Cambridge City Councillor for Petersfield and Executive Councillor for Planning, Building Control, and Infrastructure
We opened the food hub during May and it has been running successfully with many local volunteers turning out each week, and supplies of food from shops, restaurants and individual donations.
Please get in touch at [email protected] if you can help
And if you want to know what it’s like, local filmmaker Gabriela Fuzi has made this:
The food hub is open from noon-3pm on Tuesday and Friday in Trumpington Pavilion, and is accessible to everyone. If you need help, we’re there for you.
This is an enormously difficult time for so many people and we are all struggling in different ways as we cope with the pressures of being unable to live and work as normal as we deal with Covid-19.
As a City Councillor and member of the executive I’m spending a lot of time working to ensure that the council does everything it can. Many of our staff are working from home, and doing a great job, while some, like refuse collectors and street cleaners, have had to adapt their working practices in order to stay safe. Children’s parks are closed and we have limited car parks for use by essential workers.
The City Council has details of where to ask for help
If you live in Trumpington then we have set up the Trumpington.info network and there are details of local resources there.
And of course you can always contact me directly as your local councillor or for issues around planning and open spaces.
We all need to work together to get through this and I want to thank everyone for all they are doing. Stay safe.
Please note that my brief has now changed and as of June 2021 I am Executive Councillor for Planning Policy and Transport, having covered Streets and Open Spaces 2018-2019 and Planning Policy and Open Spaces 2019-2021
I’ve worked with Cambridge Sustainable Food and know how awful food poverty is. A Community Fridge provides fresh food which is coming up to or just past its sell by date, but not its use by date. The food is donated by local businesses and is free for anyone who needs it.
There are three Community Fridges currently running in Cambridge, in Abbey, Arbury and East Chesterton. I have volunteered at the one in Abbey and I can see how valuable they are to so many people so I want to set one up in Trumpington, here in the south of the city.
I’m proposing to run the fridge on Tuesdays and Fridays 11am – 1pm, and am seeking volunteers to help, especially anyone with food hygiene training.
Please contact me via [email protected] if interested. Everyone is welcome and training will be available.
updated February 29
There has been a lot of publicity recently around the placing of nets over more than 20 trees at the Whittle Laboratory on JJ Thomson Avenue. They have been placed there by Cambridge University with the aim of discouraging birds from nesting during the planning process.
I deplore this use of netting to cover trees and and have never seen netting used this way before in Cambridge.
I really do not understand the reasoning behind this – the university normally takes long, considered views on their investments and has done so for over 800 years. But in this case, there seems to be an urgency that has resulted in harm to the landscaping and danger to the wildlife.
These trees seem to have no ivy growing on them, no scrubs around them, and the canopies are open so it would seem that the risk of birds nesting was low. This now has to be weighed against the risk of birds being injured by the nets themselves.
I explored what action the Council could take in regard to the netting and it is clear that we cannot. The trees are privately owned and not protected. Even if they were protected, currently it is not a criminal offence to use netting on trees or hedges.
While our options are limited, I requested a meeting with the University and expressed my grave concerns by email and in a number of phone conversations. I wanted to understand why the University thought that netting trees was an acceptable way forward and if they can consider alternatives.
Now the university has acknowledged its mistake and agreed to remove all of the netting. In a tweet they said: We are removing the netting over trees in West Cambridge that have upset people. The decision to use nets to discourage nesting birds ahead of building works was wrong and we unreservedly apologise.
I’m pleased that they have realised that nets are not the way to deal with this issue, and hope that we can continue to discuss how best to resolve this issue in the longer term.
Last year I was given the honour of sounding the starting horn of the Cambridge half marathon, but I won’t be able to do that this year, because I’ll be somewhere in the line getting ready to run!
It’s an exciting prospect, and I’ve been enjoying my training, and like many of the other runners, I’m hoping to raise money for a cause I think is important.
For this marathon I’ve chosen to support Cambridge Hedgehogs, a local charity that was formed last year. I got to know the three directors of Cambridge Hedgehogs after the council launched its hedgehog awareness campaign last year, and I was impressed by their concern for the plight of these wonderful small mammals, and the help they offer to sick or injured hedgehogs.
They also support hedgehog mapping through The Big Hedgehog Map to help get a better idea of how many hedgehogs we actually have in Cambridge. Nationally the population has declined 97% since 1945, so it’s very important information to gather.
Continue reading “Running with Hedgehogs”Last year I organised a meeting of experts on water management and representatives from water companies and government agencies to discuss the issues that we face here in Cambridge such as low water flows in the chalk springs around Cambridge, especially at the Nine Wells nature reserve, and the potential impact on local biodiversity.
I believe that we are facing a potential ecological disaster if we do not work to ensure that the chalk streams and other tributaries of the Cam are properly managed and have sufficient water flowing through them, and I wanted to hear from experts about the current problems and what we might do.
We have now published the report of the event, and I hope that it will help as we try to decide what measures to take to address this serious issue.
You can download it here as a PDF. If you would like it in another format, please email me at [email protected].
It was a real pleasure to listen to students who had marched from Shire Hall to the Guildhall yesterday to highlight the need for more trees and to deal with our water crisis as part of an event organised by Cambridge Schools Eco Council, and I’m pleased that it got coverage in the local press.
While I did say to the students that we wanted their help planting trees, it’s not that we won’t be putting the. on council land- we just don’t have *enough* council land. And I think that comparing Cambridge to the whole of Essex is a little misleading…
I’m looking forward to the forum on the water crisis that I’ve convened for next month. Although the report says I’m doing this as part of my work as Executive Councillor for Planning Policy and Open Spaces this isn’t the case- it’s just something I’m doing as a local councillor. The report will be available for the council and everyone else to use to help decide what we can do to deal with this important issue, but it’s not a formal City Council document.
The article is on the Cambridge Independent website.
Please note that my brief has now changed and as of June 2021 I am Executive Councillor for Planning Policy and Transport, having covered Streets and Open Spaces 2018-2019 and Planning Policy and Open Spaces 2019-2021
It was a real delight to spend time today at the Queen Edith’s Share Fair and Community Environment (Skip) Day on Wulfstan Way, organised by the Queen Edith’s Community Forum with support from City Council’s Streets and Open Spaces team. I was reminded about the event by Sam Davies, the chair of QECF, who seemed busy helping out at every stall.
There was so much going on, with ‘bring and take’ stalls, a skip for larger items that had no further use (though we hope most of the material will be recycled), dog chipping, and stalls from local groups.
The day was a great example of what a community can do when they work together, and all of the organisers deserve massive thanks for their efforts. As well as helping people get rid of household items they no longer need, these sorts of events encourage people to get to know their neighbours and bring communities together.
The City Council’s City Homes team have a regular programme offering community environment days (or ‘skip days’) so do get in touch if you’d like to find out how you could arrange something for your community
See https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/community-environment-days for more details –
We have them planned for
21 September: Ashfield Road – organised by our Streets and Open Spaces team
28 September: King’s Hedges (meet at The Ship)
5 October: Bliss Way and Tenby Close – organised by our Streets and Open Spaces team
12 October: Ditton Fields
19 October: Byron Square – organised by our Streets and Open Spaces team
6 November: Whitehill Road – organised by our Streets and Open Spaces team
In May this year Cambridge City Council declared a biodiversity emergency and pledged:
to provide leadership and to ensure that we work with all organisational departments, partners and our communities to reverse the decline in biodiversity and deliver measurable biodiversity net gain within Cambridge and the wider region.
I was proud to propose the motion, and as I introduced it this is what I said:
I’d like to stand before you and say how pleased I am that Cambridge City Council is leading the way in acknowledging the significance of species collapse, and pledging action, but I can’t, because I fear that even this will be too little, too late.
I hope I’m wrong, and that what we do today makes a contribution to turning us away from the ecological and agricultural disaster that faces us
As I cycled into the Guildhall this morning I went down Porson Road and noticed the large yellow pipes standing ready to be laid along the road. Yellow is the colour used for gas, and although I was pleased to see that Trumpington’s vital infrastructure is being properly maintained, I also wondered how long we will want to keep providing gas to people’s homes when we are planning to becoming a zero carbon economy by 2030.
We all know that if we are to avoid dangerous levels of global warming then we need to change many of our current practices and assumptions, especially here where so much of our daily life and industry rely on oil, coal and gas. However we don’t seem to reflect on what that means – and it will mean not piping gas to everyone to burn, however convenient it may be.
