Speeches by Carling.

“I wonder whether the Minister has the same experience as I do. When I speak to employers in North West Cambridgeshire, I hear time and again that young people do not have the skills for the workplace and that the education system has not left them with the right mindset and abilities. Is something going direly wrong wi…”

“I have some more thrilling financial commentary, so I hope the Committee will forgive me. First, I welcome what the Minister has just said. Exactly this situation happened in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, where our mayor went on medical leave for some time. His deputy, Councillor Anna Smith, who is a good friend of …”

“With your permission, Sir John, I will make some references to schedule 3 as well as clause 9, just to do it all in the same place. I will start by responding to some of the hon. Lady’s points. She raises some valid concerns. I will just give the perspective of someone who lives in quite a fractious combined authority …”

“We have just heard the Minister speak about having statutory guidance on this issue. Does the hon. Member agree that one way of making this change, rather than through these amendments, would be for the guidance to include some clear indications to the remuneration panels about what roles they should consider comparabl…”

“I am really lucky in North West Cambridgeshire to represent a whole variety of heritage sites of different sizes, including Burghley House, which I visited recently—a 16th century stately home that welcomes thousands of visitors each year to the house itself and the gardens—and smaller sites such as John Clare Cottage,…”

“Q I have a question for the whole panel, but first I would like to come on to something Mayor Brabin just said. I was really pleased you raised the issue of taxi licensing. We have a border problem around my area of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, where taxis register in certain councils because they have laxer standa…”

“Q This is a question for Councillor Chapman-Allen about the balance of powers between councils and strategic authorities in the licensing space. A number of our district and unitary councils, including Peterborough and Huntingdonshire, in the area I represent are grappling with problems of taxi licensing, where taxis a…”

“Sorry. Would you favour adding provisions to the Bill for strategic authorities to take over licensing powers to deal with that issue? Sam Chapman-Allen: None of my 169 members has ever asked for taxi licensing to be removed from a local principal council up to the strategic authority. If that is the Government’s inten…”

“Q We have talked a lot about governance and the need to safeguard how financial procedures work on audit committees. I am interested in the flipside of that—in how we can protect taxpayer money through measures such as those in the devolution White Paper, including local public accounts committees. Could you give us yo…”

“Q That is useful. You talked about potentially having only one that perhaps has quite a big remit across the whole country. Do you think that would have enough time to do the work it would need to do, or is there a kind of midway point where perhaps you have regional committees or some other mechanism? Mark Stocks: I t…”

“Q Thank you; that is really helpful. On to my main question: in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, our mayor announced that he intends to appoint as his planning commissioner a former leader of Peterborough city council, who is still a councillor, although currently in opposition. We have a democratic problem, where we h…”

“I recently met a police officer in Cambridgeshire who told me that that force had a policy requiring all footage from stop and searches to be reviewed by a more senior officer. Due to this, they feel discouraged from doing proactive patrols due to the extra work that it adds for already stretched supervisors. Will the …”

“I have been supporting constituents living in ex-military housing on Embry Road in Wittering, in my constituency. The Ministry of Defence sold the homes years ago, but my constituents have been left in limbo because their properties remain wrongly classified under MOD commercial energy contracts. Despite repeated attem…”

“Thank you. That is a really comprehensive answer. On a slightly different topic then, how do you envisage having a relationship with this Committee during your time in office?”

“I apologise for being late, I was delayed by the tube strike. Your answers to the questionnaire were really helpful, and thank you for going into such detail. You will no doubt be aware of the seven principles of public life. I wondered if you could give us a couple of examples of those and how you have met them.”

“Is there usually a board meeting in December?”

“In that case, I will look again, but I could not find any board minutes from that month.”

“Okay. Well, I suppose that comes back to what one of the reviews said—I cannot remember which one, but it may have been the Lievesley review—about the need to modernise and improve the website. Perhaps that explains why I could not find the minutes, but I will have another look later.”

“I am going to ask you a question similar to one that I asked the board chair. In September 2023, the board minutes say that they were not aware of the extent to which response rates had fallen recently, which to me means that either the board are not being proactive enough and not noticing the problem, or that they wer…”

“Fine. So the particular problem occurred in August 2023, but you must have been able to see it coming. There was the long-term decline, and I think the board were very much—”