Last night East Cambridgeshire District Council was the first to vote to accept the Government’s ‘devolution’ package for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

With £20M a year for 30 years, and money for affordable housing across Cambridgeshire and council housing in Cambridge, it sounds like a gift horse we shouldn’t look in the mouth. We want investment in rail connections in and around East Cambridgeshire, in better roads, in housing, and other things we’ve been sadly lacking all these years – of course we do. And I’m fully supportive of such investment.

But.

1. No Government can tie down its successors to particular spending items for 30 years. They can’t even keep their own promises on grant funding to councils for four years.
2. The £20M will not rise with inflation. Inflation is very low at the moment, but is predicted to rise soon, and could go up to four per cent or more.  If so, in 30 years’ time £20M will be worth less than half what it is now.
3. We don’t know how much of the money is new, and how much would have been spent in Cambridgeshire by Government anyway.
4. The Government has insisted that to have the money, we must have an expensive elected Mayor whether we want one or not. Most people don’t want a Mayor. The only way the Government can get people to accept elected Mayors is through this sort of bribery.
5. The Mayor will be given a ‘general power of competence’, which will basically allow him to do a lot of things without needing explicit permission. This is despite a promise from the Government that this wouldn’t happen. They sneaked that proposal through in a last-minute paper produced last Wednesday and not circulated to councillors until Monday of this week.
6. There will also be a new tier of government, a Combined Authority, to make decisions on how the money is spent.
7. The £20M will be split into £12M capital to be spent on projects, and £8M to be spent on revenue items. The cost of the new tier of government that is being set up to administer all this will come out of the £8M. That cost will be £1.7M in the first year, and £6M over the first five years.
8. The Combined Authority will consist of members appointed by the councils in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. The Combined Authority will take powers not just down from Government, but up from councils, making it more remote, more likely to take bad decisions, and more unaccountable.
9. The powers the Combined Authority will be taking away from councils include powers over concessionary bus fares and bus operator grants. And Peterborough will have a veto over spending on transport plans in the rest of Cambridgeshire.
10. The Combined Authority will have a scrutiny committee. A majority of its members will come from the local councils. But it doesn’t say where the others will come from, or who chooses them. The councillor members on the scrutiny committee must reflect the political balance of councillors across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. But the other members could be deliberately appointed to swamp that balance and stop the scrutiny committee asking awkward questions. I’ve asked whether my reading of the parliamentary Order on this is right. I’m not a lawyer. But no lawyer has yet told me I’m wrong.

So a huge yes please from me to cash for Cambridgeshire. But it’s a shame leaders at district and county council level weren’t prepared to be more robust in dealing with Government over all these issues, and caved in so readily. Which is why I couldn’t give it my unqualified support last night.