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Bedford & Milton Keynes Waterway - Now A Milton Keynes Council Corporate Priority

Milton Keynes Council has this week agreed its Corporate Plan, which includes support for the delivery of the Bedford & Milton Keynes Waterway (B&MK).

The Council is a founder member of the B&MK Waterway Consortium – the group of local authorities, agencies and community groups which is driving forward the project to create 26km of waterway between the Grand Union Canal at Milton Keynes and the River Great Ouse at Bedford

The Corporate Plan has been developed within the context of a rapidly changing national policy framework. It has been produced against a challenging financial backdrop where the expectation is that all public sector partners need to do more with less, and is shaped by the Council’s comprehensive spending review that determines its budget over four years up to March 2015.

The Corporate Plan sets out how the Council and its partners will work together to achieve their collective ambitions for Milton Keynes and contains priority actions for the short-medium term (2-4 years).

Graham Mabbutt, chairman of the B&MK Waterway Trust, which for more than a decade has been campaigning for the waterway project, hailed the Corporate Plan as a key milestone.

“This represents a great start to a significant year. The Plan’s support for the project complements its other priorities such as encouraging local communities, the voluntary and community sector to become involved in managing community assets, together with opportunities to take part in sport, leisure, cultural activity and volunteering – these are all guiding principles for the Trust.

“The Consortium, which the Trust helped to create, is to be congratulated on its progress. Last year we saw the Waterspace Study jointly published by two other consortium members – Bedford Borough Council and the Environment Agency – who put the waterway at the heart of its strategy. Then later this year we hope to see the creation of a section of waterway through the Marston Vale Innovation Park.

“The waterway is no pipe dream, it is happening,” said Graham.