European Parliament with a crisis on its hands

08:09 Tuesday 1st September 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: You can call them refugees. You can call them migrants. According to figures from the United Nations, 300,000 people have risked their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe so far this year. Thousands more are attempting to get to the Continent by road, often hidden in lorries. There was a story at the tail end of last week of more than 70 people who died in the back of a lorry trying to get across the Hungarian border. Many of these people are fleeing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. So should we be doing more to help? It’s a question that will certainly be top of the agenda as Members of the European Parliament return to work this week after the summer break. Vicky Ford is the Conservative MEP for the East of England and is based here in Cambridgeshire. Vicky good morning.
VICKY FORD: Yes good morning, and indeed I’m going straight from here off to catch the Eurostar to go there this week. I know this will be top of the agenda when the MEPs get back together, and there also is going to be more meetings of the Home Secretary and her equivalents across Europe next week, and then Prime Ministers. The situation is completely unprecedented in my lifetime. The Syrian crisis means there’s eleven million displaced people in Syria. Three million of them living outside Syria. Many of them desperate to get away from the horror that’s happening in their own countries. So I think we need to have a mixed approach. We need to have compassion for true refugees, true asylum seekers, and help support them with the horror that they’re fleeing. But also we need to have a very firm approach with the economic migrants that we cannot support both. So we need to make sure that where people are not asylum seekers, when they’re not refugees from these desperate situations, that they can be returned quickly and safely. And also a very firm …
DOTTY MCLEOD: But here’s the thing Vicky. Here’s the thing. How do you choose between? How do you tell between? Because in places like Calais at the moment all process has broken down. So what do you do?
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Cambridge Corbyn meeting seeks new venue with greater capacity

07:07 Monday 24th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: A visit by the Labour Leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn planned for tonight has had to be postponed. Police were concerned about the number of people who would be attending the event at Great St Mary’s Church. Almost 2,000 people had expressed an interest in turning up, and reports over the weekend suggested the event was being moved to Parker’s Piece. It had been billed as an opportunity for people to hear Jeremy put forward his case for Labour Leader, and the chance for them to get answers to questions for him. It’s understood that the number of rejected applications from people hoping to vote in the contest has risen to around 3,000. .. With me now our Political Correspondent Paul Rowley. What do you make then Paul of this cancellation of the event in Cambridge?
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Final approval for Cambridge North Station

17:10 Wednesday 19th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

CHRIS MANN: Plans by Network Rail for a new station in North Cambridge finally got the go-ahead. It means the new station will be built on land at Chesterton Sidings, and Network Rail say work will begin in the autumn. Let’s bring in councillor Aidan Van de Weyer, who sits on the Joint Development Control Committee. This involves the County Council, the City Council and his own South Cambs. Aidan, afternoon.
AIDAN VAN DE WEYER: Good afternoon.
CHRIS MANN: So you’ve approved Network Rail’s plans.
AIDAN VAN DE WEYER: We did indeed. Yes. I was very happy to do so. It’s excellent.
CHRIS MANN: Excellent because why?
AIDAN VAN DE WEYER: Because it’s a hugely significant bit of infrastructure that’s going to transform the whole of this part of Cambridge and beyond to be honest. Because it provides excellent links from North Cambridge to the villages, to London. It’s a key part of the Northstowe development, because the Guided Bus connects directly to the station, to the door of the station. And it’s just next to the Science Park, St John’s, the Business Park, with very good links to them.
CHRIS MANN: What some people are concerned about is OK, we need an extra train station and even more public transport for people. But it’s the parking. It’s the access, and what it’s going to do to the roads around it. Because you know what already happens at existing stations like both Peterborough and Cambridge. So what’s your answer to that?
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Open Cambridge 2015

17:50 Friday 14th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

CHRIS MANN: Let’s talk about Open Cambridge. A very special weekend, 11th to 13th September Cambridge opens its doors. Let’s find out more now from the team, because they’re going to be opening the website for bookings on Monday, so we need to arm you in advance. And to tell us all about it from the team at Open Cambridge let’s welcome Ellen Thornton to tell us what it’s all about.
ELLEN THORNTON: Open Cambridge is a three day event celebrating the heritage of Cambridge, looking at places that are usually closed to the public, or perhaps charge admission, or even just places that people wouldn’t consider exploring. It’s a part of the Heritage Open Day scheme, which is a national project aimed to do just that.
CHRIS MANN: And it’s got bigger year after year. It started off as a small idea, it might be nice to let people have a peek at this and that. And it’s just proved hugely popular, hasn’t it?
ELLEN THORNTON: Yes. We’re in our eighth year now, and this year we have over eighty free events. We programmed the events just based on our own curiosity. So walking round the city, looking at things that we think might be intriguing, going on responses that we get year on year from previous participants, what they would quite like to explore. And we’re incredibly fortunate that Cambridge is just full to the brim with places that are interesting and intriguing.
CHRIS MANN: And I think it shows that the University and other places are responding to the idea that they should open their doors. They shouldn’t just be these cloistered places only for the select few. That actually it’s a good thing to let people see, because some of it is quite magnificent.
ELLEN THORNTON: Absolutely. Yes. And as I said there’s eighty events this year, and many of them haven’t featured in previous years. Some of them have, and have had a bit of a break and returned. And the nice thing about the programme is that as you said it looks at the University, but also the city, and it explores the history of both, and shares some of the incredible things that they have behind doors, and also things that are open to the public, but people don’t necessarily know that they can explore usually.
CHRIS MANN: OK. Now in previous years quite often they’ve sold out, or the tickets have gone very quickly. So the reason we’re talking today is that they’re available from ten o’clock on Monday morning.
ELLEN THORNTON: Yes they are.
CHRIS MANN: On the website. But before we give the details of that, let’s just look at some of the highlights. What kind of places are available?
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Sarah O’Connor on the Chilcot Inquiry

17:22 Thursday 13th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

CHRIS MANN: Families of British soldiers who were killed in Iraq have threatened legal action unless the official report into the war is published by the end of the year. The findings were meant to be released four years ago, but the Chairman Sir John Chilcot said he’s waiting for responses from some of the people likely to be criticised. Relatives including a Cambridgeshire woman I’ll be talking to in just a moment have given Sir John two weeks to set a date for releasing the report. With more details the BBC’s Ben Geoghegan.
BEN GEOGHEGAN: What they’re saying is that this whole process has taken far too long, and that in effect Sir John Chilcot has acted unlawfully by allowing it to drag on for so long. There’s a process called Maxwellization that’s at the centre of all of these delays, and that’s where people who may be criticised in the final report are given advanced warning of what may be said about them, and they’re given an opportunity to respond to that. And as many as 150 witnesses during this process may end up being criticised. And so what has taken so long is the process of telling them what the criticism about them is, and then allowing them to come back. But the families are complaining that’s gone on too long, there is no legal justification for allowing that to happen, and that is what their challenging. They do want the report published by the end of the year, and I think they have been spurred on to some extent by the Prime Minister himself, who in a letter in June written to Sir John said that we the public and everyone else, the families of British soldiers, soldiers who servd in Iraq, we are all fast losing patience.
CHRIS MANN: Ben Geoghegan with that background report. Let’s bring in a Cambridgeshire woman who is at the forefront of this threatened legal action. Sarah O’Connor lost her brother in Iraq ten years ago. Ten years or more that you’ve been waiting for answers, answers to what questions Sarah?
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Council careless with personal information

07:40 Tuesday 11th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: A Freeedom of Information request by the privacy group Big Brother Watch has revealed there were more than 4,000 data breaches by councils between 2011 and 2014. Around 400 of those breaches involved data being lost or stolen. Peterborough City Council recorded the fourth highest number of data breaches for a local authority with 160 incidents. Cambridgeshire County Council recorded 34. Dan Nesbitt is Research Director at Big Brother Watch. So Dan, what have you been counting up? What counts as a data breach?
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Young lifeblood wanted in Peterborough

09:28 Monday 10th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridge

PAUL STAINTON: Let’s bring in Steve Bowyer from Opportunity Peterborough, influential of course in attracting many many of the top restaurants to Peterborough in particular. Steve, it’s a fair point though isn’t it, that these thousands of people that were roaming the streets of Peterborough back in the ’80s, ’70s, ’90s, spending all that money, are we missing out?
STEVE BOWYER: Morning Paul. I don’t think so. I think there’s a really good point there about how city centres have evolved, and that mix and diversity of offer. And I think it is about providing that choice. I think there’s a lot of people been talking about how things are cyclical, and you know we may see nightclubs coming back again. But I think actually things move on, so now we have good music venues, we have good restaurants. Hopefully in Peterborough we’re going to see cinemas soon. The point your last speaker made about university and students is absolutely vital for the city, because that is a young lifeblood.
PAUL STAINTON: How close are we to getting that?
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Public health budget cuts – failing council seeks protection

10:34 Tuesday 4th August 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

CHARLIE THOMPSON: Producer Ben is in the studios holding a piece of paper. That can mean only one thing.
BENOIT STEVENSON: It certainly can. We have a statement to read out. And this is in regard to the public health story we’ve been discussing. So this is proposals from the Conservative Government. They would like to slash the public health budgets for local authorities across the board, across the UK, by 6.2%. It’s just a proposal at the moment. They’re asking councils to contribute their thoughts to this proposal. In total, we’ve worked out that that will mean £2.2 million less is going to be spent in Cambridgeshire. That’s across Cambridgeshire County Council (and) Peterborough City Council. So we’ve made contact with Peterborough City Council who as well from I think the Department of Health or Public Health England had given a report saying that it was struggling in certain indicators. Fifteen out of thirty two indicators they were below the English average. And a statement from Peterborough City Council today, .. Continue reading “Public health budget cuts – failing council seeks protection”