Combined Authority Mayor gives evidence to C2C Busway Inquiry

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Paul Bristow was also cross-examined by the representatives supporting the application

You can watch the footage here.

You can see the inquiry’s homepage here

“I campaigned on a promise to oppose the C2C Busway and to push for the abolition of the Greater Cambridge Partnership”

Paul Bristow, Mayor of Cambridgeshire & Peterborough to the Planning Inspectors. 30 Sept 2025

“My concerns about the Applicant’s C2C Busway proposal can be summarised as follows:

  • a) under future bus franchising arrangements operated by the Authority;
  • b. I can give no assurance that bus services will be permitted to operate on the C2C routeunder future bus franchising arrangements operated by the Authority;
  • c. the reliability and safety of the proposed guidance technology is uncertain;
  • d. the scheme will have an unacceptable impact on the local landscape (particularly Coton Orchard) and this damage is unnecessary as an alternative scheme with similar transport benefits is possible; and
  • e. the scheme as currently proposed does not align with my mayoral priority to deliver a light rail network for Cambridge and the surrounding area.

Above – Core written submission from Paul Bristow to the C2C Busway Inquiry, submitted 16 Aug 2025

“Did he cover what happens to the buses when they hit Grange Road? i.e. get to the city centre?”

Yes – at the end of his written evidence.

“C2C would terminate at Grange Road with onward bus journeys at the mercy of the traffic on the city’s already congested roads. By contrast, light rail would offer passengers direct, rapid journeys into the city and to major employment sites.”

Above – Bristow (2025) para 22

Here’s me making the same point back in August 2017. The Greater Cambridge Partnership chiefs can’t say they weren’t warned about this issue. Whether the Planning Inspectors judge this, and the very poor value for money of the proposals as being significant enough to recommend rejection remains to be seen.

Mr Bristow takes questions from Counsel for Cambridgeshire County Council (Neil Cameron KC)

You can watch the footage from around 54mins here.

You don’t normally see these sorts of exchanges between locally-elected politicians and professional officers looking at an issue through a highly legalese lens. It was interesting to see the Mayor pushing back against advocates representing the parties in favour of the busway.

In particular this part where Mr Chapman KC for Cambridgeshire County Council tries to pin down the Mayor, and the Mayor is having none of it.

Essentially Mr Chapman KC tries to frame it as ‘The busway or nothing’ and the Mayor disagrees with that framing. Again the former tries to frame it (I think slightly unfairly) that if the Mayor disagrees with the C2C Busway, then what he’s offering the people of Cambourne is ‘nothing’. The Mayor pushes back saying that he’s only been in office for five months – and it’s a little unfair for Mr Chapman to be expecting a fully-costed and evidenced alternative to be put in front of him when the Greater Cambridge Partnership spent *over a decade* getting the current proposals (which have a shockingly low Benefit Cost Ratio of just 0.43) before a public inquiry.

“From the Outline Business Case (OBC), the Initial Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) of the preferred option is 0.43, implying that it will yield £67.5 million of social benefit for a budgeted outlay of £157 million. Even with less-certain benefits included, the Adjusted BCR is only 0.48. Normally such a poor return on public investment would have eliminated this scheme from consideration.”

Above – Edward Leigh for Cambridge Past, Present & Future, quoted in CTO 03 Jan 2025

East West Rail had not been on the drawing board when the Cambourne-2-Cambridge busway was being designed

One of the game-changers is the proposed rail line which will stop at Cambourne between Bedford and Cambridge – restated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in her speech to the Labour Party Conference of 2025, alongside the confirmation from the Housing Secretary that the New Town of Tempsford is going to go ahead as recommended by the New Towns Task Force. Furthermore Cambridge South Station is near completion, and the Cambridge Growth Company now exists.

I’m not entirely sure why Mr Chapman. as he does so again here asks why the Mayor has not got a fully-evidenced alternative despite only having been in office for five months.

Essentially Mr Bristow did not budge despite the best efforts of his interlocutor. He was right to do so.

I’m not sure the Planning Inspectors are entirely clear on the the governance structures of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough

Have a watch here – which demonstrates why the creation of this cannot have been because it was the most efficient and effective structure and system of governance! It’s also not clear that there Inspectors are entirely clear about the nature of bus franchising (Here’s an explainer from the recently relaunched Cambridge Area Bus Users’ Group) and things such as the difference between a bus route (the roads that buses travel along) and a bus service (you can have different services travelling down the same route – eg a crawler service stopping at every stop, vs a faster service stopping at only a few of the main stops).

Cambridgeshire’s broken governance structures

If anything, the exchanges in this hearing demonstrated the impact of having unnecessarily complicated governance structures – to the extent that people who are experts in their field struggled to explain or understand them even though it is essential to their jobs.

Furthermore, I was surprised that Mr Cameron KC for Cambridgeshire County Council did not have a stronger set of arguments or a sharper line of questioning to put to the Mayor of the Combined Authority. It felt like the only argument that he had was that the Mayor did not have a fully-scoped alternative – something that the Mayor could easily explain by virtue of only having been in office for five months while those in favour of the busway application had over a decade – and still could only come up with a proposal with a woefully-poor BCR that would normally see it thrown out.

As a result, that gave the exchanges between Mr Cameron KC and the Mayor something of a politics-style debate feel to it. And as the former Member of Parliament for Peterborough, this suited the Mayor perfectly because he knew when to stand his ground, knew how to define things as being out of scope, knew how to deflect questions for other witnesses to answer (eg those promoting alternatives such as Cambridge Past, Present, & Future), and when to make his interlocutor realise that he was being a little unreasonable with some of his lines of questioning.

The inquiry continues.

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: