At this morning’s Annual Council meeting, the new Joint Administration of Cambridgeshire County Council has been put in place, with councillors elected to key leadership positions.

The meeting was in the unusual setting of The Duxford Air Museum and required 2m spacing between all our seats.

Cllr Lucy Nethsingha (Lib Dem) is the new Leader of the Council, with Cllr Elisa Meschini (Lab) as her deputy. Cllr Derek Giles (Ind) is the new Chair of the Council, ably supported by Sebastian Kindersley (Lib Dem) as Vice-Chair.

A number of changes have been made to the Council’s committee structure this morning, to enable the new Joint Administration to implement its policy priorities more effectively. The new committees and their Chairs and Vice-Chairs are listed here. Noticeable is the much greater proportion of women in key positions than previously. I have been honoured to have been elected Chair of the Pensions Fund Committee – not one of the major committees, but an important role and an important step for me.

The new structure brings together health and adult social care into a single new Adults & Health Committee. The workload will be considerable, but it’s a real opportunity to consider health and care in a properly joined-up way. One of the earliest and biggest mistakes of the pandemic was the national decision to move large numbers of vulnerable people out of hospitals and put them into care homes, enabling the coronavirus to take hold there and resulting in large numbers of deaths. Locally also the failure of health and care systems to be properly aligned leaves too many people falling through the cracks, and that must not happen.

The former General Purposes Committee (GPC) has been renamed Strategy & Resources, partly to make it clearer what its remit is, and partly to end the ongoing confusion of initials with the Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP). The former Communities & Partnership Committee has been refocused on communities, social mobility, and inclusion. And the former Environment & Sustainability Committee is now renamed Environment & Green Investment, to highlight the committee’s role in a green recovery and in investing to enable the Council to meet its now more ambitious zero-carbon targets.

The changes mean fewer committees, with consequently fewer Chairs and Vice-Chairs claiming special responsibility allowances. They also mean an end to the ‘community champions’ instituted by the previous régime, where a few county councillors were arbitrarily chosen as ‘champions’ of their respective district areas, and paid a special allowance for this, despite not having been elected by the vast majority of residents in those districts and having no mandate to claim to represent them.

Two hours this morning have set Cambridgeshire County Council on a new path and I’m looking forward to playing my part in that.

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