Your County Councillor

COUNTY COUNCIL LETTER

 Mid April / May 2001

Policing in our villages is still an anxiety for mast of our neighbours. At the recent Liaison Committee for our sector I made a private appeal to Inspector Howell to bring up to standard our local officer's presence. Now that Mark Hurry .has been appointed to represent busy Paul Davis he will have more time than Paul to investigate local crime. Mark has already shown himself to some local bodies including Bottisham and Burwell village colleges.

My public appeal to Inspector Howell was to improve on the police RESPONSE to telephoned reports and enquiries from local people to Histon police station (tel 01223 358966). We now have Sgt. Terry Cakebread at Histon during day time hours who will deal with non emergency but otherwise important problems or reports and he will be assisted by a civilian employee, Julie Gilbert; who will deal with matters not requiring a police officer's attention. Julie will also help with Neighbourhood Watch in our area now that efforts are being made to reform that previously shaky structure.

Apart from the Histon number (01223 358966 you can get in touch with Cambs. police on their website at www.cambs.police.uk. There is information on local crime and a lot about the force and its organisation.

For emergencies, if you want an alternative to 999, you can dial 112 which gets you through to the central control point. If the call is graded A (Emergency) the target response time is 20 minutes for a vehicle to arrive. If the call is graded B (Rapid), then police will attend as soon as they can, given their other current priorities.

People in Burwell should know that the village has a slightly higher crime rate than normal just now. Be careful! We should all be encouraged with, the steady march forward in DNA profiling of all guilty criminals. This campaign will be complete within the next four years.

`CAMBRIDGE HEATH TOWN AT SIX MILE BOTTOM' steps up into the spotlight. All of us interested in the possibility of a new settlement in. our part of Cambridgeshire will not be surprised at the sudden arrival of the Cambridge Heath proposal within a day of the closure of consultations for the first stage of the new Cambridgeshire Structure Flan.

The first thing to say is that the tuning was very poor. No time, for locals to voice an early opinion was tactless. The first thing I checked with the officers at Shire Hall was that anyone who does want to comment on the plan is free to do so now or in the near future. Your views will be taken into account. So I recommended parish councils and individuals who want to write in should do so to Shire Hall for the attention of Mark Vigor in the Planning Department.

There is no heed for panic reaction. The Cambridge Heath proposal. is very detailed for a first presentation, but it has no more status than the other half dozen projects that we have heard about in the last year You may recall there are sites at Waterbeach, Oakington, Gt.. Abington, near Day Drayton, and so on already well documented. This latest one at Six. Mile Bottom just adds to the group.

All the proposals known to the officers will he considered by the Plan Committee over the next months (after the delayed Counter Election on 7th June) and eventually in the, late Autumn a Draft Plan will be presented for consultation over a period well into ;2002. Thus there. is no suggestion that any one site is yet recommended,

For those who want to know the detail, 1 suggest you ask James Quinlan, Forge House, Thriplow, Cambridge SC8 7RA. Telephone 0 1763 2(18226 (E-mail james.eluinlan@ntlworld.com). 1 have a copy if you want to call in and have a quick look.

With house, prices averaging £150.000 in Cambridge and £116.000 in East Cambridgeshire it is self-evident we need more affordable houses for rent. A little of the pressure will be eased by housing association building within the next year at Burwell (on the former Smith site), Swaffham Bulbeck (8 on the Downing Farm land) and Bottisham (14 down Bell road and 4/5 next to the new surgery).

The County Council is considering the problem in relation to the whole Cambridge Area and is being pushed by the Government to build many extra houses of all sizes for sale or rent over the period of the Structure Plan ending in 2016.

The outcry over the Six Mile Bottom proposal is evidence that in general people are not keen to see large new house building projects near to existing villages in our area. The situation does point to the County's problem of. where substantial house building should take place over the next fifteen years. The Structure Plan will not be decided for two years while all the choices are compared along with consideration of where industry, services and infrastructure should go to match the housing needed. We can certainly expect a public inquiry in a year's time. Associated with all this is the Green Belt review and the A14 corridor study. We live in busy times.

Burwell has recently been a hot-spot on crime especially in connection with vehicles stolen or broken into. There has also been signs of violence among unruly young people in Bottisham very recently, so the police are being warned that we still have problems in spite of more resources arriving.

I was very glad to take part in the launch of the local schools' anti-drug policy at end of May in Burwell. As drug misuse and crime go hand-in-hand you can see that the County is trying to prevent crime as well as deal with it more effectively.

It was particularly pleasing to learn that hoax calls made to the Fire & Rescue service have dropped by half in the last five years. Cases of arson are down, by a smaller fraction, over the same period.

As Cambridgeshire rural A roads carry 70% more traffic than the national average, you will understand why this topic comes up at every parish council meeting. The latest attempt to ease drivers' speeds is the pair of self-lighting traffic signs on the A1303 on either side of the Heath Road, Swaffham Bulbeck road. If you are driving at over 60 mph they light up with a warning.

James Fitch

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