The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority’s (CPCA) first board meeting of the administrative year looked “like a shambles” to onlookers, one member said, after a vote on the region’s new transport strategy was cancelled at the last minute.
Finalising the CPCA’s Local Transport and Connectivity Plan (LTCP) was struck from the agenda at the start of the meeting amid criticism of the plan from Peterborough City Council (PCC) leader Cllr Wayne Fitzgerald (Conservatives, West) and Fenland District Council (FDC) leader Cllr Chris Boden (Conservatives, Whittlesey East and Villages).
Cllr Fitzgerald told the board that he’s “never supported this document in its current form” and that none of the CPCA’s officers have spoken to him about signing up to the LTPC and whether its content is agreeable to him.
“Officers may have had conversations, but they don’t make the decisions in Peterborough,” he said. “I do, and the council does.”
“I am not for congestion charging, I am not for low traffic neighbourhoods, 15 minute cities, 20 minute cities – whatever you want to call them,” he continued, adding that he doesn’t want to be accused of holding up the vote when this has been his position on the LTCP “for weeks”.
Walking, cycling and public transport at heart of LTCP
Fifty pages long, the LTCP is a publicly-available document aimed at guiding future transport schemes in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, many of which will be delivered by the CPCA alongside individual councils.
It emphasises the importance of active travel, such as walking and cycling, and says that the region should be at the “forefront of excellent public transport provision”.
The CPCA, which counts delivering transport schemes among its functions, is led by directly-elected Labour Party mayor Dr Nik Johnson, who sits on the board alongside other stakeholders including the leaders of the region’s various councils.
This can mean stark differences of opinion; the council leaders are from a mixture of different political parties.
Fenland representative says LTCP is a ‘war on motorists’
FDC leader, Cllr Chris Boden, made his position clear when he said that the traffic demand management policy in the LTCP is effectively “a war on motorists”, with Dr Johnson interrupting him to say that “it really doesn’t help debate when you start talking about a war”.
The traffic management policy states that “there will be situations where it is necessary to actively discourage private car use” and that this could mean “traffic reduction schemes, traffic filters, road user or congestion charging, workplace parking schemes, and changes to the availability or price of parking”.
Cllr Boden also said that the LTPC takes too much of a “one size fits all approach”, despite having appendices laying out specific policies for each district within Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and that not everyone’s voices were adequately listened to in its creation.
It had been hoped by CPCA officers and at least some of the board that the policy would be passed at the meeting, but after the concerns raised by Cllrs Fitzgerald and Boden it will instead return at the CPCA board’s next meeting.
Level of opposition ‘not raised earlier’
Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) leader Cllr Lucy Nethsingha (Liberal Democrats, Newnham) said that her council’s officers have been working with the CPCA’s officers for “months and months” and that she has not had, or asked for, individual meetings with them, as Cllr Fitzgerald suggested he would like to have.
“If there were concerns, they would have been raised a lot earlier,” she said, while South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC) leader Cllr Bridget Smith (Liberal Democrats, Gamlingay) said the “level of opposition” from Cllrs Fitzgerald and Boden “was not raised” at the “regular” strategy meetings held among council leaders.
“How does this look?” she continued. “If our principle function is to sign off a Local Transport Connectivity Plan and we’re not able to do it? It looks like a shambles, quite honestly, and I do not lay responsibility for that with officers. Quite the opposite. This goes back to political dysfunction.”
A lack of LTCP could also weaken bids for both private and Government funding for transport schemes, she added, and makes granting planning permission for new schemes more difficult when there’s no up-to-date overarching transport policy.
“It doesn’t force any measures on any of us,” Cllr Smith said. “It’s a strategy. It’s a menu from which we can all draw. It’s not forcing anything on Peterborough, so whatever your political preferences are, you’re not being forced to do anything.”
Divisions in CPCA deeper than ‘political dysfunction’
But divisions in the CPCA run deeper than just political differences; not all board members even fully support the principle of having a Combined Authority.
“I’m not a massive fan of mayors,” Cllr Nethsinga said during a separate discussion about greater devolution of Government powers to mayoral authorities. “It’s nothing personal Nik, at all. I was not a keen supporter of setting up this Combined Authority and I don’t think single people speaking as if they have a divinely-elected right for a whole area is an ideal way of doing things.”
But while Cllr Nethsinga added that she believes the CPCA has done some good things since its creation, Cllr Boden was yet more critical.
“The Whitehall machine would much rather deal with 30 locally-elected mayors rather than 400 local authorities in England,” he said. “It’s easier for them to control and get what they want out of the system.”
At the end of the discussion about delaying voting on the LTCP, Dr Johnson said that “we can draw a review of the communications in regard to this document and they will be brought to the leaders’ strategy meeting where we will be fully engaging all of us”.
He added that although failing to pass the LTCP is “not a good look” for the CPCA and could risk transport projects in the long-term, this can be avoided if all outstanding issues are worked out by their next meeting.
That meeting will be held on July 26 at Pathfinder House in Huntingdon.
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