Why is Cambridgeshire County Council Hiding the Option A Business Case for Local Government Reorganisation from Residents and Councillors?
With just 7 days to go before submission to Government, the public is still being denied access to the County Council’s plan to merge East Cambridgeshire into a new Greater Cambridge Unitary Authority (known as Option A) in the local government reorganisation process.
Even the County Councillors themselves were not given the business case before being asked to vote on its submission to Government.
Despite this, at the County Council meeting in October the Liberal Democrat administration voted in favour of submitting Option A, thereby endorsing its contents without having seen them, seriously undermining its credibility. This flies in the face of the principles of informed decision making in local government: proper consideration of evidence, transparency, openness to scrutiny, accountability for public resources.
In a bid to allow its Councillors to properly debate the options in an informed manner, East Cambridgeshire District Council managed to obtain a copy of the Option A business case and circulated it to its Councillors ahead of last night’s meeting of Council, where the decision about local government reorganisation was on the agenda. East Cambs District Council voted in favour of submission of Option B, which would see East Cambs join a northern unitary authority including Huntingdonshire, Peterborough and Fenland.
Option B would see East Cambs join an authority where the rural voice is dominant, where services will be delivered locally and tailored to local need, where the Council will begin life with £50.5m more than it would have today (due to the Government’s Fair Funding reforms) and where decisions about deciding where new housing should go will still be made by local people.
Option A would see East Cambs placed in a Greater Cambridge Unitary Authority, where Cambridge would dominate decision making, where the Council will begin life with £15.8m less than it would have today, and where East Cambs is explicitly planned to be used as an overspill housing site for Greater Cambridge.
Under Option A East Cambridgeshire will fall into the Greater Cambridge Local Plan footprint. This is an area set to take 150,000 new homes on top of the numbers already contained in the Local Plan.
Housing need will be recalculated across the new planning area. Instead of each district demonstrating its own 5-year housing land supply, the new authority will do this across its new geography; it is not only inevitable that the new authority will look to sites in East Cambridgeshire for delivery of large numbers of new homes, which are likely to be in the south, it is explicitly stated in the County Council’s publicly available options appraisal that Option A would facilitate the housing growth required compared with all other proposals.
The secret Option A business case goes further, stating in relation to housing growth, that to allow Greater Cambridge to prosper the new unitary council must be established on a larger footprint.
Worse still, Option A would also see local people lose local control of where those homes go – the Government, through the Cambridge Growth Company, will be deciding where the 150,000 new homes will be located.
So, the answer to the question “Why is Cambridgeshire County Council hiding the Option A business case for local government reorganisation from residents and Councillors?” is because they don’t want residents to see their plans to throw East Cambridgeshire under the Greater Cambridge bulldozer!
Cllr Anna Bailey
