District councillor for Sutton, Mepal, Witcham, and Wentworth (East Cambridgeshire District Council) and county councillor for Coveney, Little Downham, Mepal, Pymoor, Sutton, Wardy Hill, Way Head, Witcham, and Witchford (Cambridgeshire County Council)
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/00120/VAR Coveney Land rear of 2 Main Street Wardy Hill CB6 2DF Variation of conditions 1 (Approved Plans) and 3 (Details of External Surfaces) of previously approved 16/00477/FUL for proposed dwelling (retrospective).
20/00088/FUL Little Downham Head Fen Farm Head Fen Pymoor Two-storey side plus single-storey rear extensions and shed (part retrospective).
20/00111/OUT Mepal Land adjacent to Broadmead Kennels Witcham Road Mepal Outline application for a 3-bed bungalow (re-submission 19/01238/OUT).
20/00177/RMM Sutton Land rear of Garden Close Sutton CB6 2RF Reserved matters for outline planning application 17/01445/OUM for up to 53 houses to include public open space and details relating to access.
16/01645/NMAA Sutton Land at junction of A142 Ely Road Sutton Non-material amendment to previously approved 16/01645/FUL for construction of new convenience store and one A5 (hot food takeaway) retail units and associated car park.
20/00209/FUL Sutton Land at junction of A142 Ely Road Sutton Boundary amendments to previously approved application (16/01645/FUL), including associated car park alterations.
20/00114/FUL Witchford 33 Victoria Green Witchford CB6 2XB Proposed single-storey rear extension.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
Starting on Sunday (16 February) Extinction Rebellion Cambridge is planning a week of road blocks preventing access by all vehicles to the city centre via Trumpington Road and Fen Causeway.
The protesters have said they will set up a base at the roundabout on Trumpington Road intersecting with Fen Causeway and hold satellite protests across the city throughout the week.
Police are working with local councils to try to minimise disruption which could see road closures and diversions across Cambridge.
If you’re planning to come into Cambridge, you can keep in touch with the latest state of play by following
Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Lucy Nethsingha responds to the Conservative group’s budget proposals
Cambridgeshire County Council meets today to set the council budget for the coming financial year.
The session is introduced by URC minister Nigel Uden, who recounts the biblical story of the wisdom of Solomon – the two women disputing ownership of a baby, and Solomon revealing the real mother by proposing to cut the child in half. Why it’s assumed that only its parent would object to the bisecting of an infant has always puzzled me.
The council notes the deaths of a former Labour councillor, Christine Carter from Cherry Hinton, and a member of the council’s schools forum, Alan Rodger.
The member of the public who has asked a written question about continued access to a shortcut through the Shire Hall site isn’t here to put it. The chairman of the council himself asks a pre-arranged question about the matter to the chairman of the relevant committee. This is designed to give the committee chairman the opportunity to make very disparaging remarks about the local Labour county councillors for the area, and under the council’s rules of procedure the councillors who have been attacked aren’t allowed to respond or defend themselves. It’s going to be that kind of a grubby day.
There are no petitions, so it’s on to the next item of business, changes to the council’s constitution. These are a bit of a ragbag, firstly setting in stone the ludicrous process the council uses to consider budgets like today’s, and secondly about how delegation of decisions to officers is managed. My colleague Cllr David Jenkins demolishes the proposal for budget debates: he says (rightly) that it’s incompatible with the committee system the council operates, gives less time for the ruling group’s budget proposals to be properly scrutinised, gives officers a mandate which is incompatible with their roles, and gives no opportunity to use amendments to the budget to add value to the decision making process. But the proposal is steamrollered through anyway.
So it’s on to the budget. Last year the Conservatives changed the budget debate process to the one which is being used again today and which has now been cemented into the council’s constitution. Basically it turns the process of budget debate into a game of rock, scissors, paper. The ruling group has overseen the production by officers of a pretend budget over the last few months. All political groups, including the Conservatives running the council, then submit budget amendments about a week before the full council meeting. This is the first time the groups see each other’s budgets; there’s no chance to change them, and no chance to consider them in committee as happens in normal committee-run councils, before they come to the budget meeting.
The Leader of the Council proposes the pretend budget. Then he proposes the real Conservative budget, as an amendment to the budget he proposed immediately beforehand. Then the other groups propose their amendments as amendments to the Conservative amendment. The other groups are defeated, the real Conservative budget is voted through, and then there’s a victory lap of triumphalist speeches by the Conservative chairmen of all the committees.
The Conservative amendment puts up council tax by 1.59 per cent, plus 2 per cent for adult social care. This is less than the maximum allowed by the Government. The maximum increase is 1.99 per cent plus the 2 per cent for adult social care. The difference is 11p per week per household in a Band D home; and it’s a difference that will live with us and be multiplied every year forever. I point out that between 2016 and 2019, by not setting the maximum council tax expected by the Government, the council gave up a cumulative total of £34,654,766 which could have been spent on public services. As a result many residents – recipients of care, families in need, parents sending children to sixth form on the bus – pay far more in extra charges and lost services, than they would have in council tax.
The Conservative budget sets up a climate change fund by borrowing more, and an unexplained £5 million fund for community capital schemes. It also tells us that it expects the Government to provide £6.336 million for potholes, and that it will borrow the money in that expectation. And it puts £200,000 more into the Local Highways Initiative scheme, which began with the intention of involving parishes in putting forward their own solutions (and at least 10 per cent of the money) to highways issues in their communities, but which has evolved into a bureaucratic system in need of serious review and reform.
The Liberal Democrat budget is next. We’ve proposed a number of sensible things including:
Savings by streamlining committees, cutting extravagant ‘special responsibility allowances’ for councillors, and axing the four pointless ‘area champion’ councillor roles at £5,000 each
More spending on youth services
More money for the ‘junior travel ambassadors’ scheme in schools
A hardship fund for those who will be badly affected by the council’s new and higher charges for aspects of adult social care
More money for local highways officers to do the small repair jobs to road surfaces, verges, white lines and so on
A trial exercise to see whether the council could join almost everywhere else in the country, and remove parking enforcement from the police and hand it over to local councils
Moving £10 million from the council’s Transformation budget to a dedicated climate change fund, which could be accessed quickly by officers as soon as an environmental project is ready to go (and unlike the Conservatives’ fund won’t be paid for by additional borrowing)
After that has all been defeated, it’s the Labour budget. This removes a lot of savings from the existing budget, and takes a lot of one-off money to plug the gap. The trouble is, the gap will only open up again, and wider, next year, and the one-off money has gone. Even worse, they’ve not included a penny in their budget for the climate change work we’ve all agreed urgently needs doing. That’s defeated too.
With a budget voted through, the meeting moves on to questions to the council’s representatives on the Mayor’s Combined Authority. A Labour councillor asks about the recent bizarre motion to the Combined Authority Board from two Conservative council leaders, banning the Combined Authority from meeting in Cambridge. Fortunately it had been amended by another Conservative councillor and the resulting decision was slightly less ludicrous – and allowed the Combined Authority to meet in Cambridge half as often as it used to.
With no written questions from councillors, we wrap up at about 2:30PM. We repair to our group room for a buffet lunch one of our group members has kindly organised, and to raise our collective eyebrows at what passes for democracy in Cambridgeshire.
Another update from the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Against Scams Partnership (CAPASP).
Action Fraud is warning people selling items online to be on the lookout for fraudsters sending fake PayPal emails.
Between October 2019 and December 2019, 3,059 crime reports were made to Action Fraud about fake PayPal emails. Victims reported losing a total of £1,121,446 during this time. Those targeted include people selling electronics, vehicles, phones and household furniture via online marketplaces.
Do read more here about how the scam works and what you can do to avoid becoming a victim.
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/00091/FUL Little Downham 1A Townsend Little Downham CB6 2TA Single-storey rear extension and outbuilding.
20/00101/FUL Little Downham Land East Of 21A Cannon Street Little Downham Construction of one four-bedroom, two-storey detached dwelling with single garage and associated works.
20/00154/FUL Little Downham Barnhouse Holme Lane Little Downham Single-storey side extension, internal and external alterations, garage conversion and extension above existing store.
20/00130/FUL Sutton 162 High Street Sutton CB6 2NR Demolition of existing single-storey side extension garage and shed and constructing a new two-storey attached dwelling with associated parking.
Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me. Comments may be made
online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
Healthwatch Cambridgeshire recently brought together a representative panel of thirty members of the public from across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to give their views on local healthcare funding.
The panel debated two key issues:
availability of over the counter medicines on prescription
emergency and urgent care.
Over the counter medicines
Cambridgeshire & Peterborough’s NHS Clinical Commissioning Group spent £117 million on prescriptions in 2018. This included £5.3 million for medicines that people could have bought over the counter.
Panellists wanted to see people take personal responsibility for their health. But they felt there was a need for better education and information to help people do this. They also wanted a safety net in place for vulnerable people so they didn’t go without medication if they couldn’t afford to pay for it.
Urgent and emergency care
The second panel considered whether people should be redirected to other NHS services if they arrive at A&E but do not need emergency treatment. The panellists:
wanted those most in need in A&E to be seen first
supported redirecting people who did not need emergency services
wanted better information and signposting for people about the options available.
More information about these panels is available on the Healthwatch website here.
I have this evening sent the following letter to my colleagues and friends in the Liberal Democrat group on Cambridgeshire County Council.
“Dear Colleagues,
Nearly
nine months ago, to my absolute delight, Cllr Lucy Nethsingha was elected to
the European Parliament. At that time, no-one knew how long Britain was to
remain a member of the European Union. Despite this uncertainty, Lucy resigned
as leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Cambridgeshire County Council in
order to concentrate on her work in Brussels, and I put my name forward as her
temporary replacement, to hold the fort in her absence.
I
had hoped—and I know Lucy will take this in totally the right way—that her time
in Brussels would be a long one, both for her sake and for the sake of our
country. Sadly, that was not to be, and Lucy’s role as an MEP ends tonight. I
want to thank Lucy enormously for her hard work on our behalf as one of our
elected politicians in the European Parliament. Britain will be the poorer
without politicians of Lucy’s calibre representing us at a European level.
It
has never been my intention to supplant Lucy as leader of the Liberal Democrat
group on Cambridgeshire County Council. I am not driven by any personal
ambition, though I am deeply ambitious for my community, my county, my country,
and therefore my party.
I
am therefore submitting my resignation as leader of the Liberal Democrat group,
in order to enable a leadership election to take place on Friday 7 February.
Cllr
David Jenkins, who has served so ably as my deputy leader, will continue to
hold that post to provide continuity. I have greatly enjoyed working with David
as the Liberal Democrat group leadership team on Cambridgeshire County Council,
and am hugely grateful to him for his support, encouragement and guidance.
Finally,
thank you all for the opportunity you have given me, of serving as your group
leader for the last nine months. It has been an honour and a privilege, and I
have thoroughly enjoyed working with you all in that capacity.
A reminder for those driving into Cambridge along Histon Road, that works to the junction of Histon Road with Victoria Road and Huntingdon Road start in earnest on Monday (3 February).
There will be temporary traffic lights at the junction between 9:30AM and 3:30PM Monday to Friday. Outside of these hours, all the lights at the junction will work as usual. The junction works are set to take 18 weeks.
This is part of a major scheme along the whole of Histon Road from the A14 to the top of Castle Street, which will last around 15 months in total.
The Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority Board meets in Ely today. They recently decided to meet every two months rather than monthly. Today’s agenda has 31 items and is 780 pages long.
I’m here to ask the questions the Combined Authority’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee agreed on Monday that I should ask on their behalf. There are eight public questions first, all on the Local Transport Plan. The consultation on the draft Plan took place at the end of last year, and the report to the Board today outlines the responses, along with suggestions for changes to the Plan in response. Questioners are particularly interested in the Huntingdon Third River Crossing.
The agenda includes setting the Combined Authority’s budget and agreeing its business plan. The Board also discusses the business case for “£100,000 homes”, public consultation on the CAM metro proposed tunneled section under Cambridge, and the next stage of the proposals for the regional ‘arms’ of the network. The Overview & Scrutiny Committee has asked about progress on identifying funding for this multi-billion pound project, and I’m told it’s expected to come from a number of sources.
The motion banning the Combined Authority from holding any meetings whatsoever in Cambridge, which the Overview & Scrutiny Committee unanimously disapproved, has been amended so that it allows for meetings hosted by the city council at the Guildhall, but not meetings hosted by the county council at Shire Hall. It’s all a bit academic anyway, as the county council will be moving out of Shire Hall to Alconbury soon, but it makes a very poor motion slightly less ridiculous.
The meeting comes to an end after four hours, and I’m very late indeed heading down the M11 and on to Hertfordshire to see my son and grandson.
Tonight there’s a short meeting just before the meeting of Sutton Parish Council, for residents in Mepal Road, Tower Road and some homes in The Orchards and Millfield to raise with representatives of Linden Homes their concerns about the current works on Phase One of the new development at the top of Mepal Road.
A number of issues are raised, and Linden Homes promises to take these away and deal with them. These include:
Lack of response from Linden Homes to contact from residents.
Delays to the drain repairs—work will now begin on 10 February rather than in January.
Mud left on the road—Linden Homes willcheck wheel washing and road sweeping arrangements.
Concerns about increases in soil levels and building heights.
