As previously advertised here the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Minerals and Waste Plan roadshow was in Milton on Thursday afternoon. The key issues affecting Milton seem to be:

• They are assuming that the sewage works, which are now not to be moved, will need to expand on the current site so they are asking that any planning application within a certain distance of the current site only be granted if it won’t affect future development at the works. So if, for example, someone proposed to put houses or a hotel on “Mrs Wilson’s” field opposite Tesco then they would oppose that as whoever ended up living there would then in turn be likely to oppose further development at the works.
• The widening of the A14 means that the developers of that will need a lot of soil which they want to obtain locally. Milton is targeted to produce 200,000m³. No formal proposal has been made yet but officers are suggesting that the best way to do this will be to dig it out of land already designated to be used for land fill i.e. to make the land fill hole deeper before filling it. This probably makes more sense than digging a new hole but it will inevitably increase the life of the land fill site even further into the future.
• The household waste facility at Milton land fill is to be scrapped and replaced with a much sexier partially covered facility. Although no specific site has been found the “area of search” for this is immediately south of the sewage works i.e. off Cowley Road.
• Finally it’s worth mentioning Chesterton sidings, which fall in the parish of Milton for historical reasons. They were previously destined to form part of the new community to be built on the land there along with Cowley Road Park & Ride site and the sewage works. Now in a complete turn around the siding are being designated to be protected by the Plan to provide a means of delivering minerals to Cambridge. However as the sewage works are no longer moving and with the addition of the protected status of the land around it any thought of putting houses on that land is now gone.

So there it is. The biggest change from the previous version of the Plan is the one we already knew about – that the sewage works is no longer going to be re-located. As for the land fill site: it may only have “temporary” permission and be due to be returned to agricultural land one day but that’s now looking even further away than before.