09:53 Friday 21st February 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
[A]NDIE HARPER: Richard’s in Peterborough. Good morning Richard. What do you make of all of this? You live in the city, and Stewart Jackson was saying earlier it’s been dragged through the mud really. Just after the Dennehy case and this story and yet most people are decent. But what do you make of it?
RICHARD FROM PETERBOROUGH: Well that’s how it occurs to me. The Dennehy case is going to be wound up next week or the week after, when she and her accomplices will be sentenced. And I was just wondering, is it just coincidental that two such cases making Peterborough infamous have occurred so close to each other. You hear hearsay stories that Peterborough is used as a dump by other cities to get rid of their unwanted. And we can’t get a definitive answer on this. Maybe perhaps you can, preferably from the Chief Executive Gillian Beasley.
ANDIE HARPER: So are you making a link then between the Dennehy case, which after all she is from this country. Her victims, with one exception ..
RICHARD FROM PETERBOROUGH: Not from Peterborough.
ANDIE HARPER: No I take your point, not from Peterborough. But you are making a link between that case, if you like home-grown criminals, and people coming in from the Czech Republic or wherever. You think Peterborough is being used as a dumping ground, not just people from abroad, but from this country?
RICHARD FROM PETERBOROUGH: Precisely. I have heard tales of hearsay again that Cambridge .. dossers and beggars and unemployed of Cambridge are invited or leaned on to go to Peterborough. Can we please have an answer from Peterborough Council. Is this the case?
ANDIE HARPER: But people from this country are free to move wherever they want to. And so wherever Dennehy came from ..
RICHARD FROM PETERBOROUGH: But why is it so many of them seem to come to Peterborough?
ANDIE HARPER: Well that is I suppose a good question. So you feel that they are being attracted to the city, or sent to the city? What attracts them to the city then?
RICHARD FROM PETERBOROUGH: Well that’s the question I’d like Gillian Beasley preferably to answer. Does Peterborough agree to take all comers, whatever their histories, whatever their problems? Joanna Dennehy for instance, she was an unemployed unmarried mother who had abandoned her children. She already had drug and drink problems. And yet she winds up in a .. presumably a council property in Orton Goldhay Peterborough. How did she wind up there from Harpenden
ANDIE HARPER: Richard, we will try to find out for you.
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