in the community groups realised for example that Fife, with private partners, already collects methane gas from landfill to heat local housing, while the council was not aware that NHTT had received non-council funding to appoint and train local 'energy champions'. Crispin Hayes, director of NHTT, says the seminars were useful in taking the cycle routes project forward. "There were several people at the council who wanted to move forward on these things. There was a fair bit of negotiation with landowners, some of whom were very intransigent. The council's help with that has been very useful." Hayes says that the fact that the council had a maintenance budget was helpful because NHTT only had access to capital funding at the time. "What enabled this project to happen was for the council to take charge of the maintenance in the long term." Another example of a successful partnership between a council and the community is in north London where a tiny organisation in Muswell Hill teamed up with Haringey council on a 250,000 carbon reduction project. The council worked with Muswell Hill sustainability group (MHSG) on the bid to the mayor of London's low carbon zone fund. The bid built upon the vision of local people to make Muswell Hill a sustainable community and the broader ambition of the council to achieve a 40% CO2 reduction across the whole borough by 2020. The low carbon zone project, which covered more than 800 homes, was used by the council as a