Some of Labour’s cuts that pay for their prestige projects:

• £200,000 from road safety
• £24,000 from garden aid for the elderly
• £2,400 from the noise call-out service
• £100,000 from environmental improvements
• £30,000 from the Children’s Arts festival
• £25,000 from late night and evening buses
• £100,000 from grants for voluntary organisations
• £4,000 from providing air pollution information
• £5,000 from help for the homeless
• £6,000 from school swimming

Basic Services vs Prestige Projects

The fundamental difference to emerge in the last few years between the Liberal Democrat and Labour approaches to local government in Cambridge is that while Labour pursues large prestige projects, Liberal Democrats have pushed for better standards in basic services. While Labour has voted almost all the Council’s available capital resources to the expensive Parkside Pool scheme, Liberal Democrats have campaigned for improvements in basic public services, including street-cleaning, pavement repairs, buses, street-lighting, housing improvements and education.

Labour has always argued that prestige projects such as the ill-fated Market Square scheme are necessary to create a feeling of civic pride in Cambridge. Liberal Democrats argue that the Council should concentrate on making the city somewhere to be proud of in the first place. No-one can be proud of ill-lit, dirty and litter-strewn streets whose pavements are broken.

Our highest priorities for improvement in our first budget will be:

• More and better quality pavement repairs
• Higher quality street-cleaning
• Restore Labour cuts in help for the elderly, especially Garden Aid
• Extra help for disabled people, eg dropped kerbs
• Road safety schemes
• Repair bus shelters
• Bring back city wide funding for local environmental improvements
• Expanding the out of hours noise service

Neighbourhood Rangers
Residents often complain that small local maintenance jobs such as repairing pavements, fences and benches, removing graffiti and tidying up footpaths tend not to be done. We want to see big improvements in this area. We will introduce, experimentally in a few areas at first, neighbourhood rangers, whose job will be to make sure such jobs get done. They will either do the work themselves or contact other council departments directly. Neighbourhood rangers will report to a committee consisting of local ward councillors and residents.

Removing Needless Signs
We have issued a policy paper illustrating the large number of unnecessary, unclear or inappropriate signs in Cambridge. We will institute a review of signs, taking the lead on a matter where the County Council and other bodies also have responsibilities.We aim to remove unnecessary signs and to make sure that signs are only as intrusive as they need to be.

Street Sweeping
Street-sweeping in Cambridge still fails to come up to public expectations. We will make sure that more effort is put into the front-line, for example by having more waste bins at local shopping centres, and we will let the public know exactly when they can expect their street to be swept (or under what conditions it is swept). We will pay for these improvements by making management changes. At the moment there is unnecessary duplication of effort between inspection and supervision. We will combine these roles.