Campaigning for the countryside  - its landscape, rural communities, agriculture, and wildlife

New Chairman for the Branch

Michael Monk, has taken over as Chairman of the branch He succeeds Mike Bratby who has stepped down after more than eight years.

Michael has lived and worked in Cambridgeshire since the mid 1960s, a period which has seen massive expansion of many of the county’s towns and villages. His planning career has witnessed Peterborough double in size to become a "new town", also the rise in Hi-tech industries and development which became known as the Cambridge Phenomenon.  He sees many new challenges ahead for CPRE, not least the Coalition Government’s new Localism Bill. He also identifies several challenges at a local level:

1. Cambridge Airport, once scheduled for 12,500 houses is no longer available.
2. The new owners of Alconbury Airfield are revising their aspirations for this, the largest brownfield site in Cambridgeshire, to create a major mixed development rather than the previous proposal for warehouses and a freight interchange.
3. The massive reduction in public spending which will affect the provision of vital infrastructure, not least the cancelling of the A14 improvements.

See here for press release