By Hannah Brown
Spending on things related to climate change is “not optional” for Cambridgeshire County Council, the leader of the authority has said. Councillor Lucy Nethsingha (Liberal Democrat) said it is important the county council tries to make sure the area is prepared for flooding and extreme weather events.
Cllr Nethsingha said keeping the authority financially viable is going to be “extremely difficult”, but said she is hopeful they will not have to take money away from things the county council is already doing. Cllr Nethsingha and the deputy leader of the county council, Councillor Lorna Dupré (Liberal Democrat), sat down to discuss their priorities for the next few years.
The Liberal Democrats won control of the county council in the local elections in May, having spent the previous four years in a joint administration with Labour and independent councillors. Cllr Nethsingha has remained as leader of the authority and Cllr Dupré has been appointed deputy leader.
Cllr Nethsingha said managing the authority’s finances will be one of the main things that take up her “time and energy” in the next few years. She said: “There are two things that I think are going to take up time and energy, which are not the things I would have chosen to be our priorities. The first of those is simply the whole business of keeping the council financially viable, which I think is going to be extremely difficult.
“I think the more that we look at what is going on in Cambridgeshire, but also in upper tier councils across the country, the challenges around social care, children’s services, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are vast. Cambridgeshire is not different from lots of other places, so I think simply managing to set a balanced budget is going to be a pretty big challenge and that is going to take up a lot of time over the next six months.”
Cllr Dupré added that the costs faced by the authority in providing some services like social care are “quite uncontrollable”. She said: “The adult social care pressures, the children in care, SEND, and school transport pressures, they are issues that obviously we want to do right by those people in our community who need our help and support, and that is absolutely the right thing to do, but it is quite uncontrollable in terms of the fact we have legal obligations to provide services, and moral obligations to provide services, at pretty much unlimited cost and that is where things get really hard and lead to the budget pressures.”
Despite these pressures, Cllr Netsingha said she is going into the budget setting process for the next year hoping that they will not need to move money away from things they are already doing. She said this was “partly because” the amount of things the authority was already doing was “probably lower than we would like it to be in lots of areas”.
Cllr Nethsingha said: “I think it is important to remember that sometimes if you start taking money out of the sort of services that you provide for the whole community, you find that you are not able to support people at an early stage and therefore you end up with higher costs at the end. Calculating how much that is the case is very difficult, but I certainly feel that the relatively low level of universal support that we still have is really important for that reason.”
Cllr Nethsingha added that there are “relatively few” areas of county council services that are “nice to haves”. She said: “Even some of the things that some of our Reform councillor colleagues would like to flag up as optional are not really optional. Things like our work on climate are incredibly important for making sure that we have resilience in our system, that we are doing the work we need to do to make sure that we are ready for flooding events, for extreme weather events, there is really not much we are doing that is not sensible long term planning.
“I think part of making sure we are able to continue to do the things we are doing and potentially do things better, is about working more effectively with other partners across the system, and I do think there is significant space for doing things more effectively together.”
Challenges of dealing with local government organisation
Cllr Nethsingha added that another big area of work for her is dealing with local government reorganisation. Under government plans for Cambridgeshire, the county council and other city and district councils in the area could cease to exist in a few years time. They could instead be replaced by new unitary authorities which would provide all the services currently split between the county council and the district and city councils.
A consultation is currently being held to gather views on three possible options for a new council structure in Cambridgeshire. All of the options being considered would see the county council’s services, like education and social care, split up between the new authorities.
Cllr Nethsingha said it is important the county council manages the changes in a way that “does not disrupt the level of service that local people get”. She said: “[That] is going to be quite difficult and given that a lot of the services that we provide are for very vulnerable people it is really important that the quality of service that they get continues.”
Cllr Nethsingha said she hoped the authority would be able to hand over its services in a good condition. She said: “I think it is one of the really important things that this newly elected county council can try and do is to manage the successful handover to the successive authorities, and being able to do that well will not be easy.
“I know from talking to colleagues in Cumbria where they have gone through this process, it is a difficult process it is not easy to make sure that things are managed smoothly, but it matters enormously to the residents of the area, and in particular to the most vulnerable who are always the ones who if things go wrong are the most likely to fall through any cracks that there are. Making sure that our transition is as smooth and successful as possible I think is a really important piece of work for this final term of Cambridgeshire County Council.”
Cllr Dupré agreed and said it is the responsibility of the currently elected councillors to make sure the transition to new authorities is “as smooth as possible”. She said: “We do not yet know what the configuration is going to be. We are going to be able to put forward several options to the government, the government does not have to choose any of them, it could just open a draw and go ‘here is one we prepared anyway regardless of what you think’ and we are going to have to work with it.
“Whatever happens there are significant differences between the different authorities and I don’t just mean political, I mean in terms of historic decision making, whether they are urban or rural, whether they have their own housing revenue account, their own council housing portfolio or not, all of those things and more we are going to have to smooth out.
“There is going to be all sorts smoothing processes and the dreaded equalising of council tax and all of those issues, it is going to be our responsibility as the existing politicians handing over to what comes into place in 2028, to work together to make that process as smooth as possible for everybody and do the best for the residents who ultimately we are all here to serve.”
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