Bower's Blueprint #5 - Working harder

This is the fifth and final of a series of five posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

Working harder
Fighting tirelessly for Coleridge, as we have done over the last year, and keeping in touch on the doorstep, through newsletters and our blog.

If elected as Cambridgeshire County Councillor for Coleridge on Thursday I will focus my political efforts on getting a good deal for the people of the Coleridge Electoral Division. (I am not planning on diverting my efforts to getting elected as an MP in South Cambridgeshire as one of my opponents will be doing!)

Councillors are supposed to work for all residents, not just those who vote for them, and that is how I would operate.

Over the last two years I have been working with Cllr Chris Howell on issues affecting Coleridge. Chris was elected as a city councillor last year. As the only Conservative councillor out of four in the ward and the only Conservative on the city council I believe that Chris has punched above his weight.

We will continue to keep in touch with residents via our regular In Touch newsletters, our blog, on the doorstep and through street surgeries.

Our activities over the last year are sampled on our blog - judge us on our record!

Bower's Blueprint #4 - A Conservative voice on the county council

This is the fourth of a series of posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

A Conservative voice on the county council
I want the county council to continue the good work as the fastest improving county council in the country but to give city residents a voice at the heart of county decision making.

The county council has a good reputation for efficiency, especially, so I understand, compared with the days when it was under no overall control. Even opposition councillors from both parties have praised the county council for its record on transport and the quality of scrutiny.

However, no Conservatives have been elected to the county council from within the city boundaries since 1993 (Trumpington) and from within the city constituency since 1989. The seats won in 1989 were: Castle, East Chesterton, Queen Edith's, Trumpington, West Chesterton. (Trumpington is moving into the Cambridge constituency at the next general election).

This inevitably means that important perspectives are lacking within the ruling Conservative group. City residents often seem to get a raw deal, but with loony ideas coming from Lib Dem councillors elected from the city such as asking for congestion charging and development on Marshall's it's no wonder!

Similarly, Labour councillors here have been unable to use influence with the government to get proper funding for concessionary bus fares or free swimming (both eye-catching government initiatives with questionable funding), to remove the congestion charging blackmail for vital transport funding or to curtail the ridiculous housing targets.

Conservative county councillors from the city are desperately needed to represent city residents - councillors from the other parties are simply not getting results in these really important areas.

Bower's Blueprint #3 - No to forcing Marshall off the airport

This is the third of a series of posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

No to forcing Marshall Aerospace off the airport
I will resist plans to build high density housing on the site of Cambridge Airport.

Why are we opposed to development on the airport?
Marshall is a key local employer that provides training and opportunity for people in Cambridge; we do not wish to see it go.

We are concerned about the effect on traffic in the East of Cambridge from the development. Although a cynic might suggest the Lib Dems supported the airport for development as it is a long way from their voters in West Cambridge, they claim the proximity to the centre of Cambridge would make it ideal for a car-free development, as everyone can walk, cycle or use public transport. They would wish this fantasy to be enforced by providing no new major roads, limited car parking on the development and a congestion charge in Cambridge.

This is the same type of fanciful thinking that assumes nobody living in any new development will want to own a car if you don’t provide adequate parking. However the consultant's report looking at the transport effects concluded that even if a congestion charge was introduced (which we are of course completely opposed to), the effect on East Cambridge roads would be horrific, with the dualling of Perne Road, and even more chaos on Newmarket Road. In short, a terrible deal for existing Coleridge residents.

How did the idea come about?
The proposed development on Marshall’s Airport is a direct result of the Labour Government's top-down housing targets which mandate how many homes must be built in our area. Although local authorities were involved in deciding where housing should be built, coming up with the structure plan in 2001, which became the Regional Spacial Strategy for the East of England, it was clear from the sheer numbers the Government required that many unsuitable sites would be chosen.

Conservatives were the first to warn in 1998 that Labour's targets for increased housing (in the South, while bulldozing the North) would lead to the threat of Cambridge Airport being chosen for development. These warnings were dismissed by Labour initially as scaremongering but David Howarth's Lib Dems in Cambridge soon requested that the airport be used for 12,000 homes!

How likely is it to happen?
Marshall has tried to find a site to which to relocate its business, but has so far failed to do so. This is a major barrier as to date management have indicated they would like to keep the aerospace business close enough to Cambridge for most staff to transfer to the new site.

'Cambridge East' is the last of the fringe areas intended to be developed and with other fringe sites around Cambridge stalled due to the spectacular collective misjudgement about the housing market it seems unlikely that it will be built any time soon.

Who is driving it now?
Cambridge Horizons, which is a 'partnership' quango, has been bullying Marshall to hurry up plans to find a new site for its business with the threat that the land would be put back in the greenbelt and therefore not available for Marshall to develop itself at some point if it should want to. There seems to be a last ditch effort going on to force through the development.

What can Conservatives do?
The Conservative Party has pledged to scrap Regional Spatial Strategies and allow councils to rewrite their Structure Plans so that developments can reflect local needs and priorities. When Coleridge Conservatives discovered this policy we were ecstatic, as this really would save Cambridge!

This is only one part of radical plans by David Cameron to redistribute power from the centre back to local areas. It will help to end the culture in elected local government representatives of blaming other levels of government for all their woes instead of taking responsibility.

While we wait for what I hope will turn out to be a Conservative government I pledge to resist the existing plans for Cambridge East.

Bower's Blueprint #2 - No to a Cambridge Congestion Charge

This is the second of a series of posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

No to a Cambridge Congestion Charge!
I fully oppose congestion charging for Cambridge. We do not need another Labour stealth tax and particularly not one so inequitable that it would tax the poor off the roads. I have been campaigning against the idea ever since it was first floated and will continue to do so.

How did it get to be on the cards?
Having been forced by the government to build unimaginable numbers of housing in the "Cambridge sub region" Cambridgeshire County Council needs funding to put in place the transport infrastructure that the developments require.

Unfortunately the government compounded the problems by offering the requisite funding with the blackmail condition that the county must implement congestion charging in return.

Our record
Cambridge Conservatives have had some successes in opposing congestion charging:

1. Under our pressure the county council decided to set up a transport commission to look at all the options for transport in the county, meaning that congestion charging was not an inevitable outcome.

2. Richard Normington, the Conservative Parliamentary Spokesman for Cambridge, wrote to Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Transport, asking him to follow Conservative Party policy and drop the link between TIF and congestion charging. Cambridgeshire County Council then followed our lead. (There are signs that this could be successful - see below.)

Also to be congratulated are our neighbours, the Conservatives running South Cambridgeshire District Council, who have formally rejected the tax.

The other great development in the battle against congestion charging was the decisive rejection of a TIF bid for Manchester that would have included congestion charging. It was rejected by 84% of voters including a majority in every district.

Despite scaremongering from pro-TIF groups, i.e. all the other parties, recent news reveals that Manchester has been given £1.4bn of extra transport funding in place of the abandoned TIF bid.

Where do the other parties stand?
Labour - the government is blackmailing us with the charge and locally Labour have been in favour of road pricing in the past although at the moment they are appearing to oppose the charge, so we can't be sure exactly what they think. The Labour PPC was several months late making up his mind - sort of.

Lib Dems - in favour in principle. Not that you would have thought it from some of the literature they have put out. They are not known as the 'all things to all men' party for no reason... They are of course trying to get the best of both worlds by opposing specifics and stoking up the worst kind of nimbyism with irresponsible suggestions that their audience is not responsible for congestion and should somehow be exempt. This is a completely unworkable solution of course - even without a discount/exemption the charge would cost more to run than it would raise - with one it would be a complete financial disaster!

Green Party - in favour in principle and practice.

Bower's Blueprint #1 - Keep Down Council Tax

This is the first of a series of posts on Bower's Blueprint for Coleridge - a set of pledges to which I would work if elected as county councillor on 4th June.

Keeping down council tax
Council tax has more than doubled since 1997 when Labour came into power.

More and more obligations have been passed on to local authorities, without adequate funding (such as the 'fully-funded' concessionary bus fares scheme that is now costing city taxpayers £1.5m per year).

We also have whole areas of activity that never used to happen - or not to the same extent. 'Partnership working' between authorities and quangos is now a massively bureaucratic activity, consuming vast amounts of senior management time. The whole process is given fancy names like Comprehensive Area Assessment and Local Area Agreements, but the result is less accountability for individual authorities and greater emphasis on meeting government targets. Costs are vast and unquantifiable, benefits are almost non-existent.

Whole new areas have opened up, like community engagement as a separate exercise, rather than just an intrinsic part of what the Council does (witness the city council's area committee's costing over £100 per member of the public who attends). And the climate change agenda pursued by councils could be seen as more about feeling good and being seen to be concerned, than tackling the real issues of climate change and energy security (like how we make the major technological changes required to the production, distribution and use of energy to avoid dependence on fossil fuels at a national or international level).

Councils are governed by targets - with councils monitoring hundreds of targets, many of which are only to help meet the latest eye-catching government initiative, so that more ring-fenced cash can be 'won' as local councils become ever more like branch offices of Whitehall.

As if this wasn't bad enough, many local people are now losing their jobs (we are coming across people on the doorstep whose main concern now is how they are going to pay the mortgage). The last thing they needed was the 4.5% council tax rise from Cambridge City Council. The county council responded to economic concerns by making savings and reducing the planned council tax rise to below 4% but we need to go further. The Conservatives have promised that if councils can keep rises to 2.5%, the government will match this from cuts in central advertising and keep council tax rises to zero. Keeping council tax rises below 2.5% should be the minimum we aim for.

Enough is enough! It is time for local councils to say we do NOT need to waste our money on armies of bureaucrats ticking boxes for a dying government’s targets.

Our Councils need to focus on basic provision of services, like social services and direct funding of schools. We desperately need more money going into potholes and highways maintenance.

This can be achieved by acting now to reduce resources spent monitoring and meeting hundreds of government targets, that no-one wants and no-one needs, and ruthlessly finding real efficiency savings. Councils like Conservative-run Hammersmith and Fulham have proved this is possible - they have just cut council tax again.

Labour just doesn't get it. Britain cannot afford the size of the state that Labour has created. Difficult decisions need to be made both nationally and locally, to balance the books - this is the only way to get us out of the terrible economic mess that Gordon Brown's boom and bust has created.

Labour's candidate in Coleridge is also Labour's parliamentary candidate in South Cambridgeshire - his job is to support Gordon Brown and his approach to government: carry on spending regardless of the economic consequences. This is the last thing taxpayers need from the county council.