At the same time, Huntingdonshire District Councillors debated a Motion of No Confidence in the council leader (which may or may not have finished by the time I finish this blogpost!)
In a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon Mr Ben Obese Jecty raised issues over both the delay on a decision about unitary councils for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, and speculation over an option that would split the historic county of Huntingdonshire [as opposed to the administrative county, and later district] into two.
You can:
Above – the transcript should be up here by the end of the week
In the grand scheme of things, the news of the delay and the date the public can expect an announcement was the only substantive item where politicians divided along constituency as much as party political lines.
“What issues do MPs have?”
It’s mainly to do with this option put forward by the MPs for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes – Lab) and North-West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling – Lab) as illustrated below via Mr Carling’s website.
Above – the three unitaries option promoted by Mr Pakes and Mr Carling.
In the meantime, Huntingdonshire has put forward its own case for unitary council status (see the press release here).
Liberal Democrats’ concerns over the cost of repairing roads built on disintegrating peat.
Phil Shepka of BBC Cambridgeshire described the problem in the following terms:
“About 40% of the county is underlain by peat soil, which the authority said was “prone to movement and settlement, causing roads to crack, sink and deteriorate more quickly than those built on more stable ground conditions”.”
Above – BBC Cambridgeshire 07 August 2026
Taking both Peterborough and Cambridge out of Cambridgeshire and leaving the rural rump of the county as its own single unitary council with responsibility for a very large share of that bill is something East Cambridgeshire MP Charlotte Cane (LibDems) raised with the Minister. Hence why my preference is and has been for many years to use the proposals in the Redcliffe-Maud Report published in 1969 as the starting point for negotiations on new unitary council boundaries.
Above – Detail of Redcliffe Maud’s map (see my digitised copies of the report documents here)
While it still splits Huntingdonshire, it doesn’t leave rural areas out on their own, and furthermore ensures greater consistency with the cities at the heart of each area being responsible for their economic sub-regions, not just their old smaller boundaries. The other thing the map from 1969 shows is what the boundaries used to be like – Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (then around the same populations) having two upper tier authorities (Cambridgeshire & Isle of Ely, and Huntingdon & Peterborough – with the myriad of tiny urban district/town councils and small rural district councils within them). While some areas have long histories, this does not follow through to imply that administrative boundaries for the purposes of democracy and public services should be set in stone. (You only have to compare Peterborough City as was and Peterborough Rural District in the map above with the current boundaries of Peterborough Unitary).
Anyway, keep an eye out for the announcement which the minister said in Parliament would be ‘On or before October’. Which could be 31st October if the Government really wanted to stretch things out.
Anyway, CPCA Transport Committee papers have landed. Better have a look at those.
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:
- Follow me on BSky
- Spot me on LinkedIn
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
The Cambridge Town Owl 