Mayor reveals vision of high quality University of Peterborough

James Palmer has been in office for nearly 12 months but it is the next 12 years he is focused on.

The date of 2030 is important for the mayor as it is the year the University of Peterborough reaches its capacity of 12,500 students and the year he has earmarked for Peterborough and Cambridgeshire to become a “leading place in the world to live.”

The two themes are not mutually exclusive as the university is central to Mayor Palmer’s vision of a highly-skilled Peterborough workforce ready to thrive in a post-Brexit landscape.

In an interview with the Peterborough Telegraph Mayor Palmer, who heads the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, said: “The university is very important. It’s rare you get the chance to create something from scratch and I’m very, very lucky.

“My vision is that it’s a high quality university feeding the economy of the area. It needs to concentrate on engineering, on teacher training, on science and on agri-tech.

“And the focus is on being a centre of excellence in those four key areas. It doesn’t try to get into a bidding war to become a university just to attract everybody here really quickly.

“It grows slowly and at high quality. Those are the things that will help lift the Peterborough economy.

“My job is to sell our county, to sell us internationally as a place to do business.

“Those businesses that come here - and they will, and they are - they need a workforce that’s educated to the level that’s needed for them.

“This is about creating a society where everybody gets an opportunity. Those people who live in Peterborough, who perhaps can’t afford to go to university now, get that chance, and those people who live here, who don’t want to go to university, also get the chance through apprenticeship schemes.”

The combined authority was created around a year ago as a result of the Government agreeing a devolution deal with the county, city and district councils in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

The trade off for Peterborough City Council agreeing to the deal was the promise of a fully-fledged university, which is now due to open in September 2022 on the Embankment.

And to make sure the new wave of students have somewhere to learn, last week the combined authority promised £9.7 million for interim teaching and student facilities.

Plans for accommodation will come later on.

Looking ahead to 2030 and what Peterborough and Cambridgeshire will look like, Mayor Palmer said his ambitions include “high-quality transport, high-quality housing and allowing people to work as closely as possible to where they live.”

He added: “We’re trying to make sure when we do build new towns or villages, or add to existing settlements, that what’s put there is not just another set of houses. It’s community building.

“You only have to look at the example of this city of around 20,000 people 40-50 years ago. It was designated new town status and they put the infrastructure in and created a sense of place around a beautiful country park in Ferry Meadows and high quality infrastructure.

“We’ve forgotten how to do that as a nation. It’s a case of looking what’s been done in the past, taking advantage of, and understanding, what was done here to create that on a wider scale across the entirety of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.”