Many Sutton residents use the public car parks in Ely when out shopping, socialising, or when visiting the city for leisure or other pursuits.

It’s therefore of interest that the council has submitted a planning application to itself (and yes, it is allowed to do that) to use part of the Barton Road car park to develop 11 residential properties.  The advertised deadline for comments on this application is 4 January, but I understand through the press that the council has now extended this to 22 January – though it might be worth checking with the council directly to confirm this if you do want to express a view and think you might not make it by the initial deadline.

I’m not a member of the Planning Committee, and as I’ve been involved with discussing the general principles of this development on other committees, I won’t be part of any consideration of this planning application as I don’t think I would be perceived as coming to it with an open mind.  (I hope other councillors who have been part of these discussions as I have will follow my lead on this).  Unlike members of the Planning Committee, I’m therefore allowed to say what I think!

There are several issues which I believe the council needs to resolve.

Car parking: there’s a contradiction in various parts of the application paperwork.  Some parts say there will be 18 spaces provided as part of the new housing development of 11 dwellings, but another part says 17.  Some of these will be enclosed spaces in garages under town houses.  The current provision on that part of the car park site is 45 spaces, so there will be a net loss of 27 or 28 spaces.  However, it’s also suggested that the remainder of the site, not included in this application, could be reconfigured to provide replacement spaces so that spaces are not lost overall – though it’s not clear whether the 17-18 spaces for the development (which won’t be available to the general public, presumably) are being counted in the new total or not.  I’d want to be sure that the number of public car parking spaces remained at least the same.

(And what would happen if the current application were granted, but any later plans to increase parking on the rest of the site were not?).

Coach parking: it’s suggested that replacement coach parking will be made available elsewhere in the city centre, and I believe Market Street is being suggested.  However, it’s not clear that the highways authority, the emergency services or anyone else has been consulted on any detailed alternative, and it might also require an amendment to existing traffic regulation orders.  Market Street is already very congested with buses, taxis, delivery vehicles, cars using the dropping-off spaces etc.  What would happen if no alternative coach parking site could be found in the city centre that would meet with the approval of the highways authority and the other interested bodies?

There are other issues, including the risk of creating an anti-social behaviour magnet zone in the car park which would be screened from view from the road; and also the current use of the public car park by King’s School parents to pick up their children after school.

Personally I’m not opposed in principle to reasonable development of part of this site, but only provided that we can be guaranteed no loss of public car parking space, and suitable alternative coach parking arrangements.  It seems to me that the council may be in danger of rushing headlong into a planning application for the housing development, without having adequately advanced the necessary arrangements for everything else that follows.

As usual, full details of the application are online on the district council’s planning page: the reference number for the application is 15/01417/F3M.  If you would like to respond formally to the council about the application, any comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me.  Comments may be made

• Online using the council’s public access webpage (the link above);
• By email to plservices@eastcambs.gov.uk;
• Or by post to the Planning Department, The Grange, Nutholt Lane, Ely, CB7 4EE.

Of course, if you would also like to express your views to me as your local councillor, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) are currently consulting members of the public who use local bus services and community transport, adult day care transport, and home-to-school transport in Ely and the surrounding area (the Northern half of East Cambridgeshire District) about possible changes to these services as part of the County Council’s Total Transport pilot.

(See here for my earlier posting about Total Transport).

The County Council wants to find out which local bus and community transport services people currently use, how frequently they use them and what people think about possible changes to local bus services, for example opening up school transport to the general public.  This information will help to develop plans for the Total Transport Pilot project.

The aim of the Total Transport Pilot, one of 37 projects that are funded nationally by the Department for Transport, is to identify efficiencies and cost savings by integrating various forms of Council-funded transport. If the County Council doesn’t find savings this way they will need to consider cutting or reducing services.

The three user surveys for Total Transport are now live and will be available online until 25 January 2016.  Please use the links below to complete any or all of the surveys that are relevant to you.

(1) Total Transport Survey of local bus and community transport users

Local Bus and Community Transport Survey  This is a short survey to help CCC understand how the local community uses bus services and community transport. The County Council has less funding available, so it is important that you let them know what you think to help decide what local transport will look like in future.

(2) Total Transport Adult Day Care Survey

Day Centre Transport Survey  This survey asks for your views on possible changes to transport for adult day care which may affect how you or your relative travels to and from day care.

(3) Total Transport Pilot Consultation with Parents and Carers

School Transport Survey  This short survey asks for your views on possible changes to home-to-school transport which may affect how your child travels to and from school in future.

Earlier this evening I was one of about eight East Cambridgeshire district councillors who attended a briefing in Ely on a new pilot project called Total Transport.  Cambridgeshire County Council has chosen to run this project in the north part of East Cambs district, including Sutton.

A number of different schemes operate at the moment for transporting people around our area.  These include

• buses to take children to school
• taxis and other means of transport to take children with special educational needs to special education facilities
• ordinary buses serving the public in our towns and villages
• community transport like Dial-a-Ride
• vehicles taking older people to day care
• ambulances and other NHS vehicles providing non-emergency patient transport.

The aim of the new project is to integrate these services where possible to make better use of them, while reducing costs.

This could mean things like fixed bus routes serving both schools and the general public; or combining adult social care journeys and Dial-a-Ride services.  It could mean a wider choice of times of travel, but with pre-booking required.  It could also include things like community car schemes or flexible minibus services.

A small team of staff has been looking at current services, including travelling on the Ely Zipper and talking to passengers, and meeting with service users.  In January they will be carrying out surveys, after which they will be presenting proposals to a ‘steering group’ of county councillors.

Details of the programme for collecting domestic waste and recyclables are being published by East Cambs District Council in next week’s newspapers.  For Sutton this is as follows:

• Monday 21 December: collection as usual (black bags and green bins)
• Tuesday 29 December: a day later than usual (black bags and blue bins)
• Tuesday 5 January: a day later than usual (black bags and green bins)
• Monday 11 January: normal Monday collections resume (black bags and blue bins).

The news that the Ely North rail junction upgrade may now not be complete for another ten years is a major blow to rail users, and to campaigns to move more freight off the roads and onto rail.

The £35 million scheme will not be carried out until at least 2019, says Network Rail, who had previously intended to complete the work by 2019.  The project will now be included in the next spending period, which runs from 2019 to 2024.

The news is a major blow to rail users travelling from King’s Lynn to Cambridge and London, and for cross-country services through March to Peterborough.

It was also hoped that this upgrade would help shift more Felixstowe freight from congested roads like the A14 to the rail networks.

Network Rail has sweetened the pill by suggesting that the length of peak-time trains between Cambridge and King’s Lynn could be doubled, rather than trains splitting in two at Cambridge.

On 27 October the House of Lords narrowly voted to reject a motion which would have stopped 1.9m people – 1,606 of them in East Cambridgeshire – being deleted from the voting register next month. The government will now go ahead with changes that will take away their vote.

Are you one of the 1,606? If so, you will have been able to vote in the elections earlier this year, but you won’t be able to vote in future elections unless you register now.

(Even the Electoral Commission said this was a bad idea, and that the Government should wait a year before removing these voters from the register, but the Government hasn’t listened)**.

Because the new register will be used to calculate constituency boundaries for the next general election, these changes could skew the political landscape of the UK for years to come. Every voter who registers to vote now is one more person the government can’t delete. You can now register to vote online. (You will need your National Insurance number, if you have one).

Individual electoral registration (IER) was introduced in June last year. It is a good idea in principle, but the way it has been introduced been a disaster. Voters whose existing details cannot be confirmed by data matching with a single Department for Work and Pensions database of national insurance numbers have to provide additional forms of identification.

Voters on the register, but not data matched, who were able to vote in the elections earlier this year will be removed from the register if they have not provided extra information by December 2015.

**”Taking into account the data and evidence which is available to us at this point and the significant polls which are scheduled for May 2016, we recommend that Ministers should not make an order to bring forward the end of the transition to IER.” (Electoral Commission)

No sooner has its existing Local Plan been agreed (in April) than East Cambridgeshire District Council has started the process of revising it again.

The Local Plan is the council’s high-level strategic planning policy document. It sets out the vision, objectives, spatial strategy and policies for the future development of the district. It also identifies land and allocates sites for different types of development, such as housing and employment, to deliver the planned growth for the district – and individual planning applications are judged in the context of whether or not they conform to the Plan. The current Local Plan is online here.

Even before the ink was dry on East Cambs’ Local Plan, however, it was judged deficient. One of the main requirements of the Plan is that it must identify enough land for housing supply for the next five years. When developers Gladmans appealed the council’s refusal to grant them permission for a large development at Witchford this summer, the Inspector ruled that the development should go ahead because the council had failed to demonstrate that five year supply.

So the council is already back to the drawing board and reviewing its Plan all over again.  A timetable was agreed by the council last month, and the process is expected to take around three years, and the new Plan adopted in 2018.  There will be public consultation at different stages of the review.

The council has set up a Working Party to consider some of the issues that will arise during the development of the Plan, and I’m one of the members. It met for the first time last night, and will meet again in mid-December, before Full Council on 7 January is asked to agree the first phase of consultation.

What should be the council’s broad approach for identifying where thousands of extra houses should go over the next 25-30 years? Should they be added to all existing towns and villages in proportion to their size? (Should Sutton accept 4.7% of the extra houses because it has 4.7% of the existing housing in the district?). Should they be predominantly placed in Ely and the larger settlements because they already have better transport and facilities? Should they be mainly placed outside those settlements to balance the large developments that have already taken place there? Are there other possible patterns of distribution?

When the present Local Plan was drawn up, there were additional standards for building that the council could choose to adopt. It could, for example, require more efficient use of water; full-scale disabled access; or low or zero carbon for better energy efficiency. Many of these standards have been swept away by the Government, who said they wanted to encourage more house building by reducing construction costs. Should the council include the few remaining optional standards in its new Local Plan? Or should it choose not to require water and energy efficiency, or homes that will be able to be occupied by people when they become less mobile?

The current Local Plan says that the council wants 30 per cent of development in the north of the district to be ‘affordable’, and 40 per cent in the south. It doesn’t achieve anything like that, and has already watered down that requirement substantially. Will the ‘affordable’ housing figure in the new Local Plan be much, much lower? If so, how will East Cambs provide for those who cannot afford the escalating prices of housing at full market value?

Well done to all at Nellie‘s Community Café for another six months of fantastic fundraising! On Remembrance Day last week they presented £394 to Wood Green and £591 to Littleport charity Branching Out.

Thank you for use of the photo to Ian Stacey Photography of 38 Market Street, Ely CB7 4LS.