February 2020

Buckden Roundabout

February 2020

District & County Councillors

From your County Councillor

The General Election is behind us so now the County Council

can get back to work. Its major immediate task is to prepare

the budget for the coming financial year. The two main aspects

are:

What level of service can be made available to residents

across a county which has a wide variation of depriva-

tion, wealth and need?

Do we need to raise the County Council element of the

council tax and if so, by how much?

Under heading a, we are very aware of the increasing level of

expectation from residents. Hardly a week goes by without

somebody from the five villages in this county division drawing

my attention to pot-holes that need filling, road-signs that

need cleaning, graffiti that needs removing. These affect every-

body but are relatively minor compared to the huge pressure

on services for adults arising from the fact that we are an age-

ing society. Adult social care will be a social, organisational and

financial challenge for the foreseeable future. How much can

we afford to pay into the pot from which services are provid-

ed? How much should we expect people to pay for their own

care?

No less serious are the problems at the other end of the age

range. The proportion of young people needing extra help rises

every year. Why, you may well ask? There are several factors

involved: an increase in domestic instability means that more

and more children have to be taken out of their family home to

prevent them suffering serious physical or mental harm; im-

provements in medicine are enabling children with physical

disabilities to survive longer and a compassionate society has a

moral obligation to meet their needs. At the same time, the

costs of making appropriate provision increase; the council

tries wherever possible to place children in foster care within

the county but we do not have enough local foster carers to

meet the demand. Placements with independent providers are

extremely expensive, especially if children have special needs.

Aspect b., the level of council tax, is obviously contentious. We

all instinctively want to pay as little tax as possible but we

know that we have to take our share of providing for the many

people less fortunate than we are. Until a few years ago, a

council could raise its tax level as it wished but since 2012 cen-

tral government has ‘capped’ tax increases at specified levels.

In Cambridgeshire, in the first years of that arrangement, the

ruling group did not use that discretion as fully as permitted. In

the last two years, it as done so. Now it has to decide again.

The ‘cap’ is a 2% increase towards adult social care and up to

1.99% for other services. In Cambridgeshire every extra 1%

increase brings in £2.9 million and the weekly extra cost per

person in a 2 person household living in an average house is 13

pence.

The County Council met in December and its Climate Change

and Environment Strategy was launched. Environmental issues

are rightly a high priority for us all and I was very pleased to

attend the recent Climate event organised by the parish coun-

cil in the Village Hall. Congratulations to all who were involved.

This well-attended gathering brought together a number of

specialist agencies and gave us a lot to think about. Very few of

us now deny that climate change is happening – the terrible

fires in Australia have brought that starkly before our eyes –

but the difficulty, as always, is developing actions which will get

us, the public, to change our life style and travel patterns. I am

sure many Buckden residents have responded to the Council’s

consultation.

So we embark on a new year and a new decade with significant

challenges but with much to be grateful for. The minority who

give up their time to serve on councils, whether parish, district

or county, bear the burden of responsibility for making some

crucial decisions but all of us must be involved and play our

part to make our village, our country and the world a better

place for everybody, now and in the future.

From your District Councillor

Roads and more roads

Over the past two years the state of the transport system in

our region has been attracting a lot of attention and even more

importantly many new organisations and agencies have joined

in or been created.

The National Infrastructure Commission has expanded its role

by supporting the Oxford Cambridge Arc and the proposal to

build an additional 1million new homes. It has also sponsored a

range of planning and environmental studies on a very wide

range of topics from cycle and greenway routes to new cluster

and string cities ( basically linking existing towns with better

roads and adding unified planning and industrial development

strategies).

At the same time there has been a shift in perception at Gov-

ernment and in Departments of State, resulting in new and

wider interpretation of rules, new legislation and more im-

portantly new funding streams.

There is a new willingness to at least acknowledge that some-

thing must be done about the A1 and some form of western

relief road. Highways England have a review and issued a pa-

per in late 2018 to set out parameters. But the good news is

that the regional planning has moved away, to Sub National

Transport Bodies. In our region this is a new agency called

“England’s Economic Heartland”.

Buckden now has a new chance to make a case for a relief road

(which could be a cheaper short route from the new Ellington

Roundabout to the new Black Cat). With the new Government

Infrastructure Funding currently announced, there is a very

real chance of a quick fix, but we need to convince a whole

range of new players and influencers to support our case.

New influencers range for example from the “Cambridgeshire

Biomedical Campus Transport and Infrastructure Committee”,

to the “Local National Plan Capital Plan Steering Group”, also

known as the Transport Forum. And many, many more Com-

mittees, Agencies and Boards.

The Buckden Neighbourhood Plan gives us some super infor-

mation to talk about with other organisations, but often, hav-

ing a contact in the organisation makes the whole process a

little easier. So if a relative or friend of yours works on any Re-

generation, Transport, Physical Connectivity or Digital Connec-

tivity projects please let me know and message me on

Hamish.Masson@Huntingdonshire.gov.uk or pm me on Face-

book.

Peter Downes, January 14

2020

Hamish Masson, January

2020