Dan Roberts, a housing advisor at Cambridge City Council, has received the prestigious Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) Distance Learning Student of the Year award.

This has been awarded to Dan, who lives in Waterbeach near Cambridge, for outstanding performance in studying for the Postgraduate Diploma in Housing.

He was presented with a medal and a cheque for £200 by the Housing Minister Margaret Beckett at the CIH Presidential Dinner at the Natural History Museum in London.

Dan enrolled on a two-year distance learning programme, run on behalf of CIH, through the De Montfort University in Leicester in order to develop his housing knowledge further. Dan had graduated in 1998 in development studies and first entered housing in 2003 as a customer services assistant in one of Cambridge City Council’s area housing offices before moving into housing allocations with the local authority.

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Dan said: "This is an exciting time to be in housing and my aim is to put the skills I have learned on the Postgraduate Diploma course towards meeting the challenges that are ahead. I found the regeneration modules particularly interesting because we looked at examples where regeneration had made a real difference to the lives of people in excluded communities.

"I'm really pleased to have won the award, especially telling family and friends all about it. But a lot of the credit should go to my wife, Mel and my colleagues at Cambridge City Council for their advice and support while I was doing the course."

(CD/JM)