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How the new City Deal interim chief executive's experience in Camden could help in Cambridge




Rachel Stopard Interim Chief Executive to lead City Deal. Picture: Keith Heppell
Rachel Stopard Interim Chief Executive to lead City Deal. Picture: Keith Heppell

Although the City Deal has £100 million to spend before 2020, it spent a relatively conservative £6million last year.

However, everything is set to step up a gear as ‘Tranche 1’ schemes start to be delivered. This year the spend will be around £20million.

And because feedback so far has suggested that ‘Tranche 2’, the next £200million of funding, is on the way to being secured, efforts are beginning to be made to get the schemes from both tranches lined up for delivery.

City Deal programme director Tanya Sheridan said: “Over the next year or two, we have to invest in that alignment to then bring about likely savings going forward as the Combined Authority and the City Deal and the Local Enterprise Partnership find some overlaps.

“For the next period we’ll spend in less of an upward curve. If we have the schemes up and ready then we can get on with doing it.

“It’s going to be a busy year, very exciting as well.”

Interim chief executive Rachel Stopard joins the City Deal from Camden London Borough Council, where she was deputy chief executive. A transport director is being appointed and the Local Enterprise Partnership is appointing a City Deal executive.

Ms Stopard told the Cambridge Independent she’s keen to start building public confidence as City Deal heads into this ‘implementation phase’.

“It’s important that we can take communities with us,” she said. “This is about how Cambridge will be in the future and clearly a lot of people want to keep it as it is, but it’s growing and it’s a fantastic place to do business and to live and work.

“I want to try to work with the executive board to make sure we’re out there building that confidence with communities that says we do have a plan. We’re not going to please everybody all the time, but we’re looking at it in the round and seeing about delivering jobs and housing, making sure that it connects and that people can move about in a sustainable way.”

As well as Camden, Ms Stopard has worked at councils in Suffolk, Essex and Hertfordshire, where she lives.

She said: “I know people think that London is very different, but Camden, with a population of 230,000, is not hugely different. There’s a lot of people who want to move about in Camden and there’s a lot of pressure on space, so actually there’s a very common agenda.

“Camden was one of the boroughs that had the biggest increase in cycling in London and has been transport borough of the year for about five of the nine years that I was in charge there.

“Innovating in the way people move around a place, where there are lots of different pressures and lots of different needs, is absolutely the experience that I’ll be drawing on in Cambridge.”

Some of the work that she’s led planning and transport teams on includes the regeneration of King’s Cross and taking traffic out of Tottenham Court Road.

“I’m used to doing controversial things, but actually for the right reasons, much of which, particularly in London, was about air quality and making sure that people can walk and cycle,” she said.

“For me it’s always about partnership working. So King’s Cross is a success because the local authority worked really well with an excellent developer who had a vision for the place that said it’s not actually all about office blocks.

“The vision is to retain what’s precious about Cambridge, but at the same time recognise that growth is coming and that we manage that in a way that is thoughtful, preserves what’s best but provides for people to live here and work here as well.

“Greater Cambridge is a wonderful place and sometimes in all of these discussions you can lose sense of that. But that’s why people care about it. This is a massive opportunity and we want to get it right.”



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