City growth funds new policing tools for Milton Keynes

Image: courtesy of miltonkeynes.co.uk

Milton Keynes City Council is boosting frontline policing with new electric bikes, CCTV and ANPR cameras being provided to Thames Valley Police as part of a £46,000 investment to help keep communities safe.

The new electric bikes will help police officers patrol areas that are harder to reach by car, such as redways (shared-use routes), parks and estates, making it easier for them to respond quickly and be more visible in the community. Additional CCTV and ANPR cameras will support investigations and help deter crime across the city.

The funding comes from contributions collected by the city council from housing developers when homes are built in Milton Keynes. This money is reinvested into local facilities and services, such as the city council putting £15.6m of growth money into cancer and acute care at Milton Keynes University Hospital.

The new bikes and CCTV will be rolled out later this year.

At a recent Future Cities Forum briefing on new towns, Cllr Marland was asked what councils across the UK, on receipt of funding from the UK government, could learn from Milton Keynes on planning?

' You couldn't recreate Milton Keynes now. Ten thousand is an urban extension not a town. In terms of scale, 'new towns' is used as a code to get back to 1945 style building of lots of houses. Modern new towns are not going to be on a big scale. What the new towns could reflect if planned properly - as Milton Keynes was - is the building of strong communities. Facilities were there in Milton Keynes as people moved in, it wasn't a case of delivering a dormitory town. You incentivised people to come rather than sending people there out of inner city slums.

'Milton Keynes was unlike other new towns and acted as magnet. it created its own uniqueness and community as opposed to being a housing extension. It created its own economy and was never meant to be dependent on other cities. We have an ability to flex too. The road system overlapped with the expansion of peoples' ability to buy cars. Can we look at repurposing grid lock now? Crewe was important once, next to the M6 and had lots of land, but it is not important anymore.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves' recent announcement on reviving the Oxford Cambridge Growth Corridor gave a strong focus to road and rail infrastructure. She confirmed funding towards better transport links in the region including funding for East-West Rail, with new services between Oxford and Milton Keynes this year and upgrading the A428 to reduce journey times between Milton Keynes and Cambridge. She also spoke of support for the development of new and expanded communities in the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor and a new East Coast Mainline station in Tempsford, to expand the region’s economy.

Will Gallagher, Director of Strategy for East West Rail commented at the Future Cities Forum briefing:

'We must not forget that the thing that will make the growth corridor successful is the opportunity to combine all of the places in the Arc by connecting them up. We haven't done that yet and it is the only place in the UK to get that level of growth. Once achieved, it will have stronger regional effects exporting regional opportunities but you have to get this corridor right first. It will create journey times of 25 minutes to Cambridge and 45 minutes from Bletchley and Milton Keynes. Cambridge is currently constrained. It creates an opportunity for a place with its own identity and to become another player in the growth corridor.'