A tale of three bus strategies

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority is currently consulting on its Bus Strategy, but there seem to be some strange goings-on with the strategy document. A first version was reviewed by the Authority’s Transport & Infrastructure Committee on 16 November; then, an updated version was approved by the Board on 30 November; but as pointed out by Clare King the supposedly final version in the consultation seems to be missing many of the changes that the Board meeting approved.

It’s quite a long document, but let’s take one topical example – the proposed Cambridge congestion charge. Here’s what the strategy document said on the subject in the version presented to the Transport & Infrastructure Committee on 16 November (meeting agenda here; strategy document here):

Note in particular those last two sentences – “traffic restraint measures will be introduced” and they “will include road charging”. Not much room for compromise there. But this was toned down substantially in the version discussed at the Combined Authority Board meeting on 30 November (meeting agenda here; strategy document here). This time the document included tracked changes so that Board members could see what edits had been made:

This time the last two sentences are rather less definitive. Now the traffic restraint measures will only be “explored”, not “introduced”, and road charging in Cambridge is merely a possibility being considered, rather than something that will definitely be included. And, you might very well think, quite right too – a separate GCP consultation about the congestion charge has recently been completed, and it would be good to think that its outcome wasn’t entirely a foregone conclusion. This version of the Bus Strategy was duly discussed by the Combined Authority Board, and it was approved for a 6-week public consultation, running from 11 January to 22 February.

So you might reasonably expect that the version of the document in the consultation would be the one that the Combined Authority Board had approved. However, this seems not to be the case. Here’s the consultation web page, and here is the version of the strategy document it includes. How does the relevant paragraph look in this version? Here it is:

As you can see, it’s word-for-word identical with the original version, and completely omits all the changes in the version that the Board meeting approved. Traffic restraint measures are back to being “introduced”, not just “explored”, and road charging is no longer just a “possibility”, but once again something that the strategy “will include”.

It’s not just the paragraph on road pricing that’s undergone this reverse editing process. Here is another example, and comparing other parts of the three versions reveals more of the same. So I think we are entitled to ask, what is going on? Is this simply an unfortunate mistake, with the wrong version of the document being accidentally included in the consultation? Or has someone at the Authority decided that they preferred the earlier version, without bothering to ask our elected representatives to approve the change? And in any case, is it really a good idea for any version of this document to present road charging for Cambridge as a done deal, when there’s a huge public debate underway and an enormous consultation response still to be processed? I’ll look forward to hearing what the Combined Authority has to say.

Update: The Combined Authority has now tweeted to say that this was indeed a case of the wrong version of the document being uploaded. The version of the Bus Strategy document on the consultation website is now back to the version approved by the Combined Authority Board on 30 November.