The number of decisions that are taken in public has been drastically reduced under Labour, by a combination of shifting discussion to secretive working parties and reducing the number of meetings that are open to the public. Labour’s national plans to abolish the powers of council committees will make local government even more secretive.

Making Cambridge More Democratic

Many people feel alienated from much of what local government does. They feel that they are not listened to and that the Council follows a political agenda that does not reflect ordinary, everyday concerns. The first priority of a Liberal Democrat city council will therefore be to make the Council more open and democratic.

Labour’s approach is to spend large amounts of public money on a "communications strategy", the main point of which, as Labour councillors freely admit, is to sell the the Council’s policies to the public rather than help the public get its message across to the Council. And even when Labour’s "focus groups" and "Quality Roadshows" have given Labour councillors a glimpse of what the public wants, they simply ignore the results. For example, the Council’s own consultation exercises show that the Cambridge public’s number one concern is traffic, but Labour has massively reduced Council spending on reducing the environmental effects of traffic and refuses even to contemplate putting money into public transport.

Proposals for ‘strong’ mayors, closed cabinet systems and weak councils will make matters even worse.

The Liberal Democrat approach is to consult the public on what needs to be done and to respond in practical ways to what the public says.

Public Participation at Council Meetings
Planning applications touch most people at some time. The only way people affected by planning applications, either as neighbours or as applicants, can influence the Council's decisions is by lobbying councillors and officers. This is not satisfactory, especially when there are late changes in plans. It is also unfair that large developers often put on elaborate and expensive presentations for Planning Committee members when objectors often have no chance to put their side of the story. We support giving people affected by planning applications a chance to put their views directly to the Planning Committee. Many other councils (eg Richmond, Newbury and Sutton) have adopted this system with great success.

Openness in grants procedures
The City Council also hands out hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in grants to local organisations and voluntary bodies. The system is unfair and excessively secretive. We want to see a much more open way of making decisions on grants. We will institute a council committee of inquiry to work with the voluntary sector to produce a new, more open, system.

Another way in which the Council can become more open is to allow members of the public to question councillors at Council meetings. Many Councils, especially those under Liberal Democrat control, now hold public question times at full Council meetings. Question times can also be held at council committee meetings. We will institute public question times at all Council meetings.

Responsiveness to public opinion
Many of the Council's worst recent mistakes could have been avoided if the Council had bothered to find out more about public opinion before it embarked on a scheme. We will ensure that all departments of the Council comply with the highest standards of public consultation.

Consultation can extend beyond covering specific projects to bigger decisions that the Council has to take. The London Borough of Richmond, for example, has developed a sophisticated system, including opinion polling and leaflets showing costed options, of consulting the whole population of the Borough on overall levels of spending and taxation. The next logical step of local referendums on specific big projects is also one we support.

Decentralisation
Although Cambridge is quite a compact city, councillors hear constant complaints that the council is too remote and does not listen. Even in areas such as King’s Hedges, which have benefited from Labour’s largesse in the last few years, there is a constant refrain that the Council ignores local views and seems to have abandoned local people. There are long-standing and well-established communities, such as Cherry Hinton, whose common interests are not recognised.

There is also a problem of equity in the distribution of the Council’s resources. The ward-based approach of the Neighbourhood Community Plan means that resources are crudely concentrated on particular areas of the city and other areas are equally crudely deprived of resources. The use of poverty measures at the level of wards means that the Council has abandoned projects in very deprived areas which happen to fall in wards where the average level of income is high. At the same time it is possible for projects to go ahead in quite well-off areas that happen to be in the same ward as areas of very low income. The NCP offers no say in day-to-day services and, because it is a one-off, once the money is spent, consultation stops.

We support more local consultation on matters such as programmes of environmental improvements, local parks and leisure facilities and local planning matters. We also want ward councillors to be more directly responsible for the council services delivered in their area.

We will work towards the decentralisation of as many council decisions as possible to areas covering at most three council wards. The councillors for those wards will be responsible for decision-making regardless of which party has control of the Council overall. Each area will also develop ways of involving local people in their deliberations. The decentralisation process will take several years to complete. We will begin with a consultation paper setting out options for which decisions could be decentralised and how the city might be divided into local areas.