Open letter from council leader

Jan 26 2012 by Andrew Jackson, Buckinghamshire Advertiser

An open letter to all Buckinghamshire residents from Martin Tett, leader of Bucks County Council:

THE announcement by the government to go ahead with HS2 is clearly disappointing if not unexpected. While we may have lost a battle, we are far from losing the campaign and I am determined that we redouble our efforts to stop this ill-conceived project.

Our opponents have tried to stereotype those who oppose HS2 as ‘Chiltern NIMBYs’. I, by contrast, see us as the people who see this proposal for what it is, a vast waste of hard-earned taxpayers’ money combined with environmental vandalism on an almost unprecedented scale.

The business case for HS2, already poor, has become far, far worse. HS2 actually loses the hard-pressed taxpayer 10p for every one of the £33billion spent on it – well below the threshold that the Department for Transport would normally allow for any project.

Despite the attempt to persuade MPs that it is ‘tunnelling under the Chilterns’, only an extra 1.4 miles of extra tunnelling has been added. In addition, HS2 is now in many cases worse for many people living along this route.

The government’s so called extra ‘mitigation’ of a short route change in Amersham and extra tunnelling, has been counter-balanced by reducing the depth of the cutting between Little Missenden and Wendover to only two metres. People along this section are likely to now see and hear the trains even more than before.

The government has ignored the vast response to its own public consultation, which 55,000 people responded to. Compare that to the 7,000 who replied to the public consultation last year on the proposed sale of the national forests, which led to a rapid U-turn.

So what can we do now? Plenty. Your local councils are considering legal action against this scheme. It will be 2013 before a bill is introduced to Parliament for the London to Birmingham section of HS2. This gives us more than a year to spread the key messages that this project represents even more appalling waste of taxpayers’ money than we originally thought. That it will result in environmental damage along its entire route.

We pledge to continue to support the residents of Buckinghamshire.