Future of Small Cities Following Covid-19

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Daniel Zeichner

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I will call Daniel Zeichner to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of small cities following the covid-19 outbreak.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. Let me start by saying that the pandemic clearly is not over—this debate is very much looking ahead. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a huge subject, about small cities in general. I have a particular interest in Cambridge, my own small city, and in the future of the community that I represent and in which I live.

There are many things that could be said on this topic. I am conscious that it is a short debate and there are other Members who want to make a contribution. I therefore offer a warning to any watchers or readers: be aware that this will be a very narrow account, dealing particularly with issues of work and innovation. There is much more to be said on a whole range of issues, such as housing, fairness, mental health, transport, environmental sustainability, and air and water quality, but for today only, I will just touch on many of those issues.

The stimulus for this debate is the report by Cambridge Ahead entitled, “A New Era for the Cambridge Economy”. I pay tribute to the many Cambridge thinkers who have started the ball rolling on this discussion as we think about the world beyond the pandemic. I will mention in particular Jane Paterson-Todd and her team, Metro Dynamics, who were the lead authors, and the chair, Dr David Cleevely—there were many others.

The report sits in a wider framework. I have long felt that our goal as leaders should be to make Cambridge the best small city in the world. For me, when we are seeking to understand what that might look like, the idea of one city fair for all must be at its heart—social justice is essential. I am delighted that that runs as a golden thread throughout the report.

That goal will inevitably be delivered through the work of local leaders. I will name just a few: Councillor Anna Smith, the city council leader; Councillor Katie Thornburrow on the local plan; and Dr Nik Johnson, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. I have named some of my Labour colleagues, but I well appreciate the work of many others within and beyond local government. Future success will only be achieved in partnership; I look to the Government, and the Department in particular, to work with us to find constructive ways forward.

Let me turn to some lessons from the pandemic. A leitmotif for many of us was, “You’re on mute!”—I think many of us will remember that for years to come—but the report picked up on many more things. When it was launched a few weeks ago, I could not help noticing that it was picked up in the national media, by the Daily Mail and The Times, and it was almost as if the only issue was whether people should go back to the workplace—that is an ongoing conversation in Government, as I understand it.

However, those reports missed the core point of the report; frankly, the paradigm has shifted and the world has changed. The question is how to adapt and turn that change to our advantage. Let us be clear that for many workers in Cambridge and elsewhere, there is no choice. The street cleaners, the cabbies, the bus drivers, the hospitality workers, the cleaners, the health workers, the lab workers, the manufacturing workers and many people in schools and universities did not have a choice—all those people had to be in their workplace all the way through the pandemic and will continue to be there.

The knowledge economy is different. In some ways, historically, Cambridge has evolved in a unique way to foster networking. Those who are familiar with the college system will know that it has its pluses and minuses, but one of the great bonuses is the sense of people being together and meeting in human-sized communities. When one looks at the way the science parks, innovation centres and networking organisations, such as Cambridge Network, Cambridge Ahead and Cambridge Angels, have grown up, along with many of the consultancies that have emerged in Cambridge, one can see that it is key that those opportunities for people to meet and discuss continue as they have in the past.

David Cleevely talks passionately about what he calls the serendipity of the chance meetings that so often lead to breakthrough ideas. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me they were padlocking their bicycles in Cambridge and a chance conversation led to an investment opportunity, a discussion or a new idea. Those moments—in other places they are the water-cooler moments; in Cambridge, they are the bike-locking moments—are crucial.

The report argues that policy makers need to understand how these changes will work for city economies, so that we can respond positively and take advantage of them. Our places must not only be resilient to the shocks of the future but evolve, adapt and mature through the process, taking the opportunity to do things better than they were done before. To achieve that, we must be on the front foot and experiment to help us understand what new demands we need to make of our cities, and how resources could and should provide for all.

Cambridge Ahead is a business-led and academic membership organisation. It has been looking at the structural changes that have occurred in Cambridge during and after the pandemic, looking at internationally competitive companies, and bringing together world-leading thinkers to identify the impacts of the pandemic and the opportunities it might present. Clearly, the report was produced through the lens of Cambridge, but I believe much can be learned for other great small cities across the UK. Cambridge Ahead concluded that the UK is on a new path and that the changes we are seeing are substantially changing the city’s dynamics in a number of ways. I will touch on three points.

First, transport patterns have altered. It is pretty clear that private vehicles are still being used in preference to public transport. Public transport numbers have recovered, but not to pre-covid levels. The timing of people’s journeys has also shifted. That offers both a threat and an opportunity. There is a danger of gridlock, frankly, but if we can spread the peaks and understand that road spaces are a precious commodity, there is an opportunity to do something differently—to develop active travel in a city the size of Cambridge. There is a genuine opportunity to shift to things such as electric bikes—I am a passionate user of an electric bike myself; they are ideal for small cities such as Cambridge—and reliable, affordable mass transit into and out of the city to make sure that those outside the city are not disadvantaged.

This is a time of real opportunity, but to realise it, we have to resolve the vexed issue of financing such a transition. I make no apology for referring the Minister to my very first speech in this place, back in 2015. Perhaps slightly unusually in a first speech, I talked about tax increment financing and how close Cambridge had come to securing a truly innovative deal a few years earlier, until the dead hand of the Treasury descended, as it so often does. It is time for the Government to look at that again.

Secondly, the demand for space is changing. Perhaps counterintuitively, demand for office space in Cambridge continues to grow, even though not everyone is back. The report details why that is: people want to maintain a space, and with social distancing and so on, we do not necessarily have people back together in quite the same way. At the same time, people are also working from home. The report concludes that it looks as if we are going to settle back at somewhere between three and four days a week in the office for most people, meaning one and a half days working at home.

That means that people are working in places that were never originally designed as workplaces, which raises some real challenges, not least the need to develop far more neighbourhoods—or quarters, as one might call them—with services nearby. Academics are talking widely about the 15-minute city. We need to do that and find a way to create it. We also need green spaces for people to be able to enjoy those new workplaces. That is a very big planning issue and there are many ways to address it, but I gently suggest—this might be slightly controversial at home—that for Cambridge, where many of our green spaces are locked behind college walls, sharing that space more equitably with citizens of our city should be high on the list for those who have the opportunity to make these decisions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful for those contributions—they are all important. I mentioned lab workers in passing at the beginning, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Cambridge economy is perhaps slightly different from other parts of the country, but many of these lessons, particularly those relating to reinventing the high street, will be key. The report picks up on the fact that a number of companies are looking at setting up work spaces in other areas, not necessarily in the city centre, so it is likely that there will be a different pattern to the way in which people work in future.

The third and final point that I will pull out from the report—this is, inevitably, a brief summary of a long, complicated report—is that the biggest thing for innovation in Cambridge is, as I have already hinted, how networks work and may change. New working patterns affect the frequency and manner in which we interact with people. There are generally many benefits to homeworking. At the document’s launch there was a discussion about our need—I think we can all appreciate this—for places where we are not being constantly interrupted and where we can think and work through ideas. Homeworking provides an opportunity for such a productive space, and it can clearly boost people’s quality of life.

However—and this is key for innovation—we still need to create moments of value where people come together. The report describes that as making “serendipitous encounters” happen—in other places, that could be the water cooler moment—which has been key to Cambridge’s success. Many people over many years have asked why Cambridge has done so well. This is one of the key understandings that we have learned over the years. We have to ensure that, in the transition to different working patterns, we do not lose that. To be frank, that is important not only for Cambridge. Cambridge is a key, significant driver not just of the regional economy but of the wider UK economy, so it is very important to the Government.

That is a brief summary of a much longer argument, but lessons can be pulled out for other small cities, too. Cambridge has a proud tradition of innovation and we could be an ideal test bed for new approaches. Our economy continues to grow and there are opportunities to observe, measure, experiment and learn. That will require selecting projects to monitor proactively, publish data and test ideas, so that other cities can benefit and share in the experience, with an emphasis on generating societal benefit for every community.

We are asking Government to work with Cambridge and perhaps other like-minded cities to take the work forward to the next step. I hope the Government will follow up on this discussion and agree to meet us to discuss the creation of what might be called a multi-disciplinary test bed: a framework for implementing experiments and studies, covering health, education, climate, retail, town and city centre offers, transport, housing, business models and the evolution of office and industrial space. Cities across the UK have different characteristics and face different challenges, and they will want to experiment in different ways. Of course, an experimental approach is not without risks. Some experiments will fail, but the vital thing is to have the mechanisms to monitor and learn.

In conclusion, our cities have changed substantially and will continue to do so. There will be no return to the way things were, so let us take action together to take advantage of these changes and give our cities the resilience they need to face the future.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister to respond to the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham]

My understanding was that my office had put me down to speak in the debate.

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Gentleman certainly sought my permission.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Thank you for making that clear. I will allow the Member to speak, but only for two minutes.