A38 Derby Junctions Scheme—Little Eaton Junction
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A38 DERBY JUNCTIONS SCHEME—LITTLE EATON JUNCTION. APPLICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT CONSENT ORDER. WRITTEN REPRESENTATIONS BY BREADSALL PARISH COUNCIL TO THE EXAMINING AUTHORITY Part 1. Selection of the preferred route Breadsall Parish Council believes that the process by which Highways England (HE) and its predecessor the Highways Agency (HA) selected the preferred route for the Little Eaton junction was deeply flawed. As a result, the selection of the preferred route should be completely re-examined before the current Development Consent Order is processed. The selection process for the preferred route is described in Highways England’s own document “A38 Derby Junctions Scheme Assessment Report (PCF Stage 2)” a copy of which is attached. See especially section 5. BPC’s comments below quote paragraph numbers from this report. Much of the same material is contained in the “6.1 Environmental Statement Chapter 3 -Scheme history and assessment of alternatives” submitted by HE as part of the DCO application In highway terms the obvious way to re-design the Little Eaton junction is to route the A38 to the north of the present junction. This is the shortest and most direct route for the A38, and this was indeed the basis for options 1 and 2 originally proposed by the HA in 2002 (See para 5.4.1). In 2003 HA held a public consultation exercise based on revised high-speed versions of options 1 and 2 and a new third option routed to the south of the present junction (See para 5.4.6). In 2004 HA decided “on balance” to support the third option which is the basis of the current scheme. (See Para 5.4.13). HA gave two key reasons for adopting option 3 and abandoning the routes north of the present junction. • A high-speed route north of the present junction would have adverse effects on adjoining property especially the mobile home park. (See Para 5.4.11- 5.4.13) • In the 2003 public consultation exercise option 3 was the most popular. (See Para 5.4.8). In reality HA’s reasoning was deeply flawed It was true that Options 1 and 2 would adversely affect adjoining property but there were potential ways of overcoming these issues and it appears that HA simply abandoned Options 1 and 2 without making any attempt whatsoever to address adverse effects on adjoining property. As late as 2016 HE admitted that they had no record of approaching a single one of the affected tenants or landowners. HE had thus wasted some 13 years during which they could have attempted to overcome issues related to property north of the existing junction. In practice there were several measures which HE could have taken including the following: - • The possibility of relocating the mobile home park could have been explored and indeed the owner of the park stated at the Reference Group meeting on 18 May 2016 that he would co-operate with HE on such a move. (It should be noted that the mobile home park is hardly well placed even under option 3 as it is close to busy roads, a railway line and a former tip). • Individual mobile homes are regularly offered for sale and HE could have acquired some of them on the open market at relatively low cost. • The Little Chef outlet (now Starbucks) closed down during the period that the scheme was on hold and could have been acquired vacant on the open market by HE. • There was land in the vicinity which could have been made available to the garden centre to replace lost parking spaces • HE could have sought co-operation with the local authority in carrying out a comprehensive review and remodelling of the area north of the present junction. • HE claimed to have limited compulsory purchase powers but made no attempt to acquire property by agreement nor to work in co-operation with the local authority which had much wider compulsory purchase powers under section 226 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 Turning to the 2003 public consultation exercise there were two huge flaws with HA’s analysis. 1 A petition against Option 3 submitted by Breadsall Parish Council was counted as a single vote despite being signed by around 330 people of whom 283 were identified as living in Breadsall (See Para 5.4.7). Many residents of Breadsall believed that they had expressed their views through the petition and thus the opinion of Breadsall residents was massively under-represented in HA’s analysis of the public consultation. Quite apart from the statistical approach to the petition the HA’s analysis was again seriously deficient in attributing no significance to the fact that Breadsall residents felt sufficiently strongly to arrange a petition (the only petition noted in the public responses to all three junctions). The receipt of the petition was merely noted and otherwise totally ignored in the decision-making process. 2 At the same time HA’s analysis did give full weight to all other votes, the majority of which were from residents who would experience no physical or visual effects from any version of the Little Eaton Junction and who thus had no direct stake in the outcome. This includes, for example residents of most parts of Allestree and Little Eaton which are (on HE’s own analysis) too distant from the junction to experience any effects. On top of this it is understood that some totally anonymous votes were also counted. It is a sobering thought that, using HA’s analysis, a vote by a resident of, say, Lands End or John o’ Groats would carry equal weight with the combined signatories of the Breadsall petition. (It should be noted that the 2015 public consultation used a similar flawed process under which all votes were counted equally irrespective of the degree to which voters were actually affected by the scheme) HA’s analysis of the 2003 public consultation was thus based mainly on votes from residents who would be totally unaffected by the visual or physical effects of any version of the scheme while at the same time the numerous signatories of the petition from Breadsall were all but ignored although Breadsall clearly was affected directly by the scheme. As such HA’s analysis could not provide a meaningful measure of public opinion. The flaws in HA’s approach, as described above, were absolutely critical in the selection of the preferred scheme because, as admitted in the HE’s Scheme Assessment Report, “there was very little to differentiate between options 8a and 9” (equivalent to options 1 and 3 at the public consultation). See Para 5.4.13. Thus, even a minor change in HA’s analysis of the options could have led to a different outcome. The whole matter was made even worse by HA’s decision not to announce the choice of Option 3 at the time (See Para 5.4.17). Breadsall Parish Council did not therefore become aware of this decision until 2015, that is twelve years after the initial public consultation. Because of this delay Breadsall residents were placed at a considerable disadvantage in being informed suddenly out of the blue that HE was promoting Option 3, leaving much less time to explore and promote alternatives. This caused considerable ill feeling in the village which was aired at a public meeting conducted by the constituency MP. The Parish Council duly formed an Action Group to represent village residents and liaise with HE. The Action Group and local borough council members concentrated first on proposing alternative alignments to the south of the existing junction in accordance with HE’s wish to avoid property acquisitions to the north of the junction. These are described briefly in HE’s scheme assessment report with an option analysis at the end. The most promising alternative was the “southern sweep” which slewed the alignment of the A38 further away from all nearby dwellings. It is understood that this was quite acceptable in highway terms but failed in HE’s option appraisal because part of the alignment lay on top of the existing carriageway and would involve extra expense in installing temporary carriageways to keep the road open during the construction period. The decision to reject the southern sweep therefore involved giving priority to short term cost savings over the adoption of a superior long-term alignment for the A38. When the southern alternatives were rejected the Action Group turned to look again at potential alignments north of the existing junction and put forward two proposals, shown as 2A and 2B in the scheme assessment report, which routed the A38 slightly further north than the original option 2 to minimise the impact on the mobile home park. HE concluded that Options 2A and 2B had “a reasonable fit with the defined essential objectives” but declined to carry out detailed appraisals of these proposals because, according to the scheme assessment report, the garden centre would lose parking spaces and HE lacked compulsory powers to acquire land to provide replacement spaces.(See para 5.4.34). There was in practice a very obvious area of land for replacement parking to the south-west of the garden centre and this, at least in part, was existing highway land which would later become redundant under the scheme. It was quite inexcusable that HE rejected options 2A and 2B so readily with no detailed analysis and not even the slightest attempt to overcome land acquisition issues (e.g. by purchasing land by agreement). The Action Group finally put forward an Option X1 which involved keeping the A38 on its present alignment and replacing the roundabout with a flyover for the A61.