Anglian Water pulls back from routine opposition to planning applications

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

Intervention from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed by the Minister for Water Emma Hardy MP

Credit to Chris Patmore on LI here for picking this up – this really should have gone out as an official government announcement.

“Anglian Water will take a presumptively supportive approach…”

Above – Minister Emma Hardy MP confirms that Anglian Water will no longer routinely object to large planning applications ***where there is clear Local Planning Authority support*** and funding in future water investment periods.

Reading between the lines that won’t mean a free-for-all and lots of speculative planning applications being thrown up. The existing local plans will still apply – and presumably the draft emerging local plan (plus whatever additional sites the Cambridge Development Corporation choose to add).

Above – a snapshot of the policies map which I linked to in this earlier blogpost

“Don’t we have a climate emergency? And we’re at the end of a four day heatwave.”

Above – we have incoming. Lightning flashes and lights being picked up on https://www.lightningmaps.org/

We underestimate the retrofitting task ahead at our peril

So I wrote last summer.

This was part of some filming and content creation I did for Cambridge Carbon Footprint and friends, filming this video of their pilot retrofit off Coleridge Road in Cambridge.

The scale of the works was sobering, and the thought that every interwar semi-detached house in the city (and also the country) would need this level of work to get it up to similar sustainability standards was mind-numbing. It was then that it really hit home that our current economic systems and structures will not be able to meet the requirements. But then just as the UK was coming out of the Great Depression, the choice of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain’s Governments to limit government spending given the deteriorating international situation was something that Conservative MPs were so furious with that they kicked out the latter as Prime Minister – the transcripts of ‘The Norway Debate’ over 07/08 May 1940 demonstrating their fury.

But this isn’t WWII

In the case of Labour we’re not dealing with wars, but rather a Prime Minister with a very large majority exacerbated by a unique political crisis within his opponents, whose support imploded at the local elections a few weeks ago. (Neville Chamberlain inherited Stanley Baldwin’s monster majority of 1935). The furious criticism from those MPs who had been out and about campaigning for the local elections inevitably resulted in the ambitious now former Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP resigning, tearing into the Prime Minister as he went.

Hence the farcical situation of the Mayor of Greater Manchester standing as Labour’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election in Wigan (see the candidates here) – a friendly Labour MP standing down to make way for him in order that he can contest a future leadership election. This following Labour’s National Executive Committee blocking Mr Burnham’s nominiation in the Gorton and Denton by-election which resulted in The Green Party winning that seat that various talking-heads said could have been won for Labour by Mr Burnham had he been allowed to stand. The combination of new Green MP Hannah Spencer‘s very effective online *and* offline campaigns and communication as a new MP must have helped amplify the Green Party’s profile in the broadcast media, thus helping them reach their highest ever total number of councillors elected in England – along with control of Hackney, Islington, and Lewisham in London, and Norwich & Hastings outside of it (all former Labour strongholds).

Which is why if we have a long and very hot summer full of heatwaves like the present one, climate and retrofitting the built environment may become much more prominent issues for the Government to deal with.

What does this mean locally? Have a look at Transition Cambridge here to see how our city and county are trying to respond in the absence of something more urgent from Westminster.

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: