County Councillor's Notes

November 2007

26,000 residents from South Cambridgeshire drive into the City of Cambridge every day. Many are just taking children to school or partners to work and leave soon after but of the 40,000 cars which cross the city boundary each day, most come from South Cambridgeshire.

It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that the County Council’s Cabinet is considering a raft of measures to reduce congestion in Cambridge. These include luxury buses and more of them, more bus lanes, doubling of the park-and-ride car parks, more cycle-ways and a new railway station at Chesterton sidings. Few of us would quarrel with any of these as they strive to achieve fewer people travelling into the city by car. The Government will give us a huge amount of money to meet the cost but not for nothing. The most contentious part of the scheme is to force motorists to pay a Congestion Charge as they cross the city boundary.

I have not found a single resident in favour of this tax – for that’s what it is. It will mean everyone crossing into Cambridge between 7.30am and 9.30am will have to pay £4. Worse, everyone who lives inside the boundary will have to pay £4 as well each time they take their car on to the road. This is a new £1000 a year tax on every Cambridge resident.

London has a congestion charge of £8 a day. When it was introduced the residents of the charging zone were bribed to accept it with a 90% discount. There will be no discounts for residents in ours. The reason is that if those who live inside the city boundary don’t pay, it will mean the commuters coming in will have to pay £8. Planners, who seem above daily reality, say that each Cambridge resident who takes his car onto the road network is contributing to congestion in the same way as any commuter.

The forecast is grim. The scheme would involve 37 detection cameras, 15 on the approaches to Cambridge and 22 within the city. There will also be roaming detection vans to ensure water-tight coverage. It is costing £20 million to build. It will be a system of surveillance unrivalled outside prisoner-of-war camps and you will be spotted even tying your shoelace.

The news first broke in late July and the pro-charge lobby have had no challenge from those of us who oppose it until now. Many Conservative Councillors from South Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire are against it. Politically we Conservatives don’t raise taxes, we like to cut them and we certainly don’t impose new ones. It will turn hard-working families into hard-pressed ones. In this I am standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the leader of the Labour Group, Martin Ballard, because of the excess burden it will place on the poor and the rise in the cost of living it will impose on the rest.

Take a close look at the back of a £20 note. The picture is of Adam Smith who, just 250 years ago, set down four principles for taxation. Before this, tax collecting was a free-for-all with tax gatherers trying to squeeze as much as possible out of the population and the weakest least able to resist them. Smith said:

• Taxes should be related to ‘ability to pay’. This means that a tax should be no more of a burden to the poor than to the rich so the rich should pay more.
• Everyone should know how much they have to pay.
• The method of tax-collection should be as convenient as possible to the taxpayer.
• The cost of collecting the tax should only take a small part of the yield.

Remember that all taxation is theft. It takes people’s reward for work off them so they’re working some part of the time for nothing. Currently this is from New Year’s Day to June 3rd. If we measure the congestion charge against the four rules above, it fails on all of them. It will be a bigger burden to the poor, people will not find it convenient to pay unless they buy a special ‘chip’ for their cars, people will re-schedule their journeys to avoid the tax and queue outside the city waiting for free access, and few will know in advance how many journeys they’re going to make.

And the cost of collection? Currently the London Congestion charge costs 43% of the revenue to maintain. Much of the revenue anyway is fines for non-compliance. When the revenue wasn’t enough, the charge was increased. When that didn’t raise enough money, the zone was enlarged. There is no end to this. By comparison, Income Tax uses up about 8% in collection. The cheapest tax to collect is Council Tax where just a few people gather in millions.

Once up and running the Cambridge scheme will cost £6.4 million to run in the second and subsequent years and operating surpluses will be £43.1 million from the second year onwards. We may ask who commuters’ income is going to benefit. Councillors from places far from Cambridge are expecting a windfall bounty to improve their bus services and roads. Nothing is certain and they are at risk of being seduced by empty promises. If Cambridge commuters want to give their money to residents in remote parts of the County they can choose to pay £1000 a year into a local charity instead of being forced to by a Congestion Charge – which gives them no choice at all. Furthermore that £52 million, which will come from developers anyway, is being directed away from other needs to build cameras.

Note that if this scheme is ever built it will be near-impossible to reverse. It was to have been the prototype for a national road-pricing scheme, which, as I write this, has been quietly dropped. The Congestion Charging scheme rests on a number of assumptions, none of which can be certain. They are:

• That the growth of traffic in Cambridge will continue as the number of new housing estates is completed. There has been almost no growth in Cambridge traffic since the park-and-ride scheme began in the late 1990s.
• That traffic levels will actually decline by the 10% needed to give the same traffic flow in peak times as we now get in the school holidays.
• That 90% of commuters will still drive in. This is vital for the charging scheme to pay for itself. If the fall-off is greater the charge will have to be raised and/or the charging zone extended.
• That there is no resistance from the electorate and the scheme is not thrown out before much longer. As I said at the beginning of these “Notes”, I haven’t met a single resident in favour of a Congestion Charge. I know that I wouldn’t vote for a Councillor who supported it.

Councillor Lister Wilson
Member for the Bourn Division of Cambridgeshire County Council
October 2007
e-mail: lister@listerwilson.net

County Councillor's Notes

February 2008

The majority of law and order spending goes on the police – a cost of £550 a year to each household in England and Wales. Alongside an unprecedented increase in the Government’s spending on the police service, the number of full-time officers has increased by 12% in the last 10 years. Britain now spends a higher proportion of its National Income on law and order than any other country. So we would have expected that the crime figures would go down.

The Government uses the British Crime Survey (BCS) to support its claim that crimes have fallen by 2%. But this is a dishonest measure because:

• The BCS excludes half of recorded crime ignoring murder, rape, fraud, crimes against children, shoplifting and drug-dealing.
• Crime has increased: 300,000 more crimes were recorded in 2006-7 than in 1998-99. Violent crime has doubled in the last 10 years (rising by around 7% a year) and topped 1 million in 2004. In 2002 there were 121,000 robberies of which 5,500 were committed using weapons.
• The most recent Home Office figures show the 2% drop because people don’t always go to the police when they have been a victim of crime. In the 2004 crime survey, 38% of people do not report crimes, half of them because they believe that the police will do nothing. For violent crimes this figure is 83%.
• 3 million crimes are taken out of the figures because of a ceiling on recording offences against the same person by the same criminal.
• As police funding has increased, arrest rates have remained static and the percentage of crimes solved has fallen. Only 26% of crimes are detected leaving 4 million which are not.
• London is now more dangerous than New York. In London 32% say they have been victims of crime, In New York the figure is 23%. London is Europe’s most crime-ridden city.

The causes of rising crime are the undermining of both self-reliance and people taking responsibility for their own actions. This is caused by limp discipline in schools and the molly-coddling of a state welfare system where benefits are paid whether claimants ever paid national insurance or not. The Government’s claim to have reduced crime does not reflect reality and the public know this. So what are the lessons for policing in the future?

83% of the British public support a ‘zero tolerance’ to all crime, with highly visible policing on the streets, clamping down heavily on anti-social behaviour like graffiti, vandalism and drunken disorder. An increased police presence on the streets cuts crime and it does not have to mean hiring more officers – it means relying less on squad cars and putting officers on the beat either on bikes or on foot. Where this was done in the United States it is responsible for half the 75% fall in crime over 10 years. In New York and Arlington (Texas) officers were given their own areas and given longer periods of time to get to know them. This is called “Community Policing”. Many police officers prefer the beat to being in a squad car or in an office and foot patrols raise officer morale, most significantly when they are solo.

Police cars on random patrol are not a valuable deterrent; they are cocoons that prevent the police interacting with the public. In London, even on the beat, officers are often seen in pairs. This gives rise to 3 problems:

• They are looking at each other, not at their surroundings
• They are not interacting with the public
• The effective police presence is halved compared to solo patrols. This is because the public is more inclined to share information and tips that can lead to crime prevention and arrests. The evidence is that solo officers – including females – are no more vulnerable than when patrolling in pairs.

In Britain many police forces rotate officers from area to area depriving them of any chance of building an information flow with local citizens. In fact few police have the chance to make high-profile arrests or get involved in shoot-outs. They rarely encounter murder and rape. In 99% of cases police make an arrest when a friend or relative tells them who committed the crime. In the American examples, the consistent police presence of community policing teaches its officers to look for those conditions which lead to criminal activity: disorder, graffiti, stroppy youth, abandoned cars and broken families – which cause larger crime in the long run. The officers were expected to foster better relations with the community and move away from the idea that they were the ones tackling crime and that citizens were merely potential victims.

Above a certain number, the overall impact of more officers is negligible. Good predictors of crime are: income, unemployment levels, population size, income distribution and alcohol consumption.

The last 10 years has seen central intervention as never before. The Government’s ‘command and control’, target-led policing is the cause of rising crime.

The police are now bound by 5 Public Service Agreements; there are 5 key priorities in the National Policing Plan; the National Community Safety Plan sets out another 6 key priorities; there are 23 Baseline Assessments and 29 Statutory Performance Indictors. The list goes on. In 2004/5 the Metropolitan Police spent £104.4 million on investigating burglaries and £101.9 million on non-incident-related paperwork. The average police constable spends 75% of each shift engaged in work which has little to do with catching criminals or helping victims. Police now spend 19% of their time on paperwork and only 14% on patrol. Only 1 in 58 police officers is patrolling the streets at any one time i.e. 4 per town or 90,000. (Cambridge City’s population is 109,000). Every time the police stop someone they have to fill-in a 40 question form taking 7 minutes.

Targets, directives, inspection and centralisation all remove the scope of the police to exercise their professional judgement and discretion. The approach of trying to improve policing by imposing targets simply encourages the police to aim for soft touches. Here are 4 examples: a man arrested for being in possession of an egg with intent to throw; two children arrested for being in possession of a toy pistol; a child arrested in Kent for throwing cream buns at a bus; and the police in Glasgow registering two plastic cutlasses for a children’s pantomime. A recent survey shows that over 60% of the public believe that the police prefer to focus on easy targets such as speeding motorists rather than tackling crime.

The founding father of London’s police, Robert Peel, said that the police’s primary goal is “to prevent crime and disorder”. Hence the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it. A hundred years later the focus had shifted from crime prevention to criminal apprehension. Rapid response becomes more important until it is standard practice. But emergency response is picking up the pieces after a crime has taken place. The average response time to a 999 call is 12 minutes so any wrongdoers are long gone from the scene. Half the time the police do not meet this target. The shift away from foot patrol to police cars has coincided with an emphasis on fast response, the closure of 800 police stations and less than a tenth of officers dedicated to neighbourhood policing.

In the Police Service as in Health, Education and Defence, the Government needs to rid itself of the myth that they can impose the best methods of doing things. Police Chiefs should be given the freedom to manage their forces and be held accountable for their performance to local people. 89% of the public think this too. It works.

Councillor Lister Wilson
Member for the Bourn Division
Cambridgeshire County Council
January 2008

County Councillor's Notes

June 2008

The public have given their view on Congestion Charging in Cambridge. Well at least 4,976 of them have. There are 105,000 who live in Cambridge and as many who travel into the City every day. Two Market Research Companies and the County Council have been lifting the lid on what people think of Congestion Charging.

You may remember the basic claim: a £4 charge for driving into Cambridge between 7.30 and 9.30 in the morning. The charge would be paid by any driver on the city’s road network – including residents backing out of their own drives. The aims of the charge? To reduce traffic by 10% and raise lots of money for bus, cycle and road improvements in the City and perhaps further away.

A 10% traffic reduction is claimed to level the jams down to school-holiday size. The Government gave the County Council £385,000 for a feasibility study back in 2006. Then in November they gave us another £1.4 million to pay for the Public Consultation. Given the number of responses it has cost £281 per interview or £358 if you add-in the early money.

I have always said that this Congestion Charge is a tax and a bad idea. As a Conservative I seek to lower taxes not raise them and we should not make life worse for people who are hard-working and not well-off. We should not be raising any more money from motorists who pay heavily through double-taxation of petrol and diesel, through steeply-hiked road tax and the extra taxes on buying a car. The cost of food has risen by £800 so far in a year and the cost of keeping a car by an extra £600 a year. Add these to a stealthy increase in your National Insurance (yes, it’s a tax) and it is already too much for many.

So what does the public think of congestion-charging in Cambridge?

Those hit hardest live in South Cambridgeshire. 50% of them live within 5 miles and 96% within 10 miles of the City. This makes an important point about the research – the closer you live, the more you oppose the tax. The companies used three probes of opinion: an On-Line questionnaire, Road Shows at places like The Grafton Centre, and a balanced selection of people who live in the five District Council areas of Cambridgeshire. Responding to the On-Line survey and Road Shows was a matter of personal choice. These groups were ‘self-selecting’ and might be expected to be more vocal than those randomly approached.

The Marketing Companies chose their samples with care. The number in each District was related to that District’s population, so most came from Huntingdonshire. They were additionally balanced by age and how often they travelled into Cambridge. The method might be statistically sound but it’s not good enough. The further you live from Cambridge, the less you are likely to be affected by a Congestion Charge. In Fenland, everyone lives more than 10 miles away and places north of Wisbech are further from Cambridge than Braintree or North London. 73% of the Fenland sample live more than 20 miles away. Compare that with the 96% of the South Cambridgeshire group who live much closer. In Huntingdonshire’s sample, 89% live more than 10 miles away and in East Cambridgeshire the 10-mile figure is 98%.

24% of Fenlanders and 15% of Huntingdonshire residents travel into Cambridge less than once a year. In South Cambridgeshire 63% drive into the City by car and 32% do so five days a week. No wonder 51% are strongly opposed to the Charge.

Pro-chargers say it will reduce traffic by 10% - the same as in school holidays. But only 6% of road travel is children going to school. 31% drive in to go to work, about the same number who said they would carry on doing so if the Congestion Charge was £3.

In London, the cost of operating the Congestion Charge takes 47% of the revenue and it makes a loss until fines are included. In London people can choose other types of transport: rail, buses and the underground. Rail and underground are not available as convenient alternatives to the car where we live. Hence imposing a tax on entry to Cambridge would be a straight burden for many as there’s no alternative transport. 32% of South Cambs drivers would notice an increase in costs – a figure which rises to 52% if the charge was raised to £5. Those who could re-arrange their travel times would do so but for many working people, this isn’t possible. Neither is it possible if you work shifts at Addenbrookes Hospital and your shift coincides with the charging times.

In 2006 London’s charge cost an extra £16.6 million to operate on top of the £15 million spent extending it westwards. Automatic number plate recognition is used but non-payers are checked manually. With 4,500 people fined every day, the process is time-consuming and far from 100% accurate. In July 2005 the standard £5 charge was raised to £8 and there were plans to raise the charge to £25 a day for the largest cars. A resident in the charging zone could find themselves paying an extra £6,000 a year. There is no end to this – charges can be raised and the zone extended so long as revenue increases faster than costs. There is no cap on the daily charge that councils outside London can charge. Londoners get a 90% residents’ discount but this will not work for Cambridge. For every £1 discount for Cambridge residents, the charge for commuters rises by £1 otherwise overall revenue will fall.

Back in Cambridge people were asked if they would support congestion charging if “attractive alternatives” were in place. This increased the support to 59% overall. However, “attractive alternatives” have never been defined (a near-free bus service which runs reliably every 10 minutes to each of the 103 villages in South Cambridgeshire, perhaps). This is an empty and dishonest honey-trap. And would people actually behave in their forecast fashion facing a real charge on their daily trip? What people imagine they will do and what they really do are often very different. For example, do you know how you would react if you were the first on the scene after a fatal road accident?

There is a distraction argument becoming popular. It suggests that the Government will pay us up to the £517 million to build new buses, cycle-ways and extend Park-and-Ride. Then we will consider if we still need a Congestion Charge at all. Can you imagine any Government being that witless?

But the message has at last got through – a Congestion Charge is not right for Cambridge. I have opposed it from the start, at first a seemingly lone voice. Now everyone is on board. Thankyou.

Lister Wilson
County Councillor for the Bourn Division
Cambridgeshire County Council
June 2008

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County Councillor's Notes - February 2006

Topics:    Council Tax, Papworth Hospital, Health Care, Income Support

County Councillor's Notes - April 2006

Topics:    Cambridgeshire Health Profile, the Ambulance Service

County Councillor's Notes - June 2006

Topics:    A Children's Centre for Cambourne, Cambourne in future

County Councillor's Notes - August 2006

Topics:    A health check on the National Health Service

County Councillor's Notes - December 2006

Topics:   County Council's Budget setting, Hinchingbrooke Hospital, the "Green Agenda"

County Councillor's Notes - February 2007

Topics:    More on the Council's Budget, A Local Income Tax, Forget Locking your door, Good Neighbours are expensive, Congestion Charging - a cop out

County Councillor's Notes - April 2007

Topics:    The Lyons Report on how to raise more money, Council Tax-band revaluation, Death Taxes, Bin Taxes, Bed Taxes

County Councillor's Notes - August 2007

Topics:    Life expectancy and threats to good health in Cambridgeshire