Lucius Vellacott: Why not abolish Cambridgeshire County Council?

Cllr Lucius Vellacott is a district councillor in East Cambridgeshire

‘We are giving local communities more of a say’, said Angela Rayner, as she imposed colossal changes and threatened to force them through if anyone disagreed.

Why is it that only the Conservatives seem to understand how to govern rural areas?

I am the first to say that Local Government in Cambridgeshire is too complicated. We have the Greater Cambridge Partnership, responsible for highly immoral plans to introduce a Congestion Charge in the city and put a busway through an ancient orchard. We have parishes, Districts, the County Council, and the Combined Authority. It is perfectly true: nobody, sometimes even councillors, knows who is responsible for what.

But I wonder why the Government thinks this pattern has emerged? It is because Local Government is crying out to be just that – local.

So solving this mess of Local Authorities by abolishing our District Councils is blatant ignorance. East Cambridgeshire is the only principal authority in the UK to freeze its Council Tax for 12 years straight. It also has zero external debt. It has never cut services in that time. I am seriously proud of that record. Amongst many other projects, we’re even supporting drainage infrastructure like Sutton Gault (pictured) in the absence of the County Council (Flood Authority). With a Conservative County Council and Paul Bristow as Mayor, we will push to build a network of reservoirs to support future growth.

There is incredible work between officers and Members on value for money, which keeps us performing at the top of local government. I am proud of everyone who works here. But our neighbours and our County Council have serious debts, and most would raise tax by the maximum regardless of whether they needed to. Is it fair that residents in my patch, whose council has worked hard to achieve this value for money, will suddenly be made worse off? Is it right that their councillors will be made to represent massive areas, more distant from their communities and local concerns? Evidently, it is not.

I half-jokingly advocate a solution which is not on the table – abolish Cambridgeshire County Council! Push some powers up to the Mayor and some down to the Districts.

Our County Council has mishandled public money and done too much badly, under the last four years of a Liberal Democrat and Labour coalition propped up by not-very-independent Independents. And as yet, none of those Liberal Democrats or Labour seem very concerned about the prospects before us.

But although I am an optimist, I am something of a realistic optimist, and I know that I am seriously limited in what I can call for on behalf of my residents in Soham South and Wicken. After 1^st May, I hope to be able to call for it on behalf of Sutton Division too, where the incumbent Lib Dem councillor is running for Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, but still appears to be running for Council… hedging one’s bets rather irresponsibly.

There is an even worse undertone to it all in Cambridgeshire, and that is strategic planning. The Cambridge Growth Company is set to become the central strategic planner for Greater Cambridge under plans to transform it into what has been called a British Silicon Valley. There are merits and drawbacks to this which fall outside the subject of my piece here. What is of enormous concern to me is that the population sizes of Greater Cambridge plus East Cambridgeshire add up to a figure dangerously close to 500,000 – the size of the new authorities cited by government (which is clearly far too large and remote). Whilst we do not know what residents would prefer yet (we are doing our own consultation – setting an example for Government!), I do know this: I will die on the hill that it would be insensitive and unworkable to lump almost-Fenland rural East Cambs in with what is set to be the fastest-growing city and suburban area on this island.

Although I didn’t do brilliantly at A-Level Maths, it is somehow a realistic prospect that our District’s almost 100,000 residents will (essentially) be outnumbered by a single minister in Whitehall. Even if we are put somewhere else, the Mayor will still have strategic planning powers over a much larger area. That is blatantly centralisation; not devolution. Local people will not get the say in infrastructure and housing that they currently value.

All this makes me conclude that the government must be afraid to let local people take the lead.

And there is the case in point, colleagues. Labour don’t just fail to understand rural areas – it refuses to.

(As if, after the Family Farms Tax and approval of massive solar farms, it needed to be said.)

But as is always the case in Local Government, we must ‘be the bigger person’ and play the cards we are dealt.

However we decide to respond, East Cambridgeshire’s Conservative councillors will be led by the people who made us councillors – not by the people governing a country they won’t even try to understand.