A day in the life: as a county councillor

I must confess that this is not a typical day. I do work just about full time and my council activities are more usually spread across the week and include evenings and weekends too. But today is just about 100% council related. I squeeze in work emails etc during the day when I can.

(Go to www.chilibdems.co.uk for more information about my county council work)

I wake to a heavy frost (in March!) but the sun’s shining and once you get moving it’s a great morning.

0730 meeting with Mike Davies (county officer responsible for cycling projects) and Sue Gymer (we are a 2 councillor division and Sue is the other councillor) about conflicts between cyclists who use the Cottenham to Histon shared use cycle path and residents who need to cross it in their cars to get access to the B1049. Mike lives in Impington so we met at the excellent cafe Delicious in Vision Park. The problems are basically down to one or two militant cyclists and we agree a program of actions to address them.

0830 I go along to the guided bus stop to check out complaints about buses being full at peak times and not stopping as they pass through the village. I don’t see a fundamental problem although when I spoke to people they did say that there are instances when this happens. The problem is compounded by different bus destinations, by CRC students filling the buses and by occasional bunching of buses coming in. Sue and I have a good rapport with Andy Campbell, MD at Stagecoach so I’ll take it up with him.

0930 briefing from officers in advance of the Northstowe Joint Development Control Committee meeting next week. I sit on this committee and because it’s a planning committee I should not allow myself to be influenced by non-planning considerations. However I can take care that decisions are made with a full consideration of the relevant facts and I have been frustrated by the poor presentation of these and especially the absence of any explanation of changes. I complain to the officers about the way in which they are presenting information. I recognise that we are dealing with the biggest new development since Milton Keynes and with a very complex planning application and that the officers have lots to do with probably insufficient resource.

1100 meeting with Peter Duthie about the footpath along Reynolds Drove between Rampton and the guided bus way. Rampton is a little bit isolated as a village but it’s less than a km from the guideway which provides a quick cycle route into Cambridge. Unfortunately Reynolds Drove is not hard surfaced and unattractive for use by street bikes. We look at a number of options ranging from £20K to the best part of a million. Best case scenario is probably £400K for a 2m wide hard surfaced path with solar lights.

As I head off home I notice that the Victoria Road/Huntingdon Road traffic lights are out and County Council traffic light guru, Richard Ling, is in attendance. I’m seeing him later and note to ask him if it’s an experiment in allowing traffic to manage itself at such junctions. Later he tells me it’s not. The lights had just failed but he confesses to videoing traffic behaviour in a sort of impromptu experiment. He tells me that there were some hairy moments but generally traffic flowed OK. But then it was an off-peak time.

Home for lunch, emails and a quick blog post about my attendance at Improvement East yesterday. Click here read that.

1400 pre-meeting for the Resources and Performance Overview and Scrutiny Committee. It’s a white, late middle-aged male dominated group with thankfully 2 women and Tariq Sadiq from Labour.

1430 the scrutiny committee meeting itself: 7 Tories, 3 Lib Dems, 1 Labour. The agenda includes reviews of the Cabinet’s response to the member-led review on consultants and interim managers and its progress implementing the recommendations of the member-led review on communications. Then we look at the Council’s Jan YTD performance (I complain about the quality of presentation, ask for a fairer presentation of the what’s really been an Adult Social Care overspend and note that the underspend of the highways capital budget is resulting in more potholes for longer) and get a report on its management of HR and organisational development (I note that the presentation of data is again unhelpful and that there’s nothing addressing organisational development. I ask that this be specifically addressed with particular focus on the recent redundancy programs in the not too distant future). Finally there’s an item on insurance.

The only exciting part of the meeting came when we talk about employee stress, over 30% of sick days are said to be stress related. One of the Tories suggests that it was all somehow the fault of the unions. That provokes a nice reaction from Tariq.

I head of back to Histon and go home quickly for a change into warmer clothing. It’s been a fine sunny day with the temperature up at 7 degrees but it will cool rapidly and I’ve got a couple of hours outdoors coming up.

1700 meeting with Richard Ling (see above) and his colleague Daniel, Sue, and David Legge from Histon & Impington Parish Council at the traffic lights on Histon green. There are 2 items on the agenda. First is the current situation and complaints about insufficient time for pedestrians to cross. This is especially the case in the morning rush hour when there’s heavy traffic and the school run (walk). The main road bisects the joined community of Histon & Impington and with the village college on one side and junior and infants schools on the other there are lots of parents and children, and more independent students crossing the road.

Agenda items number 2 is the desire to calm the village, perhaps get rid of the lights and to improve the street scene. We’ve seen the video of the Poynton scheme where a busy, always congested, lights controlled junction has been transformed by re-engineering of the traffic flows and removal of the lights and would be keen to do likewise in Histon & Impington.

1800 and I’ve got a quick 45 minutes to do some campaigning, it’s the election early in May and we’ve just started to knock on doors. I do about 15 houses and find 11 people in. One was David Collins who’s a major player in the St Andrews Centre Development and I take 10 minutes out to talk to him about how this fits into the Parish Council’s vision for the community. It’s a development which I 100% support.

1900 meeting with Brian Ing of the Parish Council about STATION (www.histonstation.coom), the proposal that the parish council has made for inclusion in South Cambs local plan. This is based on the old Histon station building which was saved from demolition about 5 years ago. I have been pushing for the parish council(s) to develop plans around this and have taken a leading role in developing the proposal. We’ve had good local support and are ready to provide the final input to South Cambs at the end of the month. Brian and I map out the timetable for pulling this together.

And so finally and not too late I’m back home at 2000 and it’s a dinner of spaghetti with a glass or 2 of Chilean Merlot. Then it’s TV including question time and I’m ready for Friday.