New councils meet at the start of the municipal year

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

A new leader of Cambridge City Council, a county council with a Liberal Democrat majority, and a new order at the Combined Authority

Image – Cambridge Playlaws, when young people spoke out about inequalities in our city

You can read the meeting papers for the following:

The Combined Authority won’t meet until early June

In the meantime, the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster will be gathering with the Science Minister, and the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford & Cambridge Universities listed as keynote speakers. It’s in London in Whitehall, and the agenda for the event is hosted on Bidwells’ website. On LinkedIn there’s a growing ecosystem of people and firms with an interest in the future growth of both ancient university cities. A properly resourced local and regional media would find this a really useful resource on which to hold the influential and powerful to account for their plans. But that’s another story – even though a bold, independent, and principled local and regional media is an essential component of the success of whatever the future holds.

Moving away from social media and towards face-to-face engagement

How many of Cambridge’s powerful influencers get to live with the problems that teenagers and children of our city face day-in-day out?

“The other thing the eldest of the four told us was that adults and ‘the authorities’ had absolutely no idea of the problems and challenges that teenagers face out and about in our community.”

Above – CTO at the Queen Edith’s Summer Fete 2025

I’ve lost count of the number of events that I’ve been to where young people have had a ‘token’ presence where adults politely listen to them, tell them that their views are important, and then do precious little in response to them. That’s not to say there isn’t excellent work going on in and around the city. The problem is all too often it is being done inspite of the institutions (public, private, charitable) rather than because of them. And that has how it has been for too many generations for too long.

As work to create the new unitary councils steps up this year – the final proposals from local councils have to be submitted to ministers by 28 November 2025, it’s essential that councillors and council officers built in proper structures, systems, and processes to engage with children and teenagers so that they can influence the future of their city and county without them, their families, and teachers, having to go out of their way to do so. This is where Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education (which is in Queen Edith’s ward so I might rock up on their doorstep and ask them) could play a convening and facilitating role – especially over the summer as teachers start planning and writing up their annual schemes of work.

The difference having a comprehensive back office function makes for schools

I spotted this event on The Junction’s list of events. The difference in resources that private schools have compared with their state schooled counterparts is reflected by this event. That’s not to say it shouldn’t go ahead – quite the opposite: all children in our city should have the opportunities and encouragement to take part in something like this. It’s not like the city doesn’t have the collective resources – it’s long term decisions by national politicians that decide how those resources are distributed.

Given the age groups taking part, the investment and organisation (along with the work put in by the children – you don’t get to a standard where you’re playing on stage without putting in the hard graft) would have been significant:

  • Cost of the musical instruments and accessories
  • Cost of the tuition
  • Availability of practice rooms and practice space that doesn’t disturb the neighbours (easier in a detached house than in a poorly-insulated old/ex-council house)
  • Cost of electricity/building running costs
  • Funding/paying for a team of administrators and organisers to book venues, arrange ticketing and advertising.

I then ask myself what hope the children of Abbey Ward would have in getting to the stage where they were able to do similar.

As any local parent or teacher will tell you, Cambridgeshire’s state schools have been underfunded for decades – recall the time when one primary school in Cambridge appealed to parents to fill a budget gap back in 2019. So why are our public services continually facing cuts? Historian Robert Saunders of Queen Mary University of London stated in a thread this evening (see below) that so many decisions are made through the narrow lens of supporting economic growth. You only have to look at the narrow offer on adult education and lifelong learning.

“The promise of democracy for those who built it wasn’t that it would make them richer. It was that it would make power answerable to the people. It would protect voters against tyranny, recognise the equality of all citizens, uphold human dignity and amplify the voices of ordinary people.

“From the value of education to the case for democracy, things that were once regarded as civic, humane or spiritual goods are invariably subjected to the same shrivelled test: do they promote economic growth? If we want to defend democracy, we need to recover a richer sense of why we value it.”

Historian Robert Saunders on BSkye 18 May 2025

The answer cannot be charity – much as the private schools themselves would point to what they already do.

Here’s one alternative I suggested that no one has taken up yet. That said, the root of the problem is similar to that which prevents Cambridge’s local government institutions spending money on much-needed infrastructure – from big transport to the neighbourhood-level civic society institutions that fall below the radar. Towns and cities across the UK need far greater and far wider revenue-raising powers to tax the wealth generated – especially the wealth that is all too easily extracted and exported out of the area, leaving the communities to deal with the negative externalities of those business functions – whether AirBnB landlords destabilising communities through their business activities letting out properties for short-term let that were designed as family homes, through to the cram colleges buying up properties for their students in residential neighbourhoods that don’t have the facilities to provide for young people who might be leaving home – even their countries to live independently for the first time.

Again in both those cases, the private businesses are the symptoms, not the root cause. The root causes are the laws and policies brought in by previous governments that prevent local councils and regulatory authorities from managing their towns, cities, and communities according to their local needs. The housing crises in other parts of England caused by second home owners that underuse properties in picturesque areas is another example.

Local councils and local public services would do well to book outreach stalls at community summer events

‘Go where the people are’ – that familiar mantra. Only as I mentioned in my previous blogpost, I didn’t need to do any ‘hard sell’ in advance. A table and a couple of chairs provided by the organisers, plus some last-minute colourful A3 print outs and a handful of other things was all I needed. Then it was a case of waiting for people to make their way around the stalls.

Furthermore, I wasn’t there to recruit anyone for anything. Want to make people run away from something? Invite them to join a committee!!!

In my case I started with an invitation about whether they had heard about the proposed developments and plans the Government had for their area, and pointing them out on a map. Everything else stemmed from there.

At the same time, I also had a clear objective – making them aware of the responsibilities their MP and local councillors had for them, and how they could make their views known (i.e. via https://www.writetothem.com/). Obviously there’s a huge dependency and risk with that approach – it assumes the elected councillors and parliamentarians are willing and competent enough to reply back in a manner that does not put off their constituents! (I think most of ours are reasonably sound!) What I wanted it to be was the start of conversations between local people young and not-so-young, and their local elected representatives at a time when our city is going through further significant changes. Only the engagement that was done with my generation of teenagers in the 1990s was non-existent. I don’t want this generation of children and teenagers to be failed as my generation was. And it was the Chair of the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board, Dr Andy Williams (Formerly of Astra Zeneca) who told an audience of Queen Edith’s residents that successive governments had failed to ensure that Cambridge’s growth was matched with the infrastructure to support it.

Hopefully this time around our city will be more prepared. Because as I wrote not long after, A gym and a few yoga classes in every new sci/tech development won’t meet Cambridge’s sports & leisure needs

Food for thought?

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: