My first online county council committee meeting – General Purposes Committee. It’s a pretty short agenda, with a lot of regular business not included to make meetings more manageable during lockdown.

We have to wait for Economy & Environment Committee to finish meeting first, as they are making a decision about whether to award a contract for the Kings Dyke Level Crossing closure scheme. They agree the contract award unanimously, and refer the matter to our committee to borrow the money. It’s over £2M more than the original £30M estimate (with another £1.5M in Covid-related contingency on top), but it’s still £10M less than where the scheme cost was heading a year ago.

In rather less good news, back in 2013 Conservative county councillors agreed that the county council would pay £25M towards the cost of the current A14 works – and repaying it isn’t going to be quite how it looked back then.

At the time they made this commitment, they decided they would pay it off at £1M a year for 25 years, from a Government grant the council gets for road schemes called the Integrated Transport Block. Back in 2013, this grant was about £10M a year, so £1M a year would have left ninety per cent of the grant for local projects. Now, however, the grant has plummeted to around £3M a year, so giving £1M a year out of a much smaller sum is a bigger deal, and would leave only £2M a year for our own schemes rather than the £9M originally envisaged.

No decision has been taken on how to cut this much money out of the county council’s highways spending programme, so the committee agrees by a majority to borrow it instead. Borrowing money just to pay it to someone else is very much frowned upon in local government budgeting. I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues don’t support the proposal: it’s a mess Conservative councillors have made for themselves.

Like all committees meeting for the foreseeable future, the committee discusses various aspects of the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on the council, of which I comment on a few:

1. Council group leaders were presented with a proposed ‘virtual meetings protocol’ for the running of council meetings while they are held online. Although the report to today’s committee says this was agreed by the group leaders, it very much wasn’t agreed by my group leader (or myself and my colleagues) – it’s unnecessarily restrictive in removing public rights to speak at meetings when asking questions or presenting petitions, for example. An earlier version even tried to suggest to councillors how they should vote on items coming to the council! I express my hope that it’s loosened up sooner rather later.
2. Council officers have power to make some binding financial decisions during a ‘sudden emergency’. I make the point that pretty soon this is going to be an ongoing rather than a sudden emergency, and we therefore need to return soon to the usual procedure of the councillors taking decisions.
3. I ask for the council to include domestic abuse among its priorities for Covid-related activity. Incidents of abuse are increasing as families are shut up together for weeks on end, leaving people with no respite from their abusers. I’m assured that this is being considered very seriously.
4. I ask for clarity about how the county council and district council hubs work together, and which council is meeting the needs of which groups of people.
5. One of the most frequent queries I’m hearing as a councillor is when the household recycling centres are going to be reopened. There’s a lot of demand for this, and some pressure from the Government too. I’m told that the council is awaiting refreshed Government advice, and then will need to consider how to reopen in a way that creates a safe working environment, proper social distancing, effective traffic supervision, management of pent-up demand, and a coordinated plan with neighbouring authorities so that the first council to reopen its sites doesn’t get inundated with everyone else’s residents.
6. Skanska could almost certainly be doing more work during the lockdown, when fewer cars on the road make temporary traffic lights and road closures less of a problem. We’re promised a note from the relevant director about what additional work might be possible, and I’m hopeful of progress on this soon.
7. Finally, I ask about shortages of PPE and how this is working out locally. I’m told that the council is sourcing PPE for our own staff and that local care homes are also able to access enough PPE through the local ‘PPE hub’.