This just in from the Greater Cambridge Partnership:

“The Greater Cambridge Partnership has just launched Choices for Better Journeys – a public engagement campaign about future travel in the Greater Cambridge area and beyond.

In autumn 2017, Our Big Conversation asked people about the travel challenges they faced and their ideas for the future. Many people said that a more affordable public transport network, with better availability and reliability, would be of great benefit to them, and criticised the level of congestion in the Greater Cambridge area.

We have looked at how we could significantly improve public transport across the area, alongside continued improvements to walking and cycling provision, to give people better choices for travelling into and around Cambridge.

Your views needed

We are now asking for people’s views on a range of issues and ideas, including:

• proposals to transform public transport to offer a better alternative to the car;
• different options for tackling congestion, improving air quality and freeing-up road space; and
• funding a future improved public transport system.

Choices for Better Journeys will run until 31 March, please complete the survey to tell us your views.

The survey has been developed in collaboration with Cambridge Ahead and in association with Cambridge Network and the Cambridgeshire Chambers of Commerce.”

Liberal Democrats on East Cambridgeshire District Council are proposing to increase council spending to address key issues facing our area.

The Lib Dem group has submitted a budget amendment which would increase the council’s community transport grant pot from £15,000 a year to £50,000 a year, in recognition of the decline in local bus services.  They also propose to allocate £16,000 to additional landscape consultancy responses on planning applications, as increasing numbers of speculative planning applications pour into the district.  And they propose that the council should sign up to membership of the Association of Drainage Authorities at a cost of £334 a year, so that it is at the forefront of collaborative working on drainage and flooding, issues of critical importance to East Cambridgeshire.

This would be paid for by scrapping the buffet served to councillors before Full Council meetings (£900 a year), and by a council tax rise of less than 3p per week at Band D — less than the current rate of inflation.

Liberal Democrat council group leader Lorna Dupré says: “We believe our amendment reflects residents’ priorities — supporting public transport, providing expert responses to planning applications in our countryside, and protecting our area from the risk of flooding.  There is no excuse in these straitened times for the public purse to be paying for a councillors’ buffet, and a below-inflation 3p a week rise in council tax — the first in a number of years — would be well-spent on the proposals we have outlined.”

The amendment will be proposed at the meeting of East Cambridgeshire District Council tonight (Thursday 21 February 2019).

Park & Ride journeys into Cambridge increased by nearly a quarter of a million in the last year, with more than three million people choosing to use the services.  And January figures saw an increase of more than 15 per cent compared to the same time last year.

Usage of Park & Ride services slumped by 14 per cent after a parking charge was introduced in 2014 for use of the Park & Ride network.  The removal of the charge has seen ridership bounce back, which is good news for reducing congestion. And the Greater Cambridge Partnership is working on plans to improve and expand the Park & Ride network.

Cambridgeshire County Council has issued a press release in glowing terms about the recent Ofsted inspection of its children’s services.  The average reader could be led to believe that the inspection had passed the council with flying colours:

Council Leader Councillor Steve Count said, “I am very pleased that inspectors recognised the commitment to supporting children’s services by the Council as a whole. Children’s services are a very high priority for me personally as Leader and it gives me great confidence that Ofsted have given us an independent vote of confidence that the changes and investment we have made will deliver the improvements needed.”

In fact, however, according to Cambridgeshire’s Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Lucy Nethsingha, Ofsted have downgraded the council’s children’s services from ‘good’ (in 2014), to ‘requires improvement’ less than five years later.  This is emphatically not a ‘vote of confidence’ in the quality of Children’s Services in Cambridgeshire, says Cllr Nethsingha – but it is a clear sign that the quality of children’s services has moved in the wrong direction in recent years.

“Those of us who have been following the cuts to early help services across Cambridgeshire, with the massive reduction in the number of children’s centres by almost half, and the removal of almost all the locality teams who used to provide early help services to families of older children, will not be surprised that the number of children coming into care in Cambridgeshire has continued to rise,” says Cllr Nethsingha. She goes on to observe that this figure is now significantly above the national average, whereas a few years ago it was significantly below the national average.

“With early help services having taken massive cuts, social care services are under huge pressure, and as the Ofsted report makes clear social worker caseloads are far too high,” she concludes.  “I am concerned that not only have the Conservative leadership of the County Council presided over a serious decline in children’s services in Cambridgeshire, but their attitude in the press release seems to indicate that they don’t even recognise how serious the situation facing children in Cambridgeshire now is.”

Quotes from the Ofsted report that did not make it into the County Council press release: 

• “The quality and the timeliness of services remain less than good for too many children. For these children, the local authority is not making the positive difference it could and should.”
• “The most significant challenge to the local authority’s ability to provide consistently good services to children, young people and their families has been, and continues to be, the size of caseloads. These are too high for most social workers and unsustainable in some teams. The impact of this is that, too often, social workers and frontline managers have had to focus on the most urgent and important work to secure children’s immediate safety, without sufficient capacity for the follow-up work needed to sustain change within families or to ensure that children in care have permanent homes as soon as possible.”
• “The local authority has made progress in tackling this challenge. Additional investment in staffing and other related measures are reducing caseloads. This is enabling staff to tackle drift and delay in work with children and to improve the quality of services that they receive. However, this progress needs to be sustained and built on before most children receive a consistently good service.”
• “The help and protection that children, young people and their families receive in Cambridgeshire requires improvement. A significant minority of children do not get the help and support they need quickly enough. Too many assessments take longer than they should and do not fully explore underlying problems or the wishes and feelings of children. Significant workload pressures in teams across the county mean that there is much variability in who gets what help and support as well as in its effectiveness.”

The full report can be found at https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/provider/44/80445

Unless something happens to stop it, in only 43 days the United Kingdom will leave the European Union with no deal.  So what has been happening at our local councils to prepare for the effects of leaving the EU with no arrangements in place?

Early last month, government communities secretary James Brokenshire MP demanded more money for councils to prepare for the impact of a no-deal Brexit.  At the end of January some money was announced for all local authorities – East Cambridgeshire district council was granted £35,000 and Cambridgeshire county council £175,000.  In February all local councils were told to step up preparations for leaving the EU without any arrangements.

At East Cambridgeshire district council, I took the opportunity at a meeting of the council’s Resources & Finance Committee the end of last month to challenge the district council’s rather laid-back assessment of the risks involved in a no-deal Brexit.  Since then, a senior officer has been put in charge and is beginning to pull together plans to try to ensure the council can continue to carry out its basic functions – even down to ensuring the council has enough toilet paper to ensure its offices can stay open. (The UK is said to maintain only one day’s supply of toilet paper).

At Cambridgeshire county council, the issues are rather more complex.  The council’s Audit & Accounts Committee received a report on 24 January, and will receive another on 28 March (which the eagle-eyed will spot is the day before the day currently set in law for the UK to leave the EU, with or without a deal).  The January meeting received an impact assessment covering everything from citizens’ rights to transport.  Reductions in workforce (such as carers, cleaners and construction workers, many of whom are from EU27 countries), recruitment issues, and pressures on council budgets were said to be very likely, with a very high impact.  A range of other risks were also considered, some likely and some high-impact.

Councils have to plan, but with only a little over six weeks to go to the date set by the government, nobody yet knows what is going to happen. Extraordinary.

In breaking news this morning, East Cambridgeshire district council has announced it is set to abandon its ill-fated draft local plan. The move follows the receipt by the council of the Planning Inspector’s list of the main modifications she wants to the plan before it can be accepted as ‘sound’.

The council is saying that it intends to withdraw the draft plan and rely instead on the previous (2015) plan.  That is the one, residents will remember, that was adopted in April 2015 and then torn to shreds within three months by a successful appeal by speculative developers Gladman, against the council’s refusal of 128 houses at Field End in Witchford.

Well, that was interesting.  Today’s meeting of East Cambridgeshire district council’s Shareholder Committee (the committee which represents the council’s interests in its own ‘East Cambs Trading Company’) was asked to recommend the company’s business plan to the full council – and refused to do so.  Company directors were sent back to do some more homework, and a rewritten business plan will come to the next meeting of the Shareholder Committee.

So what went wrong?  Well, councillors have been more than a little irked that Palace Green Homes – the company’s house-building arm, responsible for such projects as the Barton Road houses in Ely – decided it wanted to move offices to Fordham, and plans for this were quite advanced before even senior Conservative councillors knew.

But questioning from me and from Conservative councillors today centred on the financial figures given to councillors, particularly for the company’s grounds maintenance operation. The salary bill for this team is expected to increase by almost £100K in the next two years, while its earnings before tax are projected to fall from £131K to less than £50K over the same period.  Transport costs are also set to increase, from under £60K to nearly £90K.

I’ve got other concerns too.  There are clear conflicts of interest between the council, the company, and the Combined Authority which is lending the company a lot of money – and there are some people on all three.  The company is aiming for only 25 per cent of the homes it markets over the next five years to be affordable – that’s less than the requirement the council asks of commercial developers.  (That’s partly because so few affordable houses will be generated by the scheme to refurbish the MOD homes at Princess of Wales in Ely).  And the company has been given the power to take unlimited loans from Mayor Palmer’s Combined Authority, rubber-stamped by only one named officer and one named councillor.

Finally, the Barton Road scheme included a payment by the company to the council, for an affordable home to be built somewhere else in the district. The money has been paid over, but there is no news about where, or when, the affordable home will be built.