The Mill Road Depot site

There was a meeting this evening about the Mill Road depot, advertised as a workshop about the Supplementary Planning Document which will be used to prepare plans for the site. I wanted to make a few notes on the meeting, for the benefit of others.

I heard about the event through the "Cambridge Map Project" group on Facebook, although it is a significant enough event that I would have expected it to be much more widely promoted. Even so, there were about 40 people present including a lot of other councillors.

Once of the most important points from the attendees in my view was the inadequacy of the process, since nobody was told the questions that would form the basis of the workshop in advance, and pitifully few people were aware it was taking place. There will be another workshop in January, when plans will have taken slightly more shape, and then I suppose we will be on our way to a concrete decision.

I went to the meeting to try and find out what residents had to say about the site, and also to put forward a view on behalf of the Green Party. But the workshop was split into groups of roughly 7 so I only got a few snippets of input from residents, the officers did facilitate the groups quite well though.

Now to share my own comments on the site:

• In my view, the highest priority for the site is to provide two new community centres. The shortfall of community centres in the city is painful, and there is a golden opportunity to provide them here.
• Firstly, I call for a neighbourhood community centre to compensate for the loss of the Sturton Street Methodist Chapel, which was recently sold to the Islamic College. Although the new owners have promised to support community activities, it would have been much better to have the building owned and managed by the community. I pledged money to the Save Our Space campaign to buy the building and run it as a community-oriented business, with a nursery and space for rent. Sadly the bid which was made for the property was not high enough, and the Methodist Church made no effort to negotiate in the interests of the local community. I hope that the council will now provide a proper community centre, near the Hooper Street end, to serve the Petersfield residents. It would have less impact at the Mill Road end, as it would then be quite close to the Ross Street community centre.
• Secondly, I call for a community centre and resource library which is dedicated to the LGBTIQ community and run for their benefit. The need for such a centre was identified in 2014 in the Encompass Network Needs Assessment which contains this:

"Although survey respondents, in response to Question 13, on experiences of living in Cambridge, overwhelmingly felt ‘safe’ the questions around homophobia, biphobia and transphobia revealed that incidents were high, particularly in public spaces, which acts as evidence of a continued need for a safe space for LGBTQ people, despite a perceived sense of safety. 

It was suggested in the student and trans focus groups that a physical resource for LGBTQ people, such as a library would be useful, so people could access a list of service providers, LGBTQ friendly venues, and LGBTQ trained professionals. Suggestions were made for the venue such as a cafe, or a community centre." 

Here is an opportunity to actually deliver for this group, for once. It is my view that Cambridge is failing a lot of people by not having a centre like this. I also heard Cllr Peter Sarris say in a Strategy and Resources committee meeting that the Single Equality Scheme consultation was made difficult by the fact that there is no single place where you can go to find a broad representation of the LGBTIQ community, in order to make sure you have understood their needs. I hope he will support my call for a provision on the Mill Road depot site.

One other point in favour of this proposal is the unique benefit of the site. If the community centre is provided near to the junction of Mill Road and Kingston Street, it will be nearby to the offices of SexYOUality and Encompass, allowing them to play a role in the creation of a safe space and a richer set of community activities. 

I also sincerely hope that the Cambridge Women's Resources Centre on Hooper Street will be able to stay in the area, if not the building, and that the council will put conditions in place to support them. I believe they would also be able to interact in a mutually beneficial way with the LGBTIQ community centre.

• There is a severe need for housing in Cambridge, and this was a hot topic at the workshop. There was a very strong call for affordable homes to be provided, and a variety of homes which would suit families and older people. Student accommodation and commuter accommodation are not wanted here, there are enough of these being built already and they would not suit the area. I was a little bit surprised but glad to hear that many residents wanted the whole site to be car-free except for essential access. Measures were discussed briefly, to make sure that people living here did not own cars and park them on neighbouring streets. There will be around 165 dwellings provided on the site, and that is without particularly going into particularly dense building compared to the surrounding area. I am happy with all of this.
• Our group in the workshop were keen to see the buildings on the site provide an example of how housing could be done well. That means good construction, ambitious standards of sustainability, sympathetic architecture, and sensible access and bike parking. It should also set an example in terms of consultation, being one of the most inclusive and collaborative plans ever seen in the city. I mentioned to the officer that architectural drawings could sometimes be too abstract for people to understand, and they would get a broader range of feedback if they made a 3D model of the site and any proposals, and made it available in a HTML5 page online.
• Speaking of sustainability, I am keen that the council does a thorough appraisal of using the Passivhaus building standard for the whole site. Officers have been working on a Sustainable Housing Standard which would set a very high bar for construction (in lieu of a national zero carbon homes standard, sadly) including green/brown roofs, rainwater harvesting, and high standards of insulation. Since this is council land, we have enough control to push even further and use the gold standard of energy-efficient building, which is Passivhaus. This isn't a standard for homes only by the way, it can be used for any building. Fuel bills in buildings built to the standard are extremely low, for example a three bedroom house can be heated for less than a hundred pounds a year. And building to the standard can often be less than 10% more expensive than not doing so. Energy bills are only going to get more expensive in future, so Passivhaus is a superb investment for keeping our emissions down and keeping our money in the local economy (instead of going to the big six energy companies).
• The Chisholm trail was discussed briefly, everyone seemed to be in favour of allowing the route to pass through the site, but there was not complete agreement about whether the route should be able to take a straight line through the site or track around the edge of it.
• A new primary school was also suggested, as was an affordable office space. This all sounds good to me too - we want people to have shorter journeys to work, so we must have some places of employment in the area. The site is really quite large, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to hope for these.
• Edit - housing cooperatives were also discussed, as a highly valuable way to ensure housing is provided at affordable prices which remain affordable in the future. This is crucial. There is an excellent example over the bridge in Argyle Street, so this would be in keeping with the local area.

The bad news, which came at the end of the meeting, was that this will all take a lot of time to get moving and turn into a reality. Alan Carter told us that we could expect to see residents moving into houses on the depot site by 2019, if all went well! I dread to think what life will be like in 2019 under the Tory government, but I hope this site will help to make life better for people in Cambridge.

On local democracy

The city council voted last Thursday to have have the civic affairs committee do a review of committee meetings, with a view to making them more effective and better value for money.

The motion was put by John Hipkin, who has been an outspoken critic of area committees, since they cost a lot of money and tend not to have much effect.

I voted for the motion, and I want to say more about why I did. I like area committee meetings but I think a better alternative is possible, and will be found by the civic affairs committee.

The big problem is the variety of people who turn up to these. I seldom see young people, newcomers to Cambridge, representatives of diverse community groups. The hours of the meetings are very difficult for parents of young children, or in fact, the children themselves.

The groups you do see at area committee meetings are residents associations. These people do a superb job, they give up an enormous amount of their time to provide a civic benefit, and unlike councillors they don't get an allowance for it. However, residents associations are already the best at communicating with councillors and have their own regular meetings. Some of them only invite councillors from one party, which is a shame, but it's their right. I think more meetings organised by local community groups would be a great thing. Look how strong the hustings in the general election were. We heard from a resident at the west central committee meeting before last that a resident wanted to organise hustings for local elections - brilliant!

There is far too much theatre in council committee meetings and I think bottom-up organisation has the power to chuck a lot of that out. A councillor recently told me that the only reason they do so much of it is because they want Jon Vale to take notice and report on it. There must be more efficient ways to do that, it seems a bit broken.

The list of oral questions last night was 21 questions long, we didn't get through half of them. My question about inequality didn't have a chance of being answered - there were so many councillors asking questions they already knew the answer to.

A similar thing happens at Area Committees - residents ask questions that they have asked several times before. However, they're not asking because they want to be there asking it, they're battling to get the system to do something when they have failed to do so repeatedly in the past.

It's a real shame that this is what they they have to do, the hoops they have to go through, to try and achieve change. It's not a good use of time.

I will mention the Lib Dem amendment to the motion, while I'm writing, the amendment didn't add anything substantial to the actions of the motion, it sought to acknowledge the strong record of the council in doing things democratically. That just seems like an attempt to glorify the good old days of the Lib Dem administration. I think amendments like that are yet more bluster and theatre, and I don't want to encourage it. And also, I lived in Cambridge for 7 years before I had any contact with councillors, committee meetings, or politicians, and that finally happened when 38 Degrees started to become active in Cambridge and persuaded me to come to a lobbying event to try and persuade Julian Huppert to vote against the Gagging Bill. Where, incidentally, he completely shrugged off everything that he was told by the panel and a large audience.

Another reason why I'd like to see the civic affairs committee take another look at committees is that the landscape has undeniably changed since the last review was done - Twitter and other social networks mean that multiple conversations are going on at the same time. Not just councillors nattering to each other while someone else is talking, but people in their homes providing comment on the topics under discussion. The diversity of opinions on Twitter is extremely wide and provides interesting, useful perspectives. There many people who would never pay attention to committee meetings if they weren't covered live by citizen journalists, generous with their time.

There must be a way of including this activity, and this modern reality, better in the structure of discussions. Modern conferences like the BETT technology in education conference allow people to put questions to the chair using Twitter, and a selection of tweets is shown on a big screen at the front of the hall. It doesn't prevent people from having their say, and more than any other meeting where insufficient time is provided for public questions.

And its not that Twitter users should be given priority, it's that they should be given better access. I would support giving priority however, to those voices we never hear, because the system discriminates against them. I would consider having a chair with instructions to actively seek a balance of genders, ethnic groups, and ages. The chair should avoid gendering speakers based on appearance, and ask their pronouns. Non-political advocates should be available, to speak on behalf of people who are immobile, or suffering from social anxiety or other conditions that make public speaking or appearance impossible to consider in other circumstances.

And finally, with all the will in the world, it will be difficult to engage people in local democracy when we continue to use the blunt instruments of electoral history. Cambridge was one of very few cities which voted in favour of proportional representation, that was something the Lib Dems did well to move up the agenda. It was a campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt which undermined the PR referendum in 2011, but the 2015 elections showed the enormous flaws in our system once again. So let's try and get this broken system fixed, starting by reinventing our local elections. We should be lobbying government to allow us to use proportional representation for these, and I intend to put a motion suggesting this at the next full council meeting. I am in favour of Single Transferable Vote, but the mechanism isn't important, the principle is important.

I believe that is how to reawaken interest in what we do, and get voters turning up to local elections AND to local committee meetings.