Blog Posts

  • Tuesday – Cabinet Family support and children – fantastic

    Two of the papers before Cabinet today were truly excellent. The first was a paper on Parenting Strategy and Early Intervention Family Support and the second was the placement strategy for looked after children with an emphasis on keeping families together. This was the stuff Councillors go into politics for. Both these papers felt very Read more

  • Tuesday Cabinet – general

    Good to see the Park and Ride scheme being so well used. We approved an expansion of up to 600 additional spaces at the Babraham site. An update report on resources and performance showed we are on target to meet our savings targets with the exception of Community and Adult Services. Part of this overspend Read more

  • Cabinet – Windfarms

    A previous decision by Cabinet not to allow any more wind farms on County land was called in by the Overview and Scrutiny committee and referred back to Cabinet. We always seek to take into account, wherever possible, the views of O & S committees. In this case we re-affirmed the original decision to defer Read more

  • Tuesday – Cabinet – where was the opposition?

    Today was Cabinet. A full agenda with 19 items on it, some very significant to the people of Cambridgeshire. The debate amongst Cabinet was good but ………. Where were the usual questions and requests to speak from the Lib Dems? Is there a trend developing that they are not engaging at all? Apart from a Read more

  • Members allowances

    Much has been said about the members allowance debate. It is worth just laying out a few points to reflect on. The rules state that our allowances have to be looked at at least every four years by an independent panel. We are overdue. This does not deal with inflation but is expected to give Read more

  • Friday

    Friday started at 0730 preparing for a meeting at 0800 to  review progress on reducing the overspend in adult social care. This was followed by a meeting with the chair of the Police Authority to discuss a range of issues including the transition from Police Authority to the new Police Chief. I then  had a Read more