In a less-united debate compared with last night at South Cambridgeshire’s HQ in Cambourne, Cambridge Greens tore into the Government’s growth plans
You can:
- watch the full debate here
- watch the two public questions here
- See the meeting papers and the text of the two public questions here
“Were there any major surprises?”
Not particularly if you’ve been following things closely.
***However***… most people have not been following things closely – as Wendy Blythe said in her public question, most people involved in local residents associations did not know about what was happening.
This raises the wider problem of how UK residents communicate with their local political representatives in the face of imploding local media and local print press institutions
Decision-makers creating the new unitary council and the development corporation need to come up with a solution to communicating with the public
I don’t think it is sustainable for the struggling local media ecosystem to carry on as it is while huge decisions are being taken that leave the vast majority of the city and surrounding district unaware of what is being decided.
“Well that’s their problem for not paying attention. Also the right to take part in politics also involves the right to ignore it too!”
But is that in the public interest? We saw what happened with the abandoned congestion charging when years of work and expensive consultants reports were put to the metaphorical torch in 2023 when councillors backed down in the face of a local election backlash. Anything that has an up-front charge that people have to pay for that isn’t automated *before* they get their paycheques or equivalents is deeply resented. Hence why council tax and business rates are felt more than say small changes in other taxes.
The councillors and senior officers of the Greater Cambridge Partnership only have themselves to blame for that one – I found the in-depth survey of community attitudes to a congestion charge proposal published in the late 2000s. I wrote about it for Lost Cambridge here. But because Cambridgeshire County Council never gave me permission to publish my digitised copy, nor did they accept the offer for me to send over my digitised copy for them to publish on their own website.
Interestingly, there was another report published in 2008 looking at congestion charging for Cambridge.
“To undertake a provincial congestion charging system requires significant investment in the charging system itself and alternative public transport and other modal facilities. This obviously needs to be in place ahead of the introduction of the charging system, as shown in the recent Cambridgeshire-wide survey.””
Above – Ison, Hughes, Tuckwell (2008) for ICE (Vol 161 Issue 3) in Lost Cambridge 19 Jan 2025.
“Coming back to The Guildhall, what issues with the Development Corporation did councillors raise?”
Here’s Cambridge City Council Leader Cameron Holloway.
“[The recent growth of Cambridge] has left us a highly unequal city with a severe infrastructure deficit and a depleted natural environment. Future growth *must* reverse this.”
“Government involvement in relieving infrastructure constraints must not come at the expense of local democratic oversight of the planning service…which will take all major planning powers and determination of planning applications into the hands of an unelected body, leaving residents with less say over their future than residents in any other part of the country. This would disempower the new unitary council before it is even born.“
Above – Cllr Cameron Holloway (Labour – Newnham)
The Leader of the Council also highlighted the failure of the construction industry to build out the homes they already have planning permission for. This
“There are 37,000 homes with planning permission yet to be built by developers.”
This is something ministers need to get hold of and be even more radical and interventionist because if the private sector site owners and developers won’t build out the homes they have the permissions to build, then the state needs to empower local government to enable them to do it for them. ‘Use it or lose it’.
The Lib Dems also have concerns about who determines which planning applications get approved.
“It is really disappointing that the Government is proposing to take all of our planning and plan-making powers away from us.“
“These losses to me are not an acceptable bargain we should take – whether it is in exchange for vague promises of infrastructure delivery with little cash attached, and no clear vision for progress.”
“The DevCo could also help us push and help developers build out the 37,000 homes that are sitting with permission, built.
Cllr Katie Porrer (LibDems – Market)
Councillors of both councils have huge issues with transport plan-making powers and transport planning applications remaining with the Combined Authority.
It’s not clear why Transport Ministers are not also insisting that these be transferred to the Development Corporation. At the same time, the presence of a Conservative Mayor in the CPCA Mayoral Office despite the very small number of Conservative city and district councillors is also an irritant to the non-Conservative councillors irrespective of what they think of his policies.
“First we must make sure it is properly democratic, with a board drawn from elected representatives, and wider community including charities, civil society rather than just the pro-business makeup we see so often”
Cllr Katie Thornburrow (Lab – Petersfield)
“It’s unrealistic and reckless… …We know that Cambridge is beyond safe ecological limits, with over-abstraction of our chalk streams, sewage in our river and biodiversity in decline.”
“We need government funding to address these issues for the people already living here.”
Cllr Jean Glasberg (Greens – Newnham)
The former council leader Mike Davey raised four specific issues which civic society should pick up on.
- Absence of social infrastructure – culture, arts, sports, you won’t get people to come here, let alone serve the people already loving here. “There needs to be a really strong response to Mr Freeman.” he said.
- Protecting nature
- Transport planning issues – and spatial planning (i.e. proper links over the county boundary eg to Stansted airport)
- Democratic deficit – citizens assemblies and delegated budgeting.
Cllr Olaf Hauk (Lib Dems – Trumpington) whose ward has seen much of the volume house-building in Cambridge (in particular significant volumes of social housing) highlighted the infrastructure issues.
“Trumpington shows us both sides:
- Former green belt has been turned into lively new neighbourhoods with higher density homes close to beautiful and award-winning parks. Thousands of residents now live here.
- “Many residents are still waiting for amenities that were promised more than ten years ago. Active recreation areas are still behind fences. Shops remain empty, trees have died and parking and traffic signalling remains chaotic. Cambridge South Station has been delayed twice now.”
“This is what undermines trust in growth. This is what we need support for – the delivery of infrastructure.”
Cllr Dr Dave Baigent (Ind/Your Party – Romsey) also raised the issue of democratic deficit. He focused on what the Chair of the Cambridge Growth Company (Peter Freeman) said.
“By taking democratic control away from the planning committee, it hurt all his statements he said before that”
One thing that the Minister for Housing and Planning needs to make crystal clear to the people of Cambridge and South Cambridge are the different powers, responsibilities, and lines of accountability between him as a Minister of State accountable to Parliament, and Mr Freeman as Chair of the Cambridge Growth Company who is directly accountable to the Minister – for the latter is a direct ministerial appointee.
In this current age of ours, the Minister Mr Pennycook should consider a short video clip. I think that would make more of an impact and also the public beyond those of us who follow local democracy closely can put a face to the name on where the buck stops.
Additionally, doing so would also create a greater incentive for local MPs to take a more high profile role in making representations to the Minister directly. One of the things that was missing in the GCP’s existence was the visible influence of MPs on ministers when issues became really controversial – perhaps with the exception of the then South Cambs MP Heidi Allen in the mid-2010s (eg in Oct 2016 at Old Shire Hall here) when constituents in the villages west of Cambridge protested outside the guildhall in 2016, and a year later took to the streets over the controversial busway plans.
Once the development corporation is established (and I take it as a given that it will be because of the huge majority the current government has, the fact that establishing a development corporation was the policy of the previous government and continued by the current one) it will be the new chief executive who will become the focus of the decisions made. (That announcement has not yet been made).
Furthermore, I think there are huge questions and lessons to be learnt from the role of the Chief Executive of the Greater Cambridge Partnership (and the arrangements before and after the recently-departed GCP chief exec) that backbench councillors in particular need to put to decision-makers. The GCP Assembly as far as I am concerned did not provide the sort of critical scrutiny – especially in the early days, that the senior transport officers needed. Furthermore, the system of ‘pre-meetings’ that happened before some of the public meetings gave the impression to the public that controversial decisions had already been decided before meetings to ratify them had already taken place. Which made people feel that everything was a done deal and undermined trust from members of the public who at the start were willing to be ‘critical friends’ of the City Deal/GCP. It is essential that the development corporation does not make the same mistakes and errors that the GCP has done over the past decade.
Food for thought?
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