Edward Browne

Statement to voters

I'll be one of your Labour candidates in the local elections on 2nd May (our other candidate is Rebecca Denness and I strongly encourage you to vote for her, because she'd be a great councillor.) I live in the ward with my wife and our pet ferrets and I work for Cambridge University as a librarian. I'm standing to be a councillor because I think the people of Ely have been taken for granted by their councillors for too long and they deserve better, more active representation. For the past couple of months Rebecca and I have been spending most of our spare time knocking on doors and talking to residents about what they want from their councillors and we'd bring that same work ethic to the council. There are three big issues I'm passionate about locally: affordable housing, green transport and public services. On affordable housing, we're campaigning to keep at least 50 of the RAF Houses behind the hospital in council hands and rent them out as social housing. These are excellent, solidly built family homes and it's a scandal they've stood empty for so long. I think it would be an even bigger scandal if we do what the Tories and Lib Dems want and sell 85% of the site on the open market, at prices nobody on a low income could possibly afford. Only Labour are campaigning for proper, council-owned housing on this site and I think it's a key issue. We also want to make sure that on the other new housing sites around Ely, developers actually provide the 30% of affordable housing that they're supposed to. That hasn't happened for years now, as the council has kept rolling over and watering down planning conditions for developers. It needs to stop and as your councillor I'd argue for the council to follow in Cambridge's footsteps and fight developers' attempts to use 'viability assessments' to game the system. I'm a commuter by bike and by train, so decent green and public transport is important to me personally. Every year the trains get more and more crowded and that's not going to stop whilst Ely keeps growing. That needs we need more train carriages. I welcome the news that the Ely North junction upgrades are (finally!) going to happen, but I'll campaign to make sure that we keep the same number of services, instead of getting fewer but longer trains. Provision for cyclists in Ely is terrible and it puts people off cycling. There's a lot that needs sorting here and changes won't happen tonight, but some of my priorities on this issue would be more cycle parking at the train station; more cyclist-friendly road surfaces on The Gallery and more off-road cycle lanes. I'm happy to work with campaign groups and local residents for any other improvements to our cycling infrastructure. We also need much better bus services. Prickwillow gets one bus a week (that is not a typo!) and the King's Avenue area doesn't get any at all. The Lynn Road area is served by the number 9 bus, but if you try to use it to get to Cambridge you'll find it's incredibly slow and incredibly expensive. Lots of residents don't drive and without decent public transport options they risk being cut off. As your councillor, I'd lobby Stagecoach to modify their routes to provide a better service and if they won't do that, then I'd campaign for new competitor services to do it for them. By public services, I don't just mean things like the Minor Injuries Centre and the GP surgery (although we do need a third GP surgery in Ely and I am resolutely opposed to any plans to cut services at the Princess of Wales.) I mean that Ely North is full of housing built in the past two decades, but none of the facilities you'd expect to go with that. We don't have a corner shop, there aren't any community meeting places and there are very few play areas, which is ridiculous when you consider how many families live here. As your councillor, I'd campaign for the shops and community facilities on the new developments in the ward to be put in first and I would campaign for a new play area on King's Avenue (serving the Allen Road/Longchamp Drive area) and for the one on the RAF Housing site to be restored.

Election history

Westminster general elections