Cambridge Greens ask the Chancellor to reconsider her plans for Cambridge

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

In a motion to Cambridge City Council (ultimately amended by the Labour ruling group), Cambridge Greens raised a host of issues related to the limits to growth in what was inevitably a highly-partisan meeting due to it being the last one before the local elections.

You can listen to Councillor Elliot Tong (Greens – Abbey) introduce the motion, followed by the response from Councillor Mike Davey (Labour – Petersfield). Furthermore:

The headlines in Cllr Tong’s motion were:

  • Water supplies
  • Transport
  • Quality of life

Such were the tensions between the Labour ruling group and the Liberal Democrats in opposition on the development planning item that the latter tabled a Motion of No Confidence in the Mayor – watch the video of the vote here, one that was easily defeated by the Labour majority. Which was a sad way to end what was otherwise a successful mayoralty from Cllr Baiju Thittala, the first Person of Colour to hold the office in our 800+ year history. The reason by the looks of it appears to be whether the Mayor was right to go straight to the vote as requested by Cllr Katie Thornburrow for Labour before any of the other councillors had the chance to speak, or whether the Mayor should have called other councillors to speak – such as the Greens. Hence this motion from Cllr Anthony Martinelli (LibDems – Market).

Make what you will of the exchanges between the councillors. The important thing from my perspective is that the voting public can hear the councillors in their own words.

Which is also why I’m saddened by the implosion of the main social media sharing platforms (FB and Birdsite) that built up huge audiences and at one time were a very useful way of highlighting the actions of councillors and councils to audiences beyond what feels like an ever shrinking local democracy pool.

“In the grand scheme of things, the exchanges were meaningless. The city council has so few powers that even if the motions were passed, ministers can ignore them at will”

Which is why the debates on, and the final outcomes of the proposed restructuring are ever so important. This was discussed earlier in the meeting here – which followed on from my blogpost of 07 March 2025 when the papers were first released. Several other councils will be discussing the proposals this week:

Interestingly, East Cambridgeshire carried out an informal survey of residents (Appendix 3 of item 6 in their papers).

“The survey was launched on 14 February. To date (6 March), 890 people have completed the survey. The survey was completed mainly by women (63%) and by people over the age of 45 (75%). There is a good selection of responses from across all East Cambs postcodes.”

Above – ECDC papers item 6 app 3 page 2, 20 March 2025

The headline findings:

  • 78% do not support the idea of councils merging (8% do and 14% are not sure).
  • 93% felt it was very important to have access to a local councillor.
  • 92% would like to be engaged more on the issue.

“People were split between whether they looked towards Cambridge (53%) or kept their focus within the district (44%) when it came to work, socialising, or shopping. Only 1% said they looked towards Peterborough and 2% referenced Cambridge and Peterborough”

Above – ECDC papers item 6 app 3 page 2, 20 March 2025

East Cambridgeshire District looks like this on G-Maps, explaining both the focus on Cambridge (for example Bottisham being just outside the city) through to those who in some of the least connected parts of the district keeping their focus within it, for example east of Ely.

There are two sources of tension that need resolving:

  1. The principle of restructuring local government into unitaries is Government policy, and that’s almost certainly going to happen unless something really extreme happens. (Therefore resistance to the principle is futile)
  2. The lack of transparency and open debate with residents is depressing – and ministers must ensure they open up the debate so it’s not just the influential and wealthy institutions who get to decide the future of our city and county.

One of the participants at the Cambs Unitaries AGM last weekend mentioned the the importance of accounting for the first point. That’s highly unlikely to change. Where the Government is at its weakest is on transparency grounds, because by now arrangements should have been put in place to enable much wider public debate.

The public debate on the future of our city and county must be part of wider attempts to strengthen our democracy – as the Carnegie Foundation recommended.

That means not relying on a discrete standalone public consultation, but instead incorporating such actions into a broader strategy that helps create structures and systems that can be used again with consultations on other issues.

Build the consultation into a very basic attempt at citizenship education for residents – something that too many of us missed out on at school. And no, I still haven’t forgiven the governments of Thatcher and Major for doing this! You don’t get to preach about the importance of protecting democracy while bringing in policies that make the same population ignorant of it.

“An introduction to local government in Cambridgeshire?”

Back in 1980 the Government produced this pamphlet on local government. What would a similar pamphlet covering local government and local public services in England (outside London) look like today? Could they get it down onto 25 sheets of A5 paper as in that pamphlet? Could you?

Community development is back. In principle.

There has been a fair amount of policy chatter on all things New Deal for Communities (one of my old policy areas) following the announcement of the Plan for Neighbourhoods. Wisbech is Cambridgeshire’s selected community for that policy.

To give you some idea of how complex the policy area is, have a look at the huge range of policy areas that were covered – and inevitably had very cumbersome reporting requirements to ensure value for money. (This is from the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, by the Social Exclusion Unit 2001). As you can see from the page count, it is ***dense***.

Above – National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, by the Social Exclusion Unit 2001 contents page

See also the digitised copy of the National Strategy Action Plan, also from 2001 here

The fragmented public services

Remember how we were told Everyone’s a Winner in 1994?

The then Deputy PM Michael Heseltine said that privatisation would bring the following:

  • choice for customers;
  • competition amongst suppliers;
  • improved productivity and efficiency;
  • employee participation and wider share ownership;
  • value for the taxpayer; and
  • clarity of purpose for the Government.

Above – Heseltine in CPC (1994) p5

I’ll leave it to you to shred each of those supposed benefits. In a nutshell, it’s impossible to have co-ordinated public services with fragmented ownership of those services – especially where those owners have a legal and commercial incentive to rip off those commissioning those services and those using them. As the Grenfell Tower Inquiry more than exposed with multiple sections of the construction and housing industries.

Can a future unitary council for Cambridge undo at least some of that fragmentation carried out by the Conservative Governments of the 1980s & 1990s?

Below – coming up on Thursday evening (do sign up – it’s free), an event where you get to question councillors on what they do – but without the party politics