Gareth Wilson

The Conservative Administration of East Cambs District Council is not listening.

Cllr James Palmer on Radio Cambridgeshire this morning stated that there were 61 traders waiting to come to Ely market. If this is true, then why did they not accept the Liberal Democrat amendment to add 15 extra stalls to the market and get the extra money they need instead of cutting the service risking the whole market?

Ely market makes a profit for ECDC. Last year market traders paid charges of £134,945 to ECDC and despite high council overhead charges there was a profit of £25,238.

The Saturday market is unique in Cambridgeshire with antiques, craft and farmers market stalls in addition to normal market traders selling clothes and food. It is also special because the neat council stalls laid out in rows against the background of the Cathedral attracts tourists and shoppers from all over Cambridgeshire. Why risk all this? Other market towns have suffered by such short-sighted measures.

SUPPORT ELY MARKET

• Ely Market has traded since the Middle Ages and is an important part of our heritage

• It is loved by everybody and brings tourists and visitors to the city and into the shops

• But the market is under threat. It has been targeted for cuts as the district council tries to get itself out of a financial crisis.

• Traders are going to be asked buy and erect their own stalls. If this happens almost half the traders at the Collectors’ Market and a third of those at the Farmers’ Market have said they will be forced to quit.

• This cannot be allowed to happen. Please sign our petition.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP We have only 2 weeks left to let the
Council know that we are not prepared to let them damage, what is a unique
well-established centre to our city.
Please sign the petition, but only once.
Attend the Policy and Resources Committee where the markets will be
discussed. Being present indicates your concern but if you can place a
question or a statement about how you feel in the box on the way in, the
the committee is duty bound to hear and respond to your views. If it’s a
question add your name and address, so they can write to you if
necessary. The meeting will be held at 5.0pm on Tuesday 2nd February
at The Grange, Nutholt Lane, Ely, Cambs. CB7 4PL
Or you can email a question/statement to:
tracy.couper@eastcambs.gov.uk ref: P & R Committee.
There is also a Personnel Committee at 4.30pm on Thursday 4th
February. Again please try to attend and write or email your concerns as
outlined above. Agendas for these meetings can be found by googling
East Cambs District Council, Click on ‘committees’ then on the meetings.
Email for the Personnel Committee: melanie.stimpson@eastcambs.gov.uk

What a muddle at the Community Services Committee last week. The Tory administration’s agenda proposals on the very important budget items clearly had not been discussed, either with the so-called partners or (as became apparent during the debate) even with the councillor members of the committee. One item to save £2,000 suddenly became an item to cost £8,000 and was hastily withdrawn. The proposal to bring the arts service in-house had no justification figures but was alleged to save £25,000. However, due to public protests the Conservative administration’s proposal was reversed during the week before the meeting and a new proposal was put to members just an hour before the meeting started. Apparently, ADeC with a financial gun to their head had been forced to agree to a halving of their grant over the next two years.
The final muddle was a proposal to save £3,300 by decimating the Ely market. When it looked like even the normally compliant Tory councillors would throw out this proposal, it was suddenly announced that we were really saving £28,000 although no justification was made for this claim. Even the vote at the end of the meeting was a muddle, with standard voting procedure having to be explained to the chairman. How could anyone be expected to vote for such a half-baked mess?
This whole procedure would normally have been debated in the autumn, but has been delayed and delayed again. Plenty of time to get the figures right and for proper consultations with all the parties concerned. But NO, just a MUDDLE.

Campaigning Lib Dem councilors are celebrating victory in the first round of their battle to save ADEC as bungling Tories stage a dramatic U-turn.

They have forced the Conservatives to re-think their decision to scrap the district’s arts provider and bring the service in-house.

Pauline Wilson, Lib Dem lead member on community services said: “This is the first piece of common sense we have heard from the Tories in a long time.

“It would have been absolutely disastrous to scrap Arts Development East Cambridgeshire and put in jeopardy all the excellent projects they have put in place.

“Instead, we are hoping that the Tories will follow through and hold talks with ADEC to see if it can increase its volunteers and run on a reduced grant.

“We fully understand the budget constraints facing the council but destroying an organisation which is working well is nothing more than a fool’s errand.”

Tory leader, Cllr Fred Brown announced his group’s decision to think again on the future of ADEC to thousands of listeners to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire on Monday.

ADEC’s future will be discussed at East Cambridgeshire District Council’s community services committee tomorrow (Thursday) where Lib Dems will fight to secure it.

Cllr Wilson will be lodging an amendment to the agenda item calling for the chief executive to enter into negotiations with ADEC to allow it to continue.

She is also pushing to reverse a decision to half the council’s contribution to Ely in Bloom which would save £2,000. “This tiny saving will be damaging to the vital tourist industry of this district,” she will tell members.

And Cllr Wilson will fight to remove a cut to the Ely Market maintenance budget.

“This small saving will damage the vibrant and successful Ely market and will reduce the number of traders and therefore customers coming to Ely,” she will tell members.

Furious Liberal Democrats have attacked savage Tory cuts which will shut down arts provider ADEC.

They claim the move to slash the grant for Arts Development East Cambridgeshire and bring the service in-house, is “short sighted and ill-thought out”.

It will also mean that Ely’s cinema will no longer be run by ADEC but handed over to the management of The Maltings. The plans would save £50,000 over the next two years.

Lib Dem Councillor, Pauline Wilson, a member of the council’s community services committee which will discuss the cuts on Thursday, said: “This is absolute madness.

“Scrapping ADEC will save the taxpayer the equivalent of less than one pence a week. But the damage that will be done to arts provision in East Cambridgeshire will far outweigh the potential savings. This is short sighted and ill-thought out by an administration which has been determined to shut down ADEC over the years.”

At the same time, the Tory-run East Cambridgeshire District Council has just advertised a lucrative £100,000 contract for Ely’s planned country park.

Cllr Wilson added: “On the one hand, the Tories are planning to spend thousands of pounds creating a new country park while on the other they can’t even manage the expenditure on what is already in place.

“Over the years ADEC has provided financial support to a wide range of events. It was set up because the previous in-house service was so ineffectual. Now we are planning to revert to a similar service and will lose the excellent team of volunteers that ADEC has built up. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

I was very concerned to hear that for short-term money saving reasons the Environment Agency is thinking of cutting back on dredging operations on the Great Ouse. The decision to save money is apparently based on the fact that at the moment only 45 houses are situated in the Haddenham drainage area, so the Agency think it would be all right to allow them to be flooded. I should have thought that after the recent disasters in the Lake District the prospect of any flooding of homes was unacceptable. However, the fen drainage area is very different from the Lake District. We saw appalling floods but within days, the water was gone. This would certainly not be the case here. The fen area suggested as a flood plain is below the river level and would have to be pumped out. The protection for this area is based on earth banks that would be washed away by the flood. The pumps that would need to be used after the banks have been restored would be under 12 feet of water as they are naturally situated at the lowest level. It would take months to rebuild the banks and pump out the millions of gallons of water.

In the meantime not only would the 45 houses be totally uninhabitable and would have to be demolished and rebuilt but thousands of acres of good farming land would be destroyed and this at a time when we are being told there is an increasing need for more food to be produced.

 1947 Floods

However, this is not all. The road and rail system in this area would be under water the A10, the A1123 and the Twenty pence Road would be completely impassable and Haddenham residents would be unable to get to Cambridge to work. The cost of the disruption and the cost of repairing these roads when eventually the water recedes would run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

I therefore think that to increase this possibility of flooding to one in twenty years instead of one in 120 years as at present, would be the height of folly.

Please return any comments you may have, marked “Advisory Freight Map” to The Traffic Manager’s Team, by 29 January 2010 using these contact details;

lorries@cambridgeshire.gov.uk
Tel. 01223 715547
Traffic Manager’s Team
CC1303
Castle Court
Shire Hall
Castle Hill
Cambridge
CB3 0AP

Good News at long last after Pauline and I campaigned about the lorry traffic through Haddenham since the summer of 2002 and have been discussing the problem at every occasion since then. In particular all of our combined efforts at the cross boundary Parish Council HCV meetings has at last born fruit.

Following our extremely well attended Meeting with Robert Roweth in January 2007 we thought that some action was going to happen. But we were disappointed as Robert left the job of HCV officer with the County Council and more and more lorries continued to come through the local villages.

In October the County Council produced a draft “Cambridgeshire Advisory Freight Map”. This showed the “Strategic Routes” for lorries in the county and also showed “Local Routes”. The first draft showed the A1123 and the A1421 as strategic routes. Local campaigners and Our Parish Council immediately responded with objections. The accompanying documentation talked about keeping heavy traffic out of village centres and these two roads go right through Haddenham and the A1123 goes through Wicken, Stretham, Wilburton and Earith as well.

Well the officials at County Hall have at last listened and a new draft map was produced at a meeting of District and County Councillors last week. Both the A1123 and the A1421 have now been downgraded to “local routes”. We now need as many people as possible to contact the consultation and to express satisfaction with the downgrading of the A1123. This is particularly important as Haulage firms may well ask for the A1123 to be upgraded as a strategic route again.

However we also need some enforcement of these routes. Any new planning consents that involve lorry transport should have these routes as a condition. (In particular the extension of the gravel extraction at Block Fen in Mepal.)

At the meeting I was able to point out that the A1421 should not be an A road at all, as it only goes from Haddenham to Witcham Toll and the Station Road end is very narrow and only has a footpath on one side. There is agreement that the road designations need to be re-examined, as this has not been done for many years and it was agreed that the downgrading of the A1421 to a B road would be looked at. Please encourage our officers to take this action as this should mean not only less traffic on this road but also less on the A1123.

Shirley Williams came to Ely to talk about her new book. She used this opportunity to talk to local Liberal Democrats. She told us how much she liked Ely. She told us that the breakthrough made by Chris Howarth in Cambridge and by Norman Lamb in North Norfolk made a victory for Jonathan Chatfield much more likely as voters can see that we can win locally.

She talked to the local Focus team and wished them well

Pauline spoke at the Liberal Democrat conference in favour of large corporations and government organisations treating the ordinary citizen with respect and courtesy. Too many people have been passed from one computerised answering machine to another when what we require is to speak to a person who can sort out our problem. Many come to us for help. However, why should these so called “customer support” departments jump about when a councillor demands some action when they should have sorted out the problem directly with the original complaint. The resolution demanding better service was passed.