A former reporter with the Cambs Times and Wisbech Standard, has scooped a hat-trick of awards for her work at The Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW).

Catherine Feast, whose parents Barry and Margaret live in Chatteris, leads PFEW as its head of communications, where she has been for four years.

The organisation is a staff association for police officers which lobbies and influences government on conditions of service of officers.

At the national 2018 CorpComms Awards her team won best integrated campaign for ‘Protect the Protectors’.

This is a campaign which exposed the unacceptably high number of assaults against the emergency services which successfully lobbied MPs to change the law enabling magistrates to double the maximum sentence.

Catherine, 47, who studied at Cromwell Community College, said: “I loved working in newspapers and it gave me a good grounding for my career in PR.

“Policing is something that I have always had an interest in and for one of our campaigns to have led to a change in the law is fantastic and to be recognised by peers in the industry is the icing on the cake. I am really chuffed.”

Judges said: “This was a very strong campaign – impactful and emotive – that achieved good results.”

A day later PFEW also won gold for ‘The Reality of Policing’ at the regional PRide Awards, run by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) for the South of England.

The video, told in a fly-on-the-wall style, powerfully and emotively illustrated the daily challenges police officers face. It was subsequently shared over a million times on social media, thanks in part to the @UKCopHumour promoting the video to its 57,300 strong Twitter followers.

The awards trio was completed with gold for Outstanding In-House Public Relations Team.

The CIPR judges said the entry for team award “impressed the judges on several fronts” and “the campaign ‘Protect the Protectors’ is especially to be commended as it resulted in important legislative change.”

For the video they said: “This was a powerful campaign that used a one-off opportunity to significantly raise awareness of the key issues in policing. This is a worthy winner, deserving of high praise.”