The Combined Authority’s latest Board meeting was certainly different to any I’d previously encountered.

I’m not a Board member, but I attend as Chairman of the Combined Authority’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee to ask questions agreed by the Committee about items on the Board’s agenda.

At this meeting:

1. The Mayor had to announce that the person lined up to be appointed as Chief Executive of the Authority’s ‘special purpose vehicle’ to develop the CAM metro, at a salary of £225,000 + ten per cent performance bonus, had just turned down the job.
2. We were informed the Leader of the County Council had resigned as finance portfolio holder (I’m told due to pressure of work).
3. We were advised that the Combined Authority was scrambling together an emergency meeting of the Combined Authority’s Transport Committee, to discuss the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s Cambourne to Cambridge corridor project, following the Transport Committee’s failure to agree (or even find someone to second) the Mayor’s proposal to its previous meeting.
4. After three and a half hours, with five items still to go, people were drifting off to other commitments, and the meeting was about to drop below the minimum number of members required to legally continue—so the rest of the business was deferred and a commitment made to reconvene a meeting in the next few days to finish it off.

The Overview & Scrutiny Committee had asked a number of questions about several of the agenda items. We were particularly interested in the CAM: why was it proposed to pay the Chief Executive, even if the preferred applicant hadn’t declined the offer, so much? Why were the non-executive directors to be paid £40,000 a year? And why was so much being spent on executives and directors for this project when there was no money in sight to actually build it? The response was that this was ‘perfectly normal’, ‘exactly how major schemes of this type begin and go on to get funding’, and while it was a ‘big challenge’ for us councillors to understand these things, this was how big national projects happen. It will all be fine.

We asked some initial questions about the Combined Authority’s budget, but we will be seeing that twice more at our Committee, in December and January, before it is finalised.

One of the most interesting Board papers was the review of progress on the 71 projects undertaken to meet the commitments of the ‘Devolution Deal’ to set up the Combined Authority nearly four years ago. We had a lot to ask about this, and unfortunately didn’t get much back in return.

Our first query was whether, in light of the recent and future shocks to the economy, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough would still meet its commitment to the Government to double the growth of the area’s economy. There was ‘every prospect that we will get back on track – absolutely yes’.

We then asked about the Public Sector Reform Commission, which has apparently been meeting for a long time, with nothing public to show for it at all. Something will be in the public domain ‘very soon’, we were told.

One of the commitments was to achieve ‘world class’ connectivity for the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough area. How would we know it was world class? The ‘acid test’, we were advised, was ‘whether the area continues to attract global investors in the future’. It’s not clear that those two things are uniquely linked, but the Overview & Scrutiny Committee will I am sure follow this with interest.

When would the impasse with the Government be resolved about its holding back of £45M of the promised £100M for affordable housing, and when will it be settled whether this multi-million pound scheme ends in March 2022 or March 2021? The Government minister had been ‘supportive’, we were told, and it should all be sorted out ‘in the coming days and weeks’.

Finally, we asked a large number of questions about various of the 71 commitments where the updates in the Board’s papers said that these were ‘not yet completed by Government’. What was happening with these? The rather circular response we received was that the updates were in the Board papers. Well yes, it was those updates we were seeking further information about. There will be regular updates and the Overview & Scrutiny Committee will be included in these, we were assured. But clearly not today.