We utterly condemn the decision of Labour councillors to abandon the interests of city residents in cutting all city spending on road safety schemes and opposing pedestrian crossings on busy and dangerous city streets. We will restore these budgets.
We will also continue to oppose the unnecessary and environmentally damaging bike bans that Labour and Conservative councillors seem to enjoy imposing.

Other environmental initiatives

Recycling
We have been pressing for many years for door-to-door recycling to be introduced into the city. We are also encouraged by preliminary investigations into the ‘gas-from-rubbish’ pyrolysis system and will properly fund further research and joint working with the County Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council.

Pollution monitoring and control
We put a high priority on the City Council's role in pollution monitoring. We fought successfully for extra resources to be put into pollution monitoring and for improvements in the public accessibility of the information. Cambridge’s pollution monitoring is now beginning to receive national recognition.

But monitoring must lead to action. The need to reduce pollution will inform our policies across the board, from planning to public transport. We support legislation to mandate local plans to reduce traffic. We will use as aggressively as we can any new powers given to the City Council by national government.

Promotion of energy efficiency
We support the efforts of the City Council to promote energy efficiency, especially the successful project to encourage insulation. We welcome the Liberal Democrat-sponsored laws on energy efficiency in housing and will work to implement them in Cambridge. The promotion of energy efficiency will continue to be central to our housing investment and improvement policy.

Local Agenda 21
Liberal Democrats secured the appointment of a Local Agenda 21 co-ordinator to further the Council’s environmental policies. This goes some way to meeting our previous demands for the reconstitution of the Council’s green team and the appointment of an ecologist to work in the Planning Department.

We would like to see the Council bring ecological concerns and sustainability into more and more of its policies. A start has been made in the new Local Plan, but more needs to be done.

The Long Term Future

Cambridge faces some difficult decisions over the next few years about its future shape. A public inquiry into the government’s regional planning guidance is under way. We want the government’s plans to take into account what makes Cambridge a good place to live and to make sure that, if any expansion of the city is necessary, it attempts to reproduce what is best in Cambridge. In particular, any expansion should contain public open spaces of very high quality and should be subject to the strictest possible controls on design.

At the same time, if any expansion is necessary, it should try to avoid the mistakes of the past. Public transport links should be of primary importance in deciding where any expansion takes place. The County structure plan and the local plan should require the highest possible standards of public transport as a precondition of major development. We also want to see a commitment by national government of adequate funds to infrastructure, especially public transport, before agreeing any development strategy. That means either direct funding or sufficient powers to raise funds locally, both through section 106 agreements and new revenue raising powers or, best of all, both. Our view is that all the options presented to the public by the County Council for the future development of the Cambridge area will be disastrous for the city unless proper public transport is guaranteed. In particular edge of town green belt development and new towns will result in appalling traffic congestion and air pollution if unaccompanied by massive investment in public transport. The City Council should not co-operate with any of the options until such guarantees are in place.

Liberal Democrats oppose out of town shopping centres, and want to preserve the viability of the city centre. We support plans for the ‘Grand Arcade’ redevelopment of Downing Street to ensure the continued presence of important department stores in the city centre. We also want to see plans for the development of ‘brown land’ in the city before the release of green field sites of any description. That means that we will be looking for ways to develop the Chesterton Sidings site, primarily as a high quality housing development but incorporating a new railway station, leisure facilities and, to the extent that it is compatible with maintaining the viability of the city centre, shopping.

In 1996, we warned that Labour would remove or reduce council support for the a number of projects including:

• Securing the St Ives railway line
• Traffic calming
• Tree planting
• All environmental improvements