Cambridge PPF arranged for the filming of the event at Wolfson College which meant I could pay more attention to who said what. (Scroll to the end to see the two positives. Save the best till last etc)
Image: Trials of democracy. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. A project funded by Cambridge City Council and delivered by Hilary Cox-Condron and Patrick Morris.
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Due to Cambridge’s fragmented bus service network, I ended up arriving early so found the cosiest corner by the stage to hide out of everyone’s line of sight.
On the panel were:
- Nathan Vear, Environment and Sustainability Adviser, Cambridge Growth Company
- Bridget Smith, (LibDems – Gamlingay) Leader, South Cambridgeshire District Council
- Wendy Blythe, Federation of Residents Association & Friends of the Cam
- James Littlewood, CEO, Cambridge Past, Present & Future
- Beth Dugdale, Deputy Chief Executive, Cambridge Growth Company will take questions from the audience.
Also presenting the Government’s case was Eleanor Riley of the Ministry of Housing, who was also at the Cambridge Room event with Peter Freeman earlier.
“Who was missing from the audience?”
People under the age of 40? There were only a handful of visibly younger faces in the audience. I’m not going to criticise the organisers given the short notice / time frame they had. The challenge is much, much greater and goes far beyond a single voluntary organisation. Furthermore, this is not a new problem and is something that institutions really need to get a grip of. Here’s me and Edward Leigh looking a lot younger discussing this issue with around 200 people behind the camera at Cambridge Rugby Club a decade ago.
Above – Antony Carpen (me!) and Edward Leigh at Greater Cambridge City Deal’s call for evidence. Cambridge Rugby Club, 13 Nov 2015
The Greater Cambridge Partnership burnt through the goodwill and the benefit of the doubt that this audience was prepared to give back in 2014 for the growth of Cambridge
Which makes the comments and criticisms of the City Deal by the then recently-elected Daniel Zeichner MP (Cambridge – Labour) in November 2015 all the more striking – esp the ‘take it or leave it approach’. Have a watch/listen here.
I’m not going to pretend that the audience was an impartial audience or in any way representative of the city. The vast majority of the people in the room were older than me – and I’m less than five years off of the big Five-Zero. And as if to further illustrate the point about the city’s affordable housing crisis, I also live with my parents due to chronic ill-health that means I can’t work full time. (It was a bit of an effort to get to the venue by bus – which involved two tickets on two networks for one journey – the joys of privatisation!)
I won’t repeat the arguments Edward Leigh made for Smarter Cambridge Transport here back in 2021. The creation of what the public see as additional tiers of the state only make it harder for them to find out who to hold accountable. Both the Greater Cambridge Partnership and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority came in for as much criticism as the Cambridge Growth Company.
“Sorry, who are the Cambridge Growth Company?!?”
…said more than one person in the audience at the start of Beth Dugdale’s speech.
It’s the institution that was set up by Homes England to prepare the way for a Cambridge Development Corporation.
“Why not call it the Cambridge Development Corporation?”
Because it’s not a development corporation unless it has powers, and it cannot get those powers without Parliament’s approval of a motion laid down by Ministers in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
“So who are Homes England?”
An executive agency of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – and what they do is explained in the link, but personally speaking it’s not in ‘plain English’. I’m not a fan of the phrase ‘deliver new homes’ because homes don’t get posted through the letter box. The phrase comes from the privatisation and outsourcing of so many direct functions of central and local government.
For example Cambridge City Council’s in-house architect and chief town planner Gordon Logie designed a number of council houses in 1960s Lost Cambridge, and the council’s own builders built them.
That doesn’t happen today – and this was something Terry Macalister picked up on at the very end when he criticised the partnership Cambridge City Council signed with Hill, the developers. His point is that it should not be a requirement for private sector developers to make big profits just to get new council houses built. He also made the point about some of those houses being marketed abroad first before being marketed locally.
Simplify the governance structures, educate the public
One of the things I keep having to remind myself is that most of the people in Cambridge won’t have been following the fun and games of local democracy over the past 15 years. For most of them there is:
- “The Council”, and
- “The Government”
Which is understandable if you’re from a generation like mine that was never taught anything about politics, government, and the rule of law at school. A longer term programme of consolidating and simplifying the structures co-ordinated with adult citizenship/democracy education could work with that in mind.
Martin Lucas-Smith tore into the over-complicated structures that both he and I have been wrestling with over that time period. I’m glad that both Ms Dugdale and Ms Riley were both there to witness the takedown of the mess that is local government in and around Cambridge. Because at some stage the Cambridge Development Corporation will have to confront that problem.
It’s not just Cambridge that has this problem – it’s nationwide. It’s also why former Communities Secretary John Denham (who was the last-but-one Secretary of State at DCLG who I worked for before leaving the civil service) is prominent in his call for Labour to bring back his pioneering ‘Total Place’ policy. Because one of the persistent criticisms with large house building is the failure of health service providers to establish the new health and dental clinics on site with fully-staffed set ups. And Northstowe just outside Cambridge is a high profile case study of this, having been splashed all over the national tabloids in the run-up to the general election resulting in Matthew Pennycook MP intervening shortly after becoming Minister for Housing.
“How bad was it?”
With no GP in the rapidly-expanding settlement, new residents had to go elsewhere. By December 2024 the practice manager of the nearby Willingham Medical practice stated it had 11,840 patients of which:
- 3,286 resided in Northstowe,
- 3,038 in Longstanton, and
- 5,490 Willingham and surrounding villages
…Which is utterly unsustainable. You can read more about that December meeting and the meetings since then of the Northstowe Community Forum facilitated by South Cambridgeshire District Council.
“Don’t they have a parish or town council?”
They do – see https://www.northstowetowncouncil.gov.uk/
“So…what’s the point of a community forum?”
“The Northstowe Community Forum is a space for local residents to engage with developers and public sector bodies about the new town of Northstowe.”
Above – From Northstowe Town Council’s page on the NCF
“So the people of Northstowe have a town council, a community forum, a district council, a county council, are part of the GCP, are part of the Combined Authority with a directly-elected Mayor and are now getting to be part of this development corporation?”
Sounds about right.
“But not a GP or a dentist?”
That’s the responsibility of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System
“What’s an Integrated Care System?”
I was going to write that it was invented by management consultants commissioned by ministers under the previous government to make it easier to privatise the NHS and/or generally mess things up, but it turns out we’ve been there before – as far back as 1974 as it turns out. Also, at this time of night it’s way too late to be talking about the histories of successive NHS restructures!
But you can see why having nationally-prescribed and structured public service silos that don’t talk to each other can cause more problems than they solve. Note however that the reason they were brought in in the first place was because prior to 1945, the quality of services provided could vary enormously depending on the demographics and strength of the local economy of an area. Nationalisation and central control provided for some measure of equality and of a basic minimum service for all, as well as benefiting from economies of scale through standardised procurement. Think of all of those memes from life in the 20th Century. There’s a reason why so many schools across the country in the last century had the same chair designs and gym equipment.
There was only so much that Growth Company representatives and civil servants could say to meetings such as this. Now ministers need to step up.
The question on chalk streams identified the chasm between what local residents were concerned about and the inability of those on the panel – which included the Leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, to do anything about it.
“…. our ability to enjoy this nature on our doorstep is being ruined by the dumping of raw sewage. Working with local residents I am calling on the Government and water companies to get a grip on the water pollution crisis.”
Above – Pippa Heylings MP (Lib Dems – South Cambridgeshire)
What the audience wanted to know – and there were a number of Friends of the Cam members in the audience, was who was going to stop Anglian Water from polluting our chalk streams – the tributaries that flow into the River Cam. Because while paying bonuses out to directors rather than spending money on upgrading infrastructure upstream of where the River Cam flows through Cambridge might be splendid for the executives, it’s not so good for those businesses dependent on the river for their trade. It’s not much fun for the tourists – or the students who have to keep their windows closed either.
Both Mr Vear and Ms Dugdale tried to answer the audience’s questions on chalk streams by articulating what was happening within and between institutions but that was never going to go down well. What the audience wanted to know was who is going to stop Anglian Water from polluting the chalk streams, and who is going to prosecute the firm and their directors for breaking the law. That was not something that was or is in the gift of any of the panelists.
Ultimately this was something for the Minister for Water at DEFRA – the department that Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner was previously the Minister for Agriculture in – and as a Minister of State, of a higher ministerial rank as well. So if any Cambridge residents would like the Minister for Water to visit Cambridge to meet local residents, all they have to do is to email their local MP -> https://www.writetothem.com/
On the development corporation, this is where the Minister of Housing needs to stand up and be counted too. I can understand why political party bosses would block such a meeting between ministers and the public. Social media memes have been made with less. One alternative is having a joint committee of city and district councillors cross-examining ministers similar to how Cambridge City Council had two council committees putting 3 hours of questions to Peter Freeman and several of his team late last year. That way, councillors can invite their constituents to submit questions to put to ministers to help shape the lines of questioning. (In the 2010s this sort of crowd-sourcing showed huge potential but the BigTechChaps ruined the platforms that enabled it to work).
We come back to that old chestnut of an over-centralised state again
Yep.
Prosecuting Anglian Water for small-to-medium sewage discharges is not something that should require anyone other than maybe a statistician or junior-to-middle-manager in Whitehall to be making a note of other than keeping track on a regional tier of the state that should be responsible for doing the prosecuting, winning the case, and enforcing the judge’s ruling on fines.
But an under-resourced and centralised Environment Agency *and* Courts Service cannot do what local residents want them to do. (Back in the summer of 2000 I spent three months working in the old Magistrates Courts Division of the Lord Chancellor’s Department – now the Ministry of Justice). And so yet again people see the headlines about Cambridge’s wealth not being matched by investment in, and spending on local public services – and in particular enforcement functions that change behaviour. (Don’t get me started on unlawfully-modified engines – especially at the start of an oil price shock!)
“Was there anything positive in the face of the hostile questioning of some of the panellists?”
Yes – although it wouldn’t have been easy to pick up for the audience unless they were familiar with the terms.
Land Value Capture is definitely on the table
That was the first time I had heard a senior civil servant talking about Land Value Capture as a serious policy option being considered actively within Whitehall. Which is splendid from my perspective because I’ve been calling for this for years!
“If ministers are serious about devolution and unleashing the potential of our towns and cities, they need to force The Treasury to relinquish its grip on taxation and spending. Hence the Parliamentary Inquiry on Land Value Capture is of significant interest given that this is one of the methods Mr Palmer has cited as being a means of raising revenues to pay for transport infrastructure.”
Above – Mayor James Palmer taking public questions at the CPCA Board Meeting, 27 June 2018
Mayor Palmer referred to the evidence he submitted to the Commons HCLG Committee on Land Value Capture – which you can read via the list of written evidence on p5 here.
“I am strongly in favour of promoting land value capture. My proposal for an agricultural land value cap, as outlined below, would help to fund these infrastructure projects and so facilitate vital connections between the north and south of the Combined Authority’s region. This would promote significant economic and social benefits, thereby tackling the disparity in socio-economic opportunities across the area.”
Above – Written evidence submitted by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined
Authority [LVC 085] to the Commons Committee for Housing, Communities and Local Government Inquiry on Land Value Capture, which reported in September 2018
The Cambridge Growth Company will be looking at the lack of opportunities for adults willing but not able to retrain
Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with my persistent calls for a new large lifelong learning college for Cambridge – ideally as one of the new East Cambridge anchor institutions near the proposed railway station. The Combined Authority is nominally responsible for this policy area, but in reality the only budget they have for skills is whatever central government providers them with. Thus there is nothing for those adults wanting to retrain in trades and professions where the local economy has such a chronic skills shortage that it is restricting economic activity. Furthermore, when it comes to resilience and recovery in the face of the growing frequency of extreme weather events, having a greater share of the population familiar with basic DIY and tools is not a bad thing.
“Sounds like Middle Class isn’t magical after all”
One for those of you who missed the BBC Mongrels first time around at the Proms.
I’ll save it for a future blogpost, but as I mentioned to someone after the event finished:
- The woodwork rooms at secondary school was built and equipped in the 1950s
- The science labs for science lessons was also built and equipped in the 1950s
For those of you who can’t remember or for whom it was before your time, Michelle Bullivant, the local historian for Cherry Hinton in Cambridge took a series of photographs before one of the 1950s-era buildings was demolished in 2010. The contrast between a modern workshop or modern science lab versus the buildings that many over-40s were educated in is stark. Which is why lifelong learning needs a huge revival – and it has to go beyond the narrow skills agenda. A place where people would choose to be, who could undertake multiple different activities, get health issues resolved, do exercise, do the food shopping, and be able to cycle or catch a bus/tram/train home. The East Cambridge/Airport site provides that opportunity.
Are the decision-makers bold enough to take that opportunity?
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