December 2018

Buckden Roundabout

December 2018

FROM YOUR DISTRICT COUNCILLOR

By the time you read this, the village Neighbourhood

Plan questionnaire will have closed. Formal results will

be announced in January, but first impressions suggest

we are a community with a keen interest in business and

that there are a very large number of people concerned

about the quality of life for those in retirement.

One good bit of good news, the planning and housing

development problems we have been having, may be

set to get better in the spring because the Huntingdon

2036 Plan has been well received by the planning In-

spector and is likely to be approved giving our planners

more scope to challenge opportunistic developers.

Lastly traffic on the A1. After a meeting with the road

group at Sandy we are planning to give the problems at

Buckden a higher profile by making it a national issue.

We are planning a joint Petition to Parliament for the

spring. This is a formal procedure and if we get 100,000

signatures, the issue must be raised in Parliament! So if

you know of someone with an interest in the A1 and a

big Facebook profile, or following on Twitter please let

me know!

Very best wishes for the holidays

Hamish Masson (Cllr) Buckden Ward, Huntingdonshire

District Council

Mob 07876 035941

hamish.masson@huntingdonshire.gov.uk

From Your Councillors

FROM YOUR COUNTY COUNCILLOR

The first ‘post-austerity’ budget has happened. The

Chancellor, by nature a fiscal conservative, reluctantly

conceded that ‘the era of austerity is finally coming to

an end.’ There were therefore some encouraging an-

nouncements of improvements in public expenditure.

Substantial extra money for the NHS is welcomed and

there were some small improvements for local services.

The £420 million for pot-hole filling went down well in

the Highways departments across the country, enabling

them to respond to the torrent of demands placed on

them. There was also extra money allocated to the hard

-pressed social care service (for adults and children) but

a national grant of some £400 million, though it sounds

a lot to us as individuals, doesn’t make a huge difference

when spread across the whole country. At the time of

writing, I don’t know exactly how much of that will be

allocated to Cambridgeshire, probably about £4 million.

To put that in perspective, the Children’s Social care

budget for the current year is already £3.6 million over-

spent.

Over the last few years, the budgets for public services

have been drastically reduced. Local government fund-

ing, the aspect which directly affects what Cambridge-

shire County Council can do, has been reduced by 49%.

Nationally, £20 billion of welfare cuts have been im-

posed, nearly 1,000 Sure Start Children’s Centres have

been closed, as have nearly 500 libraries, so we now

have a substantially enfeebled country, in which the

most vulnerable are at greatest risk. Nevertheless, look-

ing on the brighter side, Mr Hammond’s budget appears

to signal a move away from the traditional Thatcherite

goal of shrinking the state, acknowledging that the pub-

lic favours a more social democratic approach. He did

not however go as far as increasing taxation for the

highest earners.

The other big uncertainty for the future is, of course, the

outcome of the Brexit negotiations. The independent

Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the econo-

my will be smaller by about 2.5% than it would have

been if the referendum had not been called.

All these national macro-decisions have an impact for

councillors at the bottom micro-end of the public ex-

penditure chain because it is we who face the almost

daily calls for more expenditure e.g. ‘the High Street

pavements need repairing’, ‘why aren’t the verges being

cut or the trees trimmed back’ etc etc etc.

Parents with children in local state schools may have

noticed that the Chancellor has allocated extra money

to schools, amounting to £10,000 for a primary school

and £50,000 for a secondary school to enable them to

provide the ‘little extras’. This phrase has provoked deri-

sion from Heads, teachers and governors who are strug-

gling to provide enough teachers and teaching assis-

tants, hardly little extras. The increase equates to about

0.8% of the total schools’ budget, which needs to be set

against the 8% real term cuts over the last 5 years.

Meanwhile, I continue to work with the Parish Council

and other activists in the village to try to improve cycling

facilities, to improve the Ouse Valley way path, to re-

solve the roundabout delays and railway crossing im-

passe. Progress at times seems slow or non-existent and

I know how irritating that must be for those who think

obvious solutions can be implemented quickly.

Peter Downes, October 13

, 2018