Public Session

Home , Finmere, Mixbury, Newton Purcell, Thorpe Mandeville

PUBLIC SESSION

MINUTES OF ORAL EVIDENCE

taken before

HIGH SPEED RAIL COMMITTEE

On the

HIGH SPEED RAIL (LONDON – WEST MIDLANDS) BILL

Monday, 23 February 2015 (Afternoon)

In Committee Room 5

PRESENT:

Mr Robert Syms (Chair) Sir Peter Bottomley Mr Henry Bellingham Ian Mearns Yasmin Qureshi ______

IN ATTENDANCE:

Mr Timothy Mould, QC, Lead Counsel, Department for Transport Ms Jacqueline Lean, Counsel, Department for Transport Miss Melissa Murphy (for Cherwell District Council)

Witnesses:

Mr Gordon Raitt and Mrs Harriet Raitt Mr Raymond Brunton, Mixbury Parish Meeting Mr David Trott, International Teams Director, British Dressage Mr Mike Kerford-Byrnes, Finmere Parish Council Mr Patrick Clarke Mr Bernie Douglas Mr Alec Howard

Mr Peter Miller, Head of Environment and Planning, HS2 Ltd

______

IN PUBLIC SESSION

INDEX

Subject Page

Mr and Mrs Raitt Introduction by Mr Mould 3 Submissions from Mr Raitt 3 Submissions from Mr Mould 14

Cherwell District Council Submissions from Miss Murphy 19 Submissions from Mr Mould 20

Mixbury Parish Meeting Introduction from Mr Mould 22 Submissions from Mr Brunton 22 Mr Trott, examined by Mr Brunton 31 Mr Trott, cross-examined by Mr Mould 34 Closing submissions from Mr Brunton 38 Mr Miller, examined by Mr Mould 39 Mr Miller, cross-examined by Mr Brunton 45

Finmere Parish Council Submissions from Cllr Kerford-Byrnes 49 Submissions from Mr Mould 58 Closing submissions from Cllr Kerford-Byrnes 61

Newton Purcell Parish Meeting and Mr Patrick Clarke Submissions from Mr Clarke 64 Mr Miller, examined by Mr Mould 78 Mr Miller, cross-examined by Mr Clarke 87 Closing submissions from Mr Clarke 88

Mr Bernie Douglas Submissions from Mr Douglas 89 Submissions from Ms Lean 94

Mr Alec Howard Submissions from Mr Howard 97 Mr Miller, examined by Ms Lean 105

(At 14.00)

1. CHAIR: Order, order. Welcome and good afternoon to the HS2 Select Committee. This week we hear from various petitioners from the Midlands, Northants and Oxfordshire. We begin with Mr and Mrs Raitt this afternoon.

Mr and Mrs Raitt

2. CHAIR: Welcome. Can we have up on the map where Mr and Mrs Raitt are?

3. MR MOULD (DfT): Mr and Mrs Raitt live in Lower Thorpe. Their property is being shown on the ordnance sheet. If we go to the next page we can see their property shown in a more local basis. Their property is number 1, Manor Cottages, Banbury Lane, Lower Thorpe. They are situated, I think, about 100 metres from the railway line and they fall within the rural support zone.

4. CHAIR: Thank you. Mr Raitt?

5. MR RAITT: Slide number one, please. That is the introduction that we have more or less heard from Mr Mould. I would like to say first of all on slide one that you might remember a petition by Maurice Cole, who was the parish councillor for Thorpe Mandeville. He did touch on a couple of topics involving transport and the freight issues down Banbury Lane. So, I won’t refer to that in detail.

6. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is this where the railway comes thundering past you and you are one of three or four –

7. MR RAITT: Absolutely. We have the numbers and figures to show you. Okay, so on the second slide we thought we would give you a brief overview of what we intend to talk about today. First is the compensation that we feel we need for the situation we are. In the presentation we will show to what degree HS2 will affect us during construction and operation and we will plead that we are a special case rather than just a run of the mill property. I should like to say at this stage as well that over the past years we have engaged with HS2 by having some meetings at our property, by email and we have had letters and visits. We have had a communication following your visit to the area where you had a look around, and we have also had quite a few communications through Andrea Leadsom, our local MP. She supports our case very

much. Also, South Northamptonshire Council have the same attitude towards us.

8. Could we go to slide three, please? This is the map that Mr Mould showed. I have highlighted our property there with the red arrow. As you can see, it is not exactly parallel to the line so the distance, 100 metres, maybe from the middle of the house but at the bottom of the garden where the cursor is it is less than that; we think 80 to 85 metres. What this picture does show is the rural and tranquil setting that we are in – we are half a mile from the nearest village. This is a little hamlet. It was a very tight community until HS2 appeared upon the scene and that has been one of the major changes for us.

9. The pink line, as I am sure you already know, is the viaduct area. That is 190 metres to 200 metres long, so it is quite a considerable length. If we could look at the two properties that the cursor is at, this one and the one slightly to the left, these are the two properties that are going to be demolished out of the hamlet, so that already brings the community down from five properties to three. The other two properties – one of each side of us – have already been purchased by HS2 under the EHS. So, we are the only owners of a freehold property still left in the area.

10. The next slide, please. This is again similar to one of the HS2 slides. We have is coloured in orange the properties that will be acquired by HS2 either under compulsory purchase or under EHS. The large area there is because that is the amount of land that goes with that house, so that is why this is not necessarily an area that is needed for construction but is an area that they are acquiring.

11. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is the small area to the side of you part of that or is that something else?

12. MR RAITT: That is also an HS2 property already. That is also acquired.

13. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Which came with which home?

14. MR RAITT: That is number two Manor Cottages that came under an EHS purchase. The reason we have put this map on is to show how isolated we will be compared to the way the community was when we moved there. We have been told, not in writing, but at the meeting that these two properties each side of us won’t be

inhabited during construction and that makes us feel we will be even more isolated during that period.

15. Finally, I have a little arrow that says BioDisc and I will come back to that later, but that is a joint sewerage treatment plant which serves three of the houses. This is quite an important point because it is in the safeguarded area and we are just outside it, so I will come back to that in another slide later on.

16. The next slide, please. This is a reminder of your summer visit by the look of it, or autumn visit at least, to see us. On the right this is just opposite our house where you stopped for a while and Harriet appraised you of our situation. On the left is where the bus was stopped. That is where the viaduct will be. You may recall from that visit that some of the people in Thorpe Mandeville had put some balloons up to represent the height not of the viaduct but the viaduct and the gantry. That shows the degree of it compared to the height of the houses that are around.

17. MR MEARNS: I seem to remember the balloons not doing the height justice because of the wind blowing them to the side.

18. MR RAITT: That’s right, yes, so we should add at least another metre on to demonstrate, but that just gives you a concept of the degree of the height of the viaduct compared to the height of the houses around. We have another picture of that later on.

19. Slide six now, the next one. This is just to give you a bit more of a feel of where we are and how we live. It’s a family home for us and or two children. We have been there for about 30 years. It is our only asset. We have spent a lot of money on it over the last 30 years to improve and enlarge it. It was a property that we intended to live in for a good deal longer but that may not be the case now. We chose to live out of a village because it is very quiet, it is very tranquil. We didn’t want the noise of village or town life so we specifically chose this location for the tranquillity that it gives. When we bought it we found it was just right for us, so the HS2 announcement came as quite a considerable shock to us.

20. I will just briefly describe these photos. On the top left our house is the left half of that; the right half is Manor Cottages, which is already owned by HS2. The top right is the back of the house. The bottom left is the view out of the back of our house across

the countryside.

21. MRS RAITT: That is actually looking out towards the line.

22. MR RAITT: Yes, looking out in the direction of the line, on the bottom right you can see centrally but slightly to the right, that is the house there. That just demonstrates how it was sitting alone in the valley with the hamlet prior to anything. At this point I would just like to say that when the HS2 project was first announced, the line was coming through our house so we were expecting to be compulsorily purchased, and that stayed for a while. There were two moves on that line so we have gone through a situation of suddenly being told about the line and being told that we were in the compulsory purchase zone and then being told that we weren’t in it. So, our imagination, all our plans of what to do under the circumstances, have been changing all the time because of that.

23. The next slide, please. We feel that we are a special case, which I will come to later, but to move to a property of a similar type and value and to be compensated for the disruption that we face, we are asking that HS2 should provide a package as on the slide. We know, as Mr Mould said, that we are or will probably be eligible for the voluntary purchase scheme.

24. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Let’s work on the basis that you are certainly eligible for that.

25. MR RAITT: Certainly? I am quite happy with certainly; that is good, but this does not provide for the assistance of moving. We will lose money on stamp duty and on costs and, as we said, this is our only asset, so in effect we would need to downsize to move away from here. In the response document they actually quoted us as being asked to be compulsory purchased. Technically, that is not correct. We asked for a package that was the equivalent to that. We know that we are not in the compulsory purchase zone and we know that they wouldn’t make an exception for us if we are not in the safeguarded area.

26. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Forgive me for asking a question to which I ought to remember the answer – I probably knew it last year. If they hadn’t moved the line and the line was going to go through your home so it was a compulsory purchase, would

they have paid the stamp duty?

27. MR RAITT: Yes. As far as I know, although I can be corrected.

28. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Perhaps I can put that question to Mr Mould. Would they be paid stamp duty on compulsory purchase?

29. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

30. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Would they have got removal costs?

31. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

32. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Would they have got solicitors’ costs?

33. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

34. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Would they have got a home disturbance payment?

35. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes, that’s right.

36. MR RAITT: From what I understand, the home disturbance payment is 10 per cent up to £40,000, if that is correct.

37. MR MOULD (DfT): It is there or thereabouts.

38. MR RAITT: It is in that kind of area.

39. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Thank you.

40. MR MEARNS: Mr Raitt, can I ask you one more question? You have identified on one of the previous slides that all of the other properties surrounding your property has been acquired by HS2. Was that under a compulsory purchase scheme?

41. MR RAITT: The two that I said would be demolished will be under compulsory purchase. The other two were bought at the time under the EHS, the exceptional hardship scheme.

42. MR MOULD (DfT): And they received the unblighted market value.

43. MR MEARNS: Thank you.

44. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I am sorry to interrupt you.

45. MR RAITT: That is okay. So, the reason we are thinking of this is that we feel that we have been very severely affected already by HS2 before it’s even started because we don’t know whether we are going to be compulsorily purchased, whether we are going to be in the zone, or what is going to happen, so it has caused a lot of disruption. We feel, as I will try and explain later in the presentation, that just to remain living here during construction and operation would be untenable for us and we don’t feel that the choice would be either to stay somewhere which severely affects our standard of life or to downgrade because we’d have to pay our own stamp duty, etc., for moving.

46. The next slide, please. So, we are asking for the atypical property which I just mentioned, special case. I have mentioned all these points. I am not going to read off them off the slide. The reason I think we are unique is because the community rather than just ourselves has been so devastated by HS2 from five properties, people that we knew well, that we enjoyed socialising with down to a situation where we are going to have only three properties, two of which will have tenants moving in and out all the time. It will leave us not in a community anymore and that is what we had before. One of the rented properties at the moment has been occupied for maybe a year or so. The other one has been empty for nine months with the exception of two weeks at Christmas, so it is very much not a community at the moment.

47. The other point I think I mentioned earlier on but I would repeat is that we had understood verbally from HS2 that even these rented properties will be unoccupied during construction because it would be impractical to have them occupied, but that is a comment made by an HS2 employee at a meeting and not something that has been documented.

48. The next slide briefly is just to remind ourselves of the possibility of atypical property in the circumstances. I am sure you have seen this before. It is from the Property Compensation Consultation and the reference is at the bottom there. It says that there is the ability by the Government to supplement discretionary schemes if they think it is appropriate. Our proposal is that it is appropriate in this case.

49. The next slide, please. This is where I would like to go into slightly more detail

on construction and operation.

50. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Can you assume that we understand that? There is no need to go through that in detail.

51. MR RAITT: I am not reading off slides, except for one occasion later on but that is only a short sentence. This is just a slide to explain the difference between what it is now and what it will be.

52. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: You aren’t the first person to talk about Lower Thorpe, so this bit you can go through quite fast.

53. MR RAITT: Absolutely, yes. The only point I would make with this slide in that case is to say that it just increases our isolation, the fact that we have friends in Culworth that we can’t just go and see them. That is the main point.

54. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: If you want to know whether we think that it is unreasonable for you to be expected to stay there, the answer is that we do think it is unreasonable for you to be expected to stay there.

55. MR RAITT: Okay, thank you. The next slide: I know you have been bombarded with this but I won’t say more than a sentence. These were photos taken when the solar farm panel was constructed up the road and it shows how impractical it is. Now, I know that there has been a proposal to build a haul road instead. I know that that will benefit the village of Thorpe Mandeville quite considerably because of the distance, but for us the distance between the haul road and Banbury Lane is much less so we are still going to be affected by the noise and, particularly, dust. I don’t know whether they tarmac haul roads, but if not we would be in a worst dusty position with the haul road than we are at the moment. But I know that you have had a lot of discussions about this so I will call it a day on that slide, I think.

56. When I did this slide and the next one, which I will ask for in a minute, it just showed me the size of the work that is going to be going on compared to the size of our house and how we will be dwarfed. You can see from my slightly unskilled filling in on the green that the satellite compound is about two garden lengths from our house so that we won’t be very far from it at all. We know already that there are 100 to 150 workers

going to be there every day for two years. So, again it just dwarfs us and on the next slide, in some ways even worse so, this is the balancing pond which is about one garden length from the end of our garden. The dark blue is the balancing pond and the dotted blue is the replacement flood plain storage, which I know is returned to its natural state but it still has to be dug out and hauled away, so there is still a lot of construction traffic involved in that. So, these two slides were put in just to demonstrate how squeezed in and tiny we will look compared to everything that is going on.

57. Again, with the next slide I won’t be reading this. These are some quotes from the Environmental Statement. I know that some of the noise on the HGV ones are possibly not applicable if the alternative provision goes through.

58. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: They are multiple in nature.

59. MR RAITT: Yes, but there are lot of words. The visual views will still be there. The lighting from the satellite compound will still be there. The major adverse effect will still be there. What I have not put down is 5.4.9, which says: ‘The combination of these effects will have a major adverse effect on residential amenity on the property and is therefore seen to be significant’.

60. The next slide, please. Maybe I’d like to talk just a little bit longer on this one. On the assumption that we are the only property that will be there, there will also be a need to keep all the services running during the construction and when we look at that, we feel that that could actually incur quite a cost to HS2 compared to having the whole area closed down. We feel that if they are obliged to keep one dwelling active in this area, it could be quite impractical and expensive for them. That is only my opinion.

61. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: You’ve got clean water coming in, you have your waste disposal, your communal sewage farm.

62. MR RAITT: Yes.

63. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: You have electricity and telephone. You do not have gas.

64. MR RAITT: We do not have gas.

65. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: So, those are the major utilities?

66. MR RAITT: Those are the major ones and the one that I would like to concentrate on is the BioDisc, which is the sewage.

67. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: The waste water?

68. MR RAITT: Yes, the waste water. Now, this as you saw from the previous map, is on safeguarded land. It was right at the beginning on the Google map.

69. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: But that three or four houses is about £10,000 to replace, I would guess.

70. MR RAITT: Yes. The problem with this is that the brook is going to be diverted northwards – that is away from our house – by approximately 350 metres. At the moment we discharge into that brook from this BioDisc. Now, if that has to be kept running all the time they are moving the brook –

71. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: It could discharge just on to the land?

72. MR RAITT: I don’t know if you are allowed to do that.

73. MRS RAITT: No, at this location apparently you can’t. We have had lots of problems with various treatment discs and this is the only one that worked and the only way that they would install it is if it went directly into a water course.

74. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: How long has it been there?

75. MRS RAITT: This one?

76. MR RAITT: Fifteen years. One point is that the electricity for this system does not come from our house; it comes from the neighbouring house so that would need to be kept active. The second is that I would imagine that if the brook is going to be moved 350 metres it will not be an easy task to keep the discharge from this unit going throughout that whole time, particularly since the 350 metres takes that on to the other side of the track. So, that is quite a major move for this brook.

77. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: They wouldn’t even do that.

78. MR RAITT: Well, no –

79. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: The waste from your property wouldn’t be sent across the other side of the line.

80. MR RAITT: I can’t imagine that but then I don’t know what the alternative is if it has to be discharged into a brook. So, this is slide 15 we are still on. When we brought this up with HS2 you can see the quote there that they are aware that there could be an issue with this. The quote that you said is about right, £10,000 for a new unit. In addition to this there is a storm drain that goes from our house into that brook as well so something would have to be done for that because all the rainwater from out of the property at 1 & 2 Manor Cottages heads in that direction down to the stream.

81. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: That is against building regulations as well.

82. MR RAITT: The point that I am trying to make with this slide is that we see a lot – I don’t know how much, I can’t quantify –of expense with HS2 keeping us there during construction that could equally be well spent on giving us a proposition to move.

83. On the next slide, this is the impact during operation. You have probably seen this photo. This was montage from the South Northants Council. Again it shows, perhaps rather more dramatically than the balloon, the effect on our house. The way it looks there, they could actually put it over the top of the chimney and it wouldn’t touch the chimney so that shows you the degree to which we would be affected visually. I daresay you have seen that picture before anyway.

84. On the next slide are some of the effects that we want to talk about during operation. Visual impact I have already shown with the picture. That is supported by an HS2 comment in the Environmental Statement which states, ‘Significant visual effects due to the views of the Lower Thorpe viaduct cutting and embankment will provide significant in combination effects’. That was actually confirmed in the response document that we had after we put our petition in. Permanent effects, lack of mitigation and quality of life we will talk about on the subsequent slides. Operational noise and vibration: I know that again you have been battered with this but one thing we notice from this is that we are still highlighted as a red property and in the key for that the red property meant that it would suffer major adverse effects.

85. We have heard and we have read in one of the E20 or E21 documents about noise insulation. Our opinion of that is similar to probably a lot of other petitioners, that is that noise insulation is not really a satisfactory way out unless you keep all your windows shut and never go out in the garden, and that was really why we moved there. So we have a major adverse effect visually and from noise whilst it’s operational.

86. Slide 19 is a table, which is not too easy to read, but it does show that the blue line is the sound receptor that was as near to our house as possible. It shows in the change columns that we are being considerably hit in the two red marked columns there. It shows that we are being considerably hit in the change between baseline and operational, so this is operational and operational sound. So, it is going to be significant for us.

87. Slide 20, please. I would like you to bear with me just for this sentence and allow me to read it out. ‘Residents could experience high level of annoyance, sleep disturbance and activity disturbance within the properties’. That statement to me implies that some kind of compensation would be desirable from our point of view and warranted from HS2’s point of view. If that does not happen then, under the voluntary purchase scheme, we have the option to stay there if we want to, but it would be living with that, which is very different. At 5.3: ‘The combination of these effects will have a major adverse effect on residential amenity and is therefore considered to be significant’. Now, that sentence is almost exactly the same as appeared in the construction.

88. I would like to say really just a few words to finish off. On the last slide, from my point of view, the summary is as you can read on there, the devastating effect it has had. I would like to just sum up. As I said, in the Environmental Statement we are told that during construction and operation we will suffer severe adverse effects, and then the sentence I read out, that we will experience high levels of annoyance, sleep disturbance and activity disturbance within our property. We consider that this will make our lives intolerable and yet so far the feedback we have had from HS2 has led us to believe that it is a fair compensation that we are offered, the unblighted market value under the voluntary purchase scheme if we choose.

89. In these circumstances paying the market value only of the property and obliging

us to downsize we do not consider to be what I think is compensation for the situation we have been put in. So, that is the presentation. Harriet would just like to say a few words.

90. MRS RAITT: We also have two slides, just a couple of letters, one from Andrea Leadsom, our MP supporting our case, and another from South Northants Council also supporting our case. Very briefly I just want to say this about the impact that all of this has had on our family. Obviously, the last five years have been very difficult. The stress and sleepless nights have badly affected our health and well-being. Despite our best efforts we still have no resolution, which is why we are here today.

91. Being forced to move is bad enough but it appears that we are also expected to pay for the considerable additional cost of doing so. So, when the last remaining property is compulsorily purchased and construction starts, we would also like to be given the same opportunity to move on. There will be no community left. We really hope you can help us so that we can get on with our lives and make plans for the future. Thank you.

92. CHAIR: Thank you. Mr Mould?

93. MR MOULD (DfT): As the Committee knows, the petitioners’ property falls within the rural support zone. They are therefore able to call upon the Government to purchase their property at its unblighted market value and to do so at a time of their choosing. They are not due to be purchased compulsorily because their property is not required in order to construct and operate the railway.

94. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: No longer?

95. MR MOULD (DfT): Well, it never was within the safeguarding zone. In an early iteration of the scheme, the property was closer to the line than it is now but it has never been within safeguarding because safeguarding was introduced after the line had moved so as to leave them free from compulsory acquisition.

96. I have explained to the Committee that the Secretary of State and the Government following a public consultation have drawn up a discretionary compensation scheme, which includes the voluntary purchase scheme, to address the issues of generalised blight and the judgment of the Government has been that that scheme should provide for

the purchase of properties that fall within the rural support zone at their unblighted market value but should not include compensation for the costs of moving, which is essentially where the issue falls today. It is a judgment that the Government has made having regard to what it regards as fair compensation for those affected by the railway and its duty towards the public purse.

97. However, if we can just put up slide A8289, as the petitioners have pointed out, there is within the compensation scheme the opportunity for them if they feel they have a meritorious case, to apply exceptionally for a supplement. I do not say anything about the prospects of that because that would be something for the Secretary of State and the Government to consider if such an application were made but I would suggest that given that there is a compensation scheme in place which does apply to their property and provides that opportunity, however the outcome if they were to apply, that the first port of call at least should be that they should make application in that way. No doubt if they wish to make the case as they have before you, that there are certain opportunity costs involved here, then they could bring that point to bear in an application under that paragraph. As I say, I am not to be taken as giving any indication as to whether or not that would be likely to succeed, but I simply draw attention to the point as they have raised it themselves.

98. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I did not want to interrupt your flow but I did want to pick up on what you had been saying. Shall I wait?

99. MR MOULD (DfT): No, by all means interrupt me now if you wish.

100. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Perhaps I can ask if you are able to unpack this. In certain specific cases it may be desirable for the government to supplement. That does not directly say that the Government will or the promoters will, or even that they can. First of all does the government or do the promoters have the power to come to some arrangement if they think it is unfair not to?

101. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

102. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: That will do.

103. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

104. MR MEARNS: Before you move on, Mr Mould, the graphics that Mr and Mrs Raitt showed earlier on in the slides showed that their property was literally an island amongst an area which had already been acquired by HS2. From your understanding of the way in which you have already dealt with a large part of the route coming from Birmingham, can you think of any other similar properties which are in such a position where properties literally all around them have been acquired?

105. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes, at Gilson.

106. MR MEARNS: There aren’t many examples.

107. MR MOULD (DfT): Well, there aren’t many but this is not the only one and I think it is important to bear in mind that the claim for uniqueness is largely due to the point of timing. As it happens, their neighbours have applied successfully under the exceptional hardship scheme and have been purchased under that scheme. The other two properties that do fall within safeguarding, because they are required in order to construct the railway will be compulsorily purchased. So, the uniqueness is that these petitioners remain in a small group of properties the others of which have been purchased on application to the Government by the Government or they will be purchased because they are required for construction of the railway.

108. MR MEARNS: In essence what that means is that they have been overtaken by circumstances around them.

109. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes.

110. MR MEARNS: It is their home and they are perfectly entitled to sit there and if stuff happens around them, that is the reality that we all have to deal with.

111. MR MOULD (DfT): I don’t doubt that but I simply draw out the point that it is that fact of timing in a relatively small community, settlement, call it what you will, that leaves them with what they regard as a unique situation. But those who have had their properties acquired under the exceptional hardship scheme have not received more than the unblighted market value of their property and some might say that one aspect of fairness is consistency of approach when other people in similar circumstances are also afforded the opportunity to have their properties purchased, not when they are required

for the railway but in order to mitigate the impact of the project upon them, which is where we are here.

112. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I think it might help to rehearse some of the thinking – it is not an argument; this is a way of thinking – on 82827, please. The question in front of the promoters and possibly in front of the Committee is whether any of these or some equivalent to them can properly be met. We have heard that of the five properties in the hamlet, but not all – is that a reasonable expression –

113. MR RAITT: Yes.

114. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: – two will be bought with all these in them; two have been bought or have agreed to be bought without any of them because of the exceptional need so the question then comes what are we left with. At the risk of cutting out almost two or three chapters which could be said, I think the question of the opportunity cost is the one which should be there but it may be that before we come to report which may be some time, the petitioners ought to apply under 8289 and say, ‘Can we talk? We’d like to get all the four points mentioned on 8287.’ If that were agreed, that would then make the exceptional hardship people look as though they have done worse, which then gets the thinking built on. People want to make their own decisions in their own circumstances so I am not trying to make any pejorative comment on anybody, but if we are left with one household who have not chosen to go, who did not have exceptional hardship and who might not go under the voluntary application, what then would be the cost and is there some way of having cost sharing so that the overall project costs are not so great and the overall undoubted loss to people who have to move years before they would otherwise have moved can be to some extent mitigated. So, I don’t think that you are saying there won’t be any movement from the promoters and I think that the petitioners ought to think that they aren’t going to get everything they ask for but is there some way of trying to get a reasonable assessment which can be justified in public if necessary to explain why any additional payment has been made.

115. MR MOULD (DfT): Sir Peter, I don’t think I can add to that. I suppose in deference to those behind me I ought just to emphasise that one point you make is that in saying I agree I am of course not to be taken to give any sort of steer as to what the outcome will be.

116. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: No. It requires an application under (9) to the promoters or to the Secretary of State – I am not sure which. You might very kindly somewhere outside say who they should apply to but I think that the best meaning of the word ‘compromise’ is agreement, an agreement which puts each in a better situation than they would otherwise have been, is one which I think could be publicly justified.

117. MR MOULD (DfT): And as you say the best way of testing that is to follow the scheme that is in front of us.

118. CHAIR: Any final comments, Mr Raitt?

119. MR RAITT: I have one comment to make. You talk about a possible comparison with the EHS. If somebody was moving under the EHS, possibly because of a job, then to give the unblighted value is fine, but they have to and they would expect to pay their stamp duty anyway.

120. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: We understand that.

121. MR RAITT: Yes.

122. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: In the same way, if you were to move in 15 years’ time you would have all these costs. It is what my family call ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’.

123. CHAIR: Any other comments?

124. MRS RAITT: No, only that we weren’t aware that we could apply under this.

125. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: And that is clearer now than it is on paper, I think.

126. CHAIR: I do know that civil servants make recommendation to the Under- Secretary of State for Transport and has cases coming to him periodically. So, it depends to some extent on Civil Service advice to your case. Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation.

127. MR RAITT: Thank you very much. Thank you for your time.

128. CHAIR: We now move on to Cherwell District Council.

Cherwell District Council

129. CHAIR: This is still Cherwell District Council. You want to make a statement to the Committee?

130. MISS MURPHY: Good afternoon, sir, yes. My name is Melissa Murphy and today I appear on behalf of the Cherwell District Council. Mr Colwell to my right is the other familiar face, again for Cherwell District Council. He is the Head of Strategic Planning and Economic Development at Cherwell District Council.

131. I will address you all very briefly this afternoon because the promoter and the council have made significant progress in relation to the issues set out in our petition and we have received an assurance from the promoter. I would like to have that up, if that is possible, please. It is P4889. I would like to address you on two of the four bullet points. Do you see the list of issues on the first page? It is the first bullet point, the impact of construction and associated traffic, in particular the impact on junctions 10 and 11 of the M40 motorway, and then the third bullet point, the impact on the setting of residential properties at Featherbed Lane in particular.

132. So, if you would turn to the second page of the letter, please we welcome two assurances that have been given in relation to the impact on the M40 junctions 10 and 11 and the provision of an alternative haul road to access the Featherbed Lane construction compound with just a couple of detailed drafting points about which we disagree and to which I would like to draw the Committee’s attention if I may, please.

133. The first is, as you will see on the second page of that letter which you have in front of you, that we have an assurance in respect of the carrying out of an assessment of traffic flow at the M40 junction 10 post-improvement works on that junction. The second point in that assurance is the identification of potential measures to mitigate the impacts of additional traffic. What we are lacking at present is the delivery of such identified mitigation measures. So, you have an assessment and identification of mitigation measures but it does not address delivery.

134. Today we have written to HS2 and suggested alternative wording which would deal with delivery, so we hope that that can be agreed but we will hear from them in due course. The second point relates to Featherbed Lane, which is a narrow, local route. If

we could turn to page 4 of the letter, please, just to draw your attention to paragraph 3 of that assurance, ‘The Secretary of State will require the nominated undertaker to use a haul road for HS2 construction traffic and limit where reasonably practical the use of Featherbed Lane as an HS2 construction route during works’. A narrow, but important point: we would actually prefer that they avoided where reasonably practical the use of Featherbed Lane rather than just limit its use given the particular local circumstances. So, those are a couple of drafting points on the assurances that we have been offered.

135. Next, sir, I would like to just put on record the fact that the council supports the requests which were made by South Northamptonshire Council on 2 February this year where we sought amendments to Information Paper D1 and the draft planning memorandum. As I understand the position, the promoter has indicated willingness to review those suggested amendments and apparently the outcome of that will be reported to the planning forum in March but it is not clear to us when that will be. The conclusions will be reported to you so again we would just like to raise that with you and take this opportunity to do so.

136. Lastly, sir, I would like to record Cherwell District Council’s support for the local community’s request for considering the lowering of the land of the route through the district. As I understand the position, community representatives will make this case to your Committee themselves with some local examples. I don’t propose to call any evidence but should you have any questions Mr Colwell will be happy to attempt to assist.

137. CHAIR: Okay. Mr Mould?

138. MR MOULD (DfT): Thank you, sir. I am grateful to the council for their positive words. We have indeed received a letter today responding to ours of 17th, which is on the screen in front of you. It makes some helpful suggestions as Miss Murphy has just drawn to your attention. We need to think about those and we will be writing to the council as soon as we have done so with our response to that letter.

139. In relation to the question of design and the refinements to the design policy and the planning memorandum, Miss Murphy is right; our intention is to take proposals to the planning forum in March. I hope to be in a position to report back to the Committee as I indicated when we have heard from South Northants before the Committee rises for

the forthcoming general election. So, that of course means that I must report back by the third week in March, I think, at the latest.

140. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Can we please see the subsequent pages of this?

141. MR MOULD (DfT): Yes, by all means, we can carry on. There is a list of a number of matters where the letter records points of agreement.

142. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: So, subject to the support that Miss Murphy has indicated for the local groups who are petitioning, we don’t need to concern ourselves and we can expect that agreement can be reached?

143. MISS MURPHY: We think that the drafting of those assurances needs to be improved. If one makes an assessment of traffic impact and then identifies mitigation measures, unless you deliver them you are no better off. So, it might be a short point but it is quite important, and they are quite important junctions and a quite important route. That is why we are coming to you, so that we are not actually agreeing but to be fair we have raised our drafting point pretty late.

144. CHAIR: Okay, so you are nearly there but not quite and want to reserve your position for the moment?

145. MISS MURPHY: Thank you. That is exactly it.

146. MR MOULD (DfT): I did not mean to suggest that I was looking longingly at the long grass but more that we need to read the letter and just think about it but I take the point that if one is going to offer something, one needs to provide a suitable means of delivering it. I take that point.

147. CHAIR: Okay, thank you very much indeed. We now have Mixbury Parish Meeting.

Mixbury Parish Meeting

148. CHAIR: Thank you very much, gentlemen. I see you have a fair amount of slides, so I would be grateful if we could whip through at a reasonable speed.

149. MR BRUNTON: We will gallop through most of them.

150. CHAIR: Okay, we can see where you are.

151. MR MOULD (DfT): I have put up a slide showing the administrative boundary of the Parish Meeting, and I do emphasise that Mixbury is the beneficiary of a parish meting rather than a parish council, I think probably due to the size.

152. MR BRUNTON: That is partly due to the size.

153. MR MOULD (DfT): To the size, yes.

154. MR MEARNS: I haven’t the faintest idea what that means.

155. MR MOULD (DfT): I think below 100 souls; is that right, or thereabouts?

156. MR BRUNTON: I think roundabout 250 depending on whether people seem to think that they need a parish council. Of course, below that it is quite difficult to find anybody to stand.

157. MR MEARNS: I am terribly sorry, I come from an area of the country where we have only one town council and no parish council.

158. MR BRUNTON: Okay. Well, a rural parish council has councillors; the parish meeting has me. There is a chairman of the parish meeting, who is the only elected member of the parish.

159. MR MEARNS: And when you call a meeting, the people attend in their droves?

160. MR BRUNTON: Yes, usually about eight to 10.

161. MR MEARNS: Excellent.

162. MR MOULD (DfT): It is a true, absolute democracy.

163. MR BRUNTON: It is the bottom rung of an absolute democracy. Perhaps we can have our first slide 8421. I don’t have to look over there any more, I can see it. Thank you. So, this was the front slide that we put on a visit pamphlet which we provided for the Committee, some members of which were good enough to visit us back in October. This might well remind them of perhaps the facts or what we purported to give them as the facts of our situation.

164. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: More than your castle?

165. MR BRUNTON: You did not see the castle, did you? I don’t think you would have seen the castle if we had taken you to look at it, but anyway I shall move on. I am very pleased that HS2 have actually come forward with some assurances. They have sent us and Cherwell District Council, obviously an assurance about the possibility that Fulwell Lane, or rather Featherbed Lane – I have to change the name because there are two names and we compete for it – will not be used for heavy hauling but the route up the line will be. We are very pleased about that and we support Cherwell also in their clarification that they asked for that there should be no heavy traffic up that lane, which is totally unsuitable.

166. They also wrote to Mixbury and have offered us the fact that the bridge, which was going to be closed for 12 months during the construction process on Featherbed Lane, will now be bypassed with a temporary road while the bridge is built and then the road put back on to a bridge, so the lane would no longer have to be closed, which wipes out a large part of the middle of our petition.

167. If I go on to describe Mixbury, perhaps we could have slide two, which is an aerial view, and slide three, which shows the little pink houses and a sight of the church and the missing castle. If we go to slide four you will see where HS2 will run across this and the parish boundary to the right, the wiggly blue line going north.

168. There are five farms in the area. Slide six just shows you the areas farmed by those farms. The farms are arrowed in blue, green and yellow and you will see that their respective fields are coloured in blue, green and yellow. These are the ones that will be most affected by the line, as you can see. Mostly the farming is arable. There are a couple of flocks of sheep and two herds of cows but mostly the normal crops of rape, barley, etc.

169. So, basically to sum up our position before moving on to the direct petition that we put in, we are a rural neighbourhood. We rely on the amenities which are in front of you. They are our only amenities. We have no shops, although HS2 managed to find some – it would be interesting to know where they were. We have had no shops since about 1989, I believe. We have no community hall, no village green. We have the countryside around us, which is, I shall be able to show you later, well used.

170. So, to move on, paragraph one of our petition deals with the consultation process, which we have complained about as I am sure you have heard before all the way up the line, I have no doubt. It was great on quantity. We had plenty of meetings; we have had two bilaterals with HS2. It was very, very short on quality. What we did not get was grown-up discussions. Generally speaking, we were offered generalisations and never had decent decisions on anything because as often as not it was something that was going to be decided later in the process. That is all I have to say about HS2 at the moment.

171. Moving on to construction traffic impact, our petition paragraph 3, in view of the promoter’s response if we go back to 8424, we believe it is not unreasonable to ask the promoter that there should be no construction traffic through the village. By ‘through the village’ I mean along Evenley Road, which is along here, down through the village, down to the 8421 and from the junction here along Church Lane to Fulwell Lane, which is here. So, that really is the first request that we make, that there should not be construction traffic allowed through the village. There must be ways of stopping it and it is up to the promoter to do this.

172. So if we go to 8421(1)? Right, it really is the first two parts of this slide: the offer from HS2 came in too late for us to change this presentation. So, we will forget the heavy haulage bit at the bottom and assume that that is going along okay. We are asking that there should be no construction traffic through the village, no heavy construction lorries up Featherbed Lane.

173. Moving on to our next petition point which was the visual impact of HS2. If we can look at 842-12? This is an extract from the HS2 photo montage, looking up the said Featherbed Lane, towards the line. The lines runs across the top here, 100 metres the other side of that hedge, roughly speaking. You will see that HS2 have decided that the first thing that needs to go is that hedge; and that by 2026, it is still gone. We think it is more reasonable if somebody plants a hedge as soon as they can, once they have finished with the earthworks. Really, we do not want to wait until the trains start running before we see mitigation in the way of soft vegetation, if you like. We fail to understand what is the problem with actually planting a hedge as soon as you have finished the major earthwork. It would make a big difference to me personally; by the look of it, I shall probably be about 95 by the time that hedge has grown and I’m not

sure I’ll be terrible interested in wandering about looking at it.

174. It is quite obvious to us that some hedges are going to have to go; we are not arguing about that. We are just saying that - if we go to 842-16? – we are asking this: the proposer should be instructed in such a way so construction work will prioritise protection of existing woods and hedges – you don’t rip them out if you don’t need to – and all new screening must be effective well before operations in 2026.

175. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: It takes about 10 years for the screening to become…?

176. MR BRUNTON: The suggestion was it would be 15 years, from HS2, from our own experts, they suggest 10 years for the cover to meet, basically.

177. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: So they need to be planted next year?

178. MR BRUNTON: Well, I think if they planted it in the first five years, it would be just shy of…

179. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: And when they stop using the land for a haul route, presumably, it then becomes easily available or…?

180. MR BRUNTON: I am not actually arguing particularly for that hedge, although I think we have petitioners here who might be arguing for it. I am talking, I think, rather more in general, across the parish –

181. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Plant as soon as you can?

182. MR BRUNTON: Plant as soon as you can, yes, rather than wait until operation day.

183. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: 17 is your –

184. MR BRUNTON: 17 we have yet to get to; you will be interested in 17, perhaps not. Where have we got to? 16, yes. So, the next part of our petition was regarding light pollution and we are satisfied with the promoter’s response on this. Basically, it is saying, ‘We’ll do our best’, and I don’t think we can honestly ask for much more than that. So, if I move on to the next slide? No, not the next slide – we know what the next

slide is – the next part of our petition is on operational noise, and I don’t suppose you have ever heard anything about this during your sitting here. So this is going to be totally new to you.

185. The countryside, as I mentioned before, is our only amenity. It is all we have got in Mixbury; it is why a lot of people move to live there. If we look at 842-56, a bit of a challenge? 842-56 is a slide from a survey that we took in 2012, when we were looking at the amount of usage that our rights of way actually had. If we ignore the first column, which is road use – Church Lane and Fulwell or Featherbed Lane – and is obviously largely motorised, although not entirely, and we look at the remaining bridal paths and footpaths which are identified by their District Council numbers at the bottom – mean nothing to anybody – but these are ones that go out into the Ouse Valley, which is where the line is moving across. We –

186. CHAIR: Greater…?

187. MR BRUNTON: Greater Ouse, yes, sorry. I left off the ‘Greater’. You will see that if you can add up quickly – I have added it up slowly – 33,000 journeys, roughly, per annum, are made on footpaths and bridal ways, by villagers of Mixbury, and this is not including Westbury or Finmere or surrounding villages – and I think that suggests that we do spend quite a lot of time out in this area. One of the things that we are really worried about is, I hope, what you will see in the video clip which we have named 842- 17. Is that on? Yes, go! No sound? I did ask that there should be sound, there’s not much point without the sound. But there goes the TGV, near Tours, and very quiet, you will understand it is! Terribly impressive – I don’t know why I am complaining about noise! Forget that!

188. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: This is your noise point.

189. MR BRUNTON: It’s a noise point. If you had heard the sound, it was quite loud and, right at the end, you’ll have heard a bird going ‘cheep cheep’ about 10 metres away. That train was at about 250 metres, and the train is going to go quite close to some of our bridal ways, a lot closer than that.

190. So in a sense, this part of my presentation is going to conflate two parts of our petition, that is the operational noise part and the bridal way and footpath parts, because

they are interlinked. If I can go on to quote from the HS2 information paper E20, which is the Control of Airborne Noise, I think this perhaps is the heart of what I wish to say to you today. Page 6, paragraph 3 of E20, if I can read from it or is that a bore?

191. CHAIR: Is it long?

192. MR BRUNTON: I shall read it quickly.

193. CHAIR: Okay.

194. MR BRUNTON: There’s several paragraphs; I shall read them all quickly. ‘There’s a need to integrate consideration of the economic and social benefit of the activity or policy under examination, with proper consideration of the adverse environment effects, including the impact of noise on health and quality of life. This should avoid noise being treated in isolation in any particular situation.’

195. Going on to page 7, paragraph 6 – sorry, we are into acronyms – ‘The noise policy statement England (NPSE) notes that it is not possible to have a single objective noise- based measurement that defines SOAEL (Significant Observed Averse Effect Level). That is applicable to all sources of noise in all situations. Consequently, the SOAEL is likely to be different for different noise sources, for different receptors, and at different times.’ We agree with this.

196. Page 7, paragraph 10, ‘Identifies the SOAEL as a level above which noise causes a material change in behaviour and/or attitude, for instance, avoiding certain activities during certain periods of intrusion. Quality of life is diminished due to change in acoustic character of the area’.

197. I think, finally, page 7, paragraph 11, ‘HS2’s sustainability policy sets out HS2’s commitment to being an exemplar project.’ It states that ‘HS2 will promote high-speed rail and balance community, environmental and economic issues. The key theme identified in relation to noise impact is environmental change, to seek to avoid significant adverse effects on communities, businesses and the natural, historic and built environment, minimising effects where they occur, and delivering enhancements as far as practicable’.

198. So, we believe the noise will be an SOAEL for us, not in the village but in our

playground, if you like, for people and horses using footpaths and bridal ways. None of the tables published in the appendices of E20 address this.

199. So if we go on to slide 18 please? You might remember this from your visit. It is a photo montage – HS2 aren’t the only ones who can do that – and it is showing the line from the point at which the Committee stood to see where the line was crossing Hollow Barn which is an embankment close to the village. The train here is 150 metres distance from the bridal way, which is the hedge on the left, going that way. The hedge tapers down towards the actual track; it passes within 100 metres of the track at the point where the track is on its highest point of the embankment, I think eight metres.

200. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Bridal ways tend to go under the track?

201. MR BRUNTON: The bridal way is beside the track –

202. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: It doesn’t cross it?

203. MR BRUNTON: It does, later. The bridal way approaches the track to within 100 metres, at the eight metre embankment. It then goes alongside the track, getting closer to the track for another 400 metres, in HS2’s red zone – that is somewhere over 65dB is it? The red zone on the sound map, for 400 metres before it reaches a crossing, so it’s going across a bridge at that stage. Our petition asks that the best way forward, we think is that the line should be lowered and that would have the following consequences which we would like to go through one at a time.

204. First, you would need to raise the A421. If you go down four metres – that’s about what the A421 will be raised – you do not need to raise the A421, you don’t need to worry about traffic noise increase from the A421 on the village. Secondly, the Hollow Barn embankment which you see in the picture –

205. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: How far is the village from the line?

206. MR BRUNTON: The village? The church is about 700 metres, 750, something like that. Sorry, the Hollow Barn embankment here in front of you would be done at four metres. This would effectively shorten the length over which we think you should need to put noise barriers to protect horses on the bridal way.

207. In responding in particular to the promoter’s response in paragraph 18 – on the back page of the promoter’s response document, page 19 – they are suggesting that lowering the line will increase the amount of excavated material, increase the amount of material to be removed to landfill, increase land take, reduce the area of retained habitat etc. – and we think that all those points can be met by replacing the cutting with a cut and cover tunnel on either side of the embankment and Hollow Barn.

208. A cut and cover tunnel will generate less spoil than a deep cutting of the same depth, which is geometry, as far as I can see. And, you reuse spoil for capping, which reduces your spoil level yet again. It reduces the total land take, which reduces the costs, although the costs of doing the tunnel cut and cover, probably are higher. Your land take over the life of the line is less. And, finally, on this part of my petition, it would allow Westbury viaduct to be replaced by a simple eight metre high embankment, with the Ouse culverted and bridal way underpass. This is good use for your excavated soil, less noisy than a viaduct and better to look at than, I suspect, HS2’s viaduct design will turn out to be. I don’t suppose it’s going to be brick arches is it? No.

209. So if we look at 842-19 –

210. CHAIR: It might be, we are waiting to hear what planning policies are.

211. MR BRUNTON: Okay. 842-19 is a picture of the embankment the Victorians built for the old railway line. The map underneath shows you where it is; it’s about 600 metres in a straight line, from the viaduct to the HS2 is going to be putting across the Ouse. And it is nine metres high. If we go on to the next slide, which is 20? There is the Ouse going underneath. It’s got about 2.5 metres headroom. That is the culvert for the Ouse at present through the Victorian embankment, 600 metres from where the viaduct is going. This basically would address all our subsequent problems which we are going to come to, I suspect, with bridal ways and crossing the line, because there would not be a problem with crossing a line that is under the ground.

212. We also propose a less effective, no doubt cheaper solution which we are not so keen on but it really would involve adding noise barriers and bunds along the route wherever the train was going to be visible from the bridal path. So if we go on to the next slide, 842-21 and if we could – I will talk about this one first – this is from the draft environmental statement. This shows us Westbury Viaduct and Hollow Barn without

any mitigation put in at all. It shows us, if you look at the pale yellow, 50-55; the darker level, 55-60dB contours of average noise. If we look at slide 22, we can see what happens when some mitigation went in. As you can see, there’s a 1.4 metre sound barrier on Westbury Viaduct. On the Westbury side, not on the Mixbury side, just on the north – not the north, but the north, if you like, on the map – and if we go back to 21 and then back to 22, it’s quite obvious what has happened to the contours, if you toggle between them you can see the noise contour from Westbury is pulled right back by that very simple barrier. Go back again please? Previous slide? Try 842-21, yes that’s it; and 842-22. So that is without barrier, with barrier; without barrier, with barrier. Now, look at the bottom of the map, you’ll see what happens towards Mixbury, this is without barrier, and this is without barrier again. So it’s quite obvious that without barrier equals without barrier. We are saying there should be a barrier both sides of Hollow Barn to mitigate against noise and there should be a barrier both sides of Westbury Viaduct, and both the barriers need to be raised because, look what it can do. It is doing this for our only asset; it is reducing the noise problem out in the countryside.

213. So, 842-23 is just suggesting where the extra noise barriers ought to go. Talking about one of HS2’s comments, I’m not sure – I think it was in the response document – they suggested that we would not like the sight of the noise barriers. I think that we ought to point out that we prefer the site of noise barriers to the sound of the noise.

214. If I go on to 82424, just to summarise what I’ve just gone through: lower the line by four metres, allowing cut and cover tunnels both sides of Hollow Barn, and replace Westbury Viaduct with an embankment, with noise barriers either side, or just bung in a load of noise barriers, but to be honest, I think our first solution is a better solution. Bridal ways and footpaths, which I said I was conflating with this, because I have already mentioned them, was the next part of our petition. The problems here would be largely solved by this solution to the general noise in the countryside.

215. If we go on to 82425, you can see the stabling within the Mixbury village area. There are accommodation – I won’t say stabling as such – it is accommodation and stabling, able to take something in the order of 130 horses. Last week there were 88 horses in the village. So you can see there are quite a lot of horses, rather relying on the Ouse Valley for exercise.

216. If we go on to 26, this is the definitive map for Oxfordshire, of Cherwell, for the rights of way, where they are numbered. I apologise for the shading out of surrounding counties; I’m a man of Oxfordshire, you see. Our minor roads, our bridal ways, all here, were the ones I referred to in a previous slide, as being heavily used: 33,000 if you remember, passages per annum, along these bridal ways into the Ouse Valley and they’re all going to be cut by HS2. I think, really, you are going to hear tomorrow from other witnesses who are grossly inconvenienced by this in their Parish, who will be unable to use a pony and trap – Mr and Mrs Drummond – and as it stands, the design for HS2 and their bridges is unsuitable, we believe, for horses. If I could introduce Mr David Trott here, as a witness, he knows more about horses than I do, and probably most people do. He is our resident horse expert, is that not so David. Perhaps if I could ask you to outline to the Committee your expertise, shall we say, in horses?

217. MR TROTT: Thank you very much. My name is David Trott, I’ve been riding 52 years. I am the Director of International Teams for Great Britain for the sport of dressage, which we currently have the team gold, individual gold, etc. I have been chairman of selections since 2000; I have been the world class performance manager and I was the Chef d’Equipe at the 2004 Olympics. So I have a vast experience of competition horses. My partner and I run a business from Mixbury; I am a freelance dressage trainer, a farrier, but we also train dressage and national hunt racehorses. Part of the regime for any competition horse is fitness and the need for hacking would cover any of those disciplines; the use of different terrain, different ground conditions, and the mental stability of the horses so they are not always just on the gallops or in an arena. It’s absolutely paramount. Some of the problems that we foresee are obviously the noise, particularly with the racehorses, believe me. The sudden noise and the sudden visibility of the trains will be a major issue. The bridge crossings, looking at the directives that have been given, we are told that the parapets will be 1.8 metres high. If you can turn to item 842-27 please? If you look at the bottom picture, you’ll see that 1.8 metres high, the riders body is more or less already completely above the parapet. If you can imagine that horse standing up on its hind legs, probably the horses belly would be above the parapet and if anything happened, the rider would just be chucked straight over the top of the parapet onto the railway line. I know that the BHS have said that 1.8 metre. I am sorry, but I disagree with that. I would think 2.5 metres high parapets on the bridges is absolutely essential.

218. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Because it is different to having a protected bridal way over a road?

219. MR TROTT: I would think that is completely dangerous as well. I think 2.5 metres would have to be – over a main road or something, a small road is different – but if you can imagine a train going underneath you, that’s coming at 200mph –

220. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I am trying to draw a distinction. The BHS supporters have successfully argued for parapets at this sort of height over motorways and dual carriageways –

221. MR TROTT: I know.

222. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I don’t think that my research has shown many problems with that, but we are looking for a distinction between a train – an episode of a train rather than a constant flow of traffic?

223. MR TROTT: The only difference I can say is that none of the reports have talked about racehorses or competition horses. I think there is a vast difference between that and your normal riding pony. You can visibly see – if you just visualise that horse standing on its hind legs.

224. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: We’ve got that point –

225. MR TROTT: I think it’s very dangerous. We’ve spoken already about Hollow Barn, but where the bridal way runs up from Hollow Barn to join the first of the bridges, I think if you look at 82425, please, the final 400 metres to the west of Hollow Barn there, the bridal way is actually going to be joining the other bridal way; it will be running right beside the railway. Again, having the trains coming whooshing right beside will be a major issue for some of the horses, for sure; and I would have major concerns that you would need an awful lot of screening along that path to make it safe, please?

226. Part of a trainer’s licence means that the horses have to be able to hack where they can gallop. If we look at 26, the green area at the top is currently our galloping field which we have written permission from Mrs Owen of Owens Farms to use the perimeter of that field for exercising horses at gallop.

227. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: And these horses are from both Westbury and Mixbury?

228. MR TROTT: Our horses are from Mixbury but there are horses from Fulwell and Westbury that would use it as well, for racehorses. In fact, you see the bridal path runs through the middle of that field, it actually now is used on the southern perimeter, all of the riders will use that field now. I personally would ride under the viaduct than ride over the bridges. I think it’s safer.

229. Racehorses and competition horses are not the same as your normal riding horse, believe you me. I notice that the ILPH, the International League for the Protection Horses, or World Horse Welfare, have been the people who have been consulted and saying that horses will get used to trains. I agree, that horses in the field beside the train eventually it will get used to it. The horses that we are talking about now are not stabled in the field; are not in fields next to the trains. They come and they have to ride next to it, for two minutes, cross it for two minutes a day. They are not going to get used to it straight away and I really do foresee that there could be major issues. Without crossing the railway, there will only actually be one route from Mixbury available to ride on, and that is going through Mixbury, along Church Lane, and then down Mossy Banks – which is, if you move the arrow, right, north and west with the arrow – that is actually only a 20 minute ride which isn’t actually sufficient for exercise. You would have to cross the railway at least twice to do any exercise that’s worthwhile with the horses.

230. So I have some pleas: for the bridges to be made, if possible, 15 metres wide, but at a minimum of 10 metres, so that you can actually ride in the middle of them and not be anywhere near the edge. That the parapets are 2.5 metres high and solid and extend beyond just the part of the going over the line; that they go from land to land so that horses actually can’t see what’s happening down below. And also, whether or not there’s a possibility of having a waiting area. If the trains are coming as frequently as they say – which is every two minutes – if you get there and there’s one coming, to be quite honest, you are going to be buggered with some of the horses, because they’ll have whipped round and gone away. By the time you get back there, the next one will be there. You need some safe area. I suggest a 20 metre area either side, a holding bay, if possible.

231. On the part of the ride that goes beside the railway, just north of Hollow Barns, where it joins the first bridge, I really don’t know what the second option is, whether or not we have to ask whether the bridal way be fenced on the side away from the railway, as well as obviously fenced on the railway side, but on the other side, just for that 400 metres. If the horses are spooked and the dive to the left – which believe you me, they will – if you’re going onto grass, that’s fine. If you’re going into plough, which could well happen, a valuable racehorse could be injured immediately by the change of the terrain at that speed and completely damage a leg, could fall over on top of the rider. The change of terrain will make that much difference. I don’t know the answer, whether you fence it or whether you don’t, but perhaps you could seek advice on that. I’ve spoken with the BHS and they don’t know either. Really, that’s my main point.

232. MR BRUNTON: The only thing I’d like to ask you is, if none of this happens – not HS2 I mean – but if no mitigation goes in place beyond what is being offered, how do you see that affecting your business?

233. MR TROTT: As regards the racehorses, it will probably be very difficult to continue. The dressage horses will cope better, but I would imagine you would actually have to move.

234. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Where are you presently?

235. MR TROTT: The horses are in Mixbury.

236. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Where all those –

237. MR TROTT: Yes, on the inside of one of the farms.

238. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Okay.

239. CHAIR: Mr Mould, do you have any questions of Mr Trott at all?

240. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I do have a couple. Just first of all, can we put up P4639? This is another version of the plan we had in front of us, but it’s useful because it shows the diversions that we propose to take the bridal ways over the railway line. If I can take you to Church Lane, and we can see the bridal way running in a north, north- east alignment – you mentioned, it’s the Hollow Lanes, by the way?

241. MR TROTT: Yes.

242. MR MOULD QC (DfT): We’ve got the series from the definitive map, so it’s bridal way 3034 as you can see. Now, at the point at which the railway passes across that bridal way, you can see from the box we are proposing to divert it via an overbridge and that will allow riders to continue along the bridal way to the east of the railway line, and then they can – if they wish to – make use of the gallops that you showed us a few minutes ago. They can then take a left, passing north-westerly, where they can pass, instead of the existing route, which will be severed by the railway, where they can take a dog leg, which takes them beneath the Westbury viaduct, do you see that, and then into the gallops? I’m pointing out the Westbury viaduct and you can see bridal way 3035 permanently diverted under the Westbury viaduct –

243. MR TROTT: I don’t think that’s the right field, actually. The land that is white coloured, to the north east of where you’re pointing?

244. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Where?

245. MR TROTT: Where’s Ouse, that red line –

246. MR MOULD QC (DfT): The viaduct is taking the rider across the fields.

247. MR TROTT: The field that I’m talking about is the white field that’s below the red line, and above the – that one there –

248. MR MOULD QC (DfT): So you don’t actually need to cross the railway line to use the gallop? Is that the point?

249. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Part of it.

250. MR MOULD QC (DfT): In any event, the point I was going to make there was, I think you said a minute ago that if you had a choice, you’d prefer to take horses underneath the viaduct?

251. MR TROTT: I would.

252. MR MOULD QC (DfT): So with that at least, the proposal is consistent with your wishes?

253. MR TROTT: Yes.

254. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Now if we come back to the first of the crossings I mentioned, which is just at the top of the Hollow Lane diagonal. Your point there I think is that you’d like to see a greater degree of width and a greater degree of height than the parapets than is specified in the British Horse Society

255. MR BRUNTON: Not width of parapets?

256. MR MOULD QC (DfT): No, width of the over bridge and height of the parapets. Can I just take you to the guidance? If we can turn to page 4649(8) just so the Committee has it in mind. I don’t know if we can turn that? If we look at the bottom of that table, we have the bridge specification for equestrian use over roads and railway. Any route over a railway, minimum width 3 metres, parapet height 1.8 metres. If we then rotate it anticlockwise again, we can see that there’s a footnote? ‘Parapet that is higher than 1.2 or 1.8 metres may be desirable in some circumstances’. I think insofar as parapet height is concerned, what you’re really saying to the Committee that in circumstances where a bridal way is being used by competition horses – whether it be racehorses or dressage horses – that may be one of those circumstances where consideration should be given to a higher parapet wall –

257. MR TROTT: That is what I would ask for, please?

258. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Than 1.8 metres. Okay, well we intend to design these structures in accordance with the guidance of the British Horse Society and we will therefore consider in the light of the evidence in each given case, whether there are circumstances which make it desirable to provide a parapet height which is higher than the standard that is set out on that page.

259. MR TROTT: Thank you.

260. MR MOULD QC (DfT): You drew attention to the fact that the width is expressed as a minimum. The same point applies, where in detailed design, circumstances are drawn to our attention which suggests that we should seriously consider something more than the minimum of three metres, then obviously we would need to consider that on its merits. You mention that one such circumstance may be in

relation to a bridge that is likely to be used by competition horses or –

261. MR BRUNTON: And the fact as well that several bridal ways are converging in one point there.

262. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes. If we go back to the previous page 7, we see under the heading ‘Width and sight lines’, another point you made, the emphasis – I won’t read it out but if you glance down that section ‘Width and sight lines’, the emphasis very much there is on safety and safe operation and that actual widths on the benchmark of that three metre minimum should be carefully considered having regard to the circumstances in a given case, with a view to maintaining a safe crossing point?

263. MR BRUNTON: Yes.

264. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And there’s also reference to waiting areas and I think you mentioned that was something you’d like the project to consider as a matter of detail in this location?

265. MR BRUNTON: I personally would like it much bigger than four metres, I can tell you.

266. MR MOULD QC (DfT): That’s obviously something that needs to be considered on the evidence which presents itself when the detailed design is being drawn up, would you agree?

267. MR TROTT: Yes, thank you very much.

268. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I suppose we should go back to the previous page 6, because we just note the context in which this guidance is given. Under the heading, ‘Parapets’, do you see, second bullet point, obvious point, horses can be alarmed by – it says ‘traffic’, but that would include railway trains as well as road traffic – and then further bullet point, parapets higher than 1.2 or 1.8 metres, see the table below, may be desirable in some circumstances. We’ve discussed that. This is relative to location, as there are a great many bridges in use with low parapets and no history of incidents. So there is a balance to be struck depending on the circumstances of the case, in the knowledge that often a design which is at the minimum specification – or in the case of parapets, to the suggested specification of 1.8 metres, based on experience, is sufficient

to meet the needs of the given case. Well, it doesn’t say that, this is guidance given by the British Horse Society –

269. MR BRUNTON: Could I quote another paragraph from the Horse Society, it says – I think it’s on the previous page – ‘Where it is necessary to turn a horse in order to close a gate, for example, the ideal space required is at least 4x4 metres. Many large horses require more than four metres to turn easily. The absolute minimum space required is a diameter of three metres of clear, flat ground with no protrusions or overhanging vegetation. This will be too restrictive for some horses, could result in injury should a horse panic at being so constrained, allows no leeway at all for a horse being startled by a sudden movement or sound, perhaps from wildlife in a hedge or wildlife on the railway – or coping, sorry, with temporary conditions such as standing…’ I mean, this means, really that the British Horse Society are very much hedging their bets I think on spirited horses and crossing noisy roads and railway.

270. MR MOULD QC (DfT): They say – this is guidance that we think is of value to people designing these things, but don’t forget that each set of circumstances needs to be considered on its own facts.

271. MR BRUNTON: Indeed, yes.

272. CHAIR: Have you finished your questioning?

273. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes.

274. CHAIR: Are you coming to your final bits now?

275. MR BRUNTON: What an optimist! Yes, so basically we want to be able to use the bridal ways safely. So, to do that we think you need to make all the crossings carrying bridal ways green bridges, in effect. Something like 10-15 metres wide, 2.5 metres blocked-in parapets, extending into the field either side, so that they are safe for horses and so that they are, in effect, wildlife corridors, because I think that is one of the things that the government is interested in, that we should have continuous wildlife corridors supplied across this route. If you look at the route of the map, there doesn’t seem to be any way of crossing the line for wildlife for eight kilometres or thereabouts, southeast of the Westbury Viaduct. The Westbury Viaduct, you could argue was a safe

crossing point, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else beyond, lower than that, for wildlife to cross this line. A less satisfactory approach, we think, would be to add high earth bunds and acoustic barriers and to separate the trains from horses entirely; and if necessary, to re-route bridal ways away from the track side.

276. So if we could move on to the next part of the petition. It’s road traffic noise. Let’s stay with that, road traffic noise. If we don’t lower the line by four metres, we are asking that the road which will then be four metres high and be a source of noise should be resurfaced with low-noise asphalt; that that should be maintained – or the cost of the maintenance of that which will be roughly double what it costs to maintain a normal asphalt road, that also should be borne by the promoter and we should have noise barriers alongside the road. But if you lower the line, you don’t need to do that.

277. Finally, a summary slide – I think we are there – Mixbury, a quite rural parish – and you won’t mind if I read from this will you? We are going to suffer 10 years of dirt, noise and disruption during the construction. We will be left with a devalued environment for the foreseeable future. The least we can expect is no money or effort is spared in mitigating all the effects of this invasion. The petition points to minimum measures which should be taken to soften the blow to the community. Thank you.

278. CHAIR: Thank you very much indeed. Mr Mould?

279. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I wonder if I could just ask Mr Miller to come into the middle just to respond on one or two points?

280. CHAIR: Okay.

281. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Here is a slide which shows the route as it passes through the area to the east of Mixbury. Very briefly, do you just want to put us into the context here, starting perhaps in the north with the Westbury Viaduct?

282. MR MILLER: Yes, the Westbury Viaduct, as has been indicated, crosses over the River Ouse, has taken account of the flood plain of the river and that’s shown on the Environment Agency’s maps, so we tried to keep that to the minimum distance. We put a 1.4 metre noise barrier looking at the noise contour at Westbury. We will come back to that perhaps. Then we go onto an embankment, but it’s an embankment which has

earth bunds either side, so it’s a false cutting in that situation, and we’ve just heard about the area where the gallops are, and the re-aligned bridal way which passes underneath the viaduct, just in front of the – or just to the north of the embankment there. Going further south, the route enters into a cutting and that goes up to about nine metres in depth. At its deepest, the train and the overhead line electrification is hidden; and there are various plans for landscaping, hedgerows and that sort of thing, along the line of the route. It is not easy to see it on this plan, I have to say.

283. Going further along, you get towards Hollow Barn where the land drops away and this is the area which you visited; we walked through Tibbetts Farm and down to the paddock there, and looked over to where the railway would be, looking across at Mossycorner Spinney and it’s there where there’s an embankment – I think that goes up to about 8 metres in height, and the petitioner has shown a fairly stake event on their photo montage. Going further south, there is a long length of cutting all the way through to the A421 London Road, and you’ve just heard about Featherbed Lane, how we’re going to tackle that. That cutting is up to 10 metres in depth, and again, associated with planting. A further bridal way across the route, just to the north of Tibbetts Farm, on that bridal way path – perhaps we’ll have a look at that in a little bit more detail – and there are various other crossings up to Widmore Farm. There’s another crossing there. I think that relates to the footpath, public rights of way and the bridal ways which are circular routes. I think we are broadly agreed that they are well- used and our evidence demonstrates that to be the case.

284. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Can we just deal with the question of noise. If we turn to P4643? The noise contours showing the extent of the LOAEL contours, so the extent of the land and property that falls within the lowest observed adverse effect contour?

285. MR MILLER: That’s right, that’s the grey contour.

286. MR MOULD QC (DfT): We see that the settlement of Mixbury falls outside the extent of the LOAEL Contour as shown by the arrow. There are I think three properties that are predicted to experience –

287. MR MILLER: Tibbetts Farm itself –

288. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Which is there –

289. MR MILLER: There’s a property that is just in the LOAEL Contour which is just there and just further to the south, property –

290. MR MOULD QC (DfT): That is Mr Howard’s property, who we are going to hear from later, I think?

291. MR MILLER: Yes, that’s right.

292. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And the bridal way that we were looking at earlier runs on the diagonal up and as we can see, passes just for a few hundred yards into the SOAEL contour?

293. MR MILLER: Yes, at the moment it cuts across on a diagonal going up towards Westbury and then it meets the rest of the footpath complex here.

294. MR MOULD QC (DfT): If we turn to the next page, I show this so that the Committee has a sense of the mitigation that is proposed along this section of the route, and we can see the provision of a 1.4 metre barrier on the east side of the Westbury Viaduct? And, the point was made earlier about the presence of a noise barrier to provide mitigation to Westbury and the absence of a corresponding barrier to provide mitigation to Mixbury. Can you just explain the logic of that?

295. MR BRUNTON: Would you like me to do that?

296. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Well, I’d like Mr Miller to do it!

297. MR BRUNTON: I didn’t see where you were looking!

298. MR MOULD QC (DfT): No, no.

299. MR MILLER: The logic of this, and actually it’s done quite well in the slides which the petitioner has shown, the change between the draft ES that we consulted on; and the final ES which included the barrier. The contour at the time for the draft ES, as you saw earlier when we flicked backwards and forwards, took the outer contour to the edge of the village of Westbury. What we’ve been trying to do with the line of the route is thread it through the landscape so we don’t have big effects on where people live. So, here it was felt because of the viaduct across the Ouse, the route we had consulted on, we looked again at mitigation response, and a 1.4 metre noise barrier is the sort of noise

barrier you see on the Medway Viaduct, when you visited that site. The effect of that is to bring that contour in.

300. When you look at Mixbury to the other side of the route, the route in fact is providing a very similar sort of effect; yes, it does capture a couple of those properties which we’ve just pointed out, but it avoids the main centre of the village itself, where most people live. So it’s still not without its problems and there are issues that we will come to in due course with properties within the LOAEL contour. We’ve looked at it, and if you put a barrier in, yes you might be able to bring that contour in a little bit, but it’s unlikely that we’ll avoid the effects on those three properties to any great extent. So it’s just that they’ll be in a different part of a moved contour, and the noise change is going to be very similar.

301. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Thank you. Now I’d like to visual matters, and for that I think we can put up 4640? We’re here looking at the area of the embankment, the 250 metre embankment, and this is the area referred to as Hollow Lane by the petitioners I think. If you just look along the line of section three we will come to in a minute, just tell us, is there existing vegetation along that line?

302. MR MILLER: Yes there is. If you look at it this way out, where it says ‘3B’ you are sort of in the middle of the Mossycorner Spinney, and I should say that that’s been recently identified on the Ancient Woodland Inventory. This is an action that the Woodland Trust intervened on and spoke to Natural England on the point – perhaps we will come back to that – but working away from the railway, the intervening vegetation is partly the woodland – and alongside the bridal way, and you’ll remember that we were standing somewhere around about here? Was it there or a bit further? A bit further back? Anyway, we saw the bridal way diving away, which people were concerned about because of the equine interest in this location. That followed a route which was diving down because this higher ground here, of a dry valley. In between, there is a Spinney in this triangle of land. Then you get the remnant of the Great Central Railway, which is a linear feature in the landscape, and that’s pretty well planted – or overgrown, I suppose. That’s all the way through there and runs not quite parallel to the railway. Then you get fields with various hedgerows and that sort of thing, coming back into the village centre.

303. MR MOULD QC (DfT): You mentioned that Mossycorner Spinney had been identified as a remnant piece of ancient woodland. Is the project looking at that and considering how it should respond to that?

304. MR MILLER: Yes.

305. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And the effect the railway has in relation to that feature?

306. MR MILLER: Yes, every time something else new comes onto the ancient woodland register, we have to have a think about that and what the response is, and as the Committee have heard, when we looked at ancient woodland, the response is normally, fairly large areas of land for woodland replanting. So we have to revisit this area in light of that ancient woodland being identified in this location. I think we had it down as showing ancient woodland characteristics, but now it’s deemed to be ancient woodland.

307. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I suppose given the points made by the petitioners, we just remind ourselves of the alignment of the bridal way that the petitioners were particularly concerned about. Is there a detailed design for planting there?

308. MR MILLER: What we think will happen in this area, and it’s fair to say that we haven’t talked this through with the landowner, so in absence of that discussion I can only give you an indication of what that might be. I think what you’ll see is an in-fill through this area here, and possibly in this area here. So the bridal way itself dives down and goes towards where the new railway will be. There’s woodland either side, as it dives down, and I think what will happen is that there’ll be, rather than just a hedgerow there along the line of the route, I think you’ll end up with more of block planting in that area, to compensate for the ancient woodland. As I say, it’s fairly early days on that at the moment, but you can see if you have that block of planting in there, then the visual screen, which as I understand it, is a fundamental part of the startle effect, where the horse has binocular vision and peripheral vision, that that gets that bridal way down into a fairly safe position visually and – not for noise, it’s not a noise screen – it gets you down to that point where we’re going up along the cutting to then cut over on the – it’s not on here, but the bridal way bridge that we just described.

309. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Just flash up 4639 just remind us of that?

310. MR MILLER: That’s it. So we are down here; where that second cross, where my pen is, that’s at the bottom of the Spinney which is in here. We think there’s probably planting that needs to go in here, and then the bridal way cuts across the railway up to the point where the bridal way bridge is of sufficient height to go over the cutting so the trains can go underneath. Then the bridal way cuts across the railway. Now, I think in looking at that woodland again, we take the opportunity to reinforce the planting so that avoids the startle effect. It is probably different compared to the others because you’re coming at it from an angle and you’re getting closer in to where the railway is. So, you’ve got some distance with the horse rider coming down that bridal way. I think maybe what we have to do is look at the bits of bridal way just along the line of the route, where it runs parallel to the route, and just think carefully what that screen looks like there. We would say 1.8 metres, but if it turns out to be something else, a bit higher, then so be it.

311. MR MOULD QC (DfT): This is the area of the route where the petitioners have suggested that consideration should be given to creating a green tunnel or lowering the line of the route considerably. Have we looked at the costs, in ballpark figures, of a green tunnel or the lowering of the route through this location?

312. MR MILLER: Yes we have, yes. Both of the scenarios would elevate the costs considerably. I think it is not quite 2.5 kilometres, for a cut and cover tunnel, reducing the height of the line through here – to give you an idea of what that would be, it’s probably about £150 million-plus. That’s to put a cutting in, then put a structure in and to fill back over. And if you were to do a cutting alone, getting the depth, then we are looking at something about £120-125 million, that sort of order.

313. MR MOULD QC (DfT): There are some slides in the package we’ve produced for Cherwell District Council, but I’m not going to take you to those now. The final point relates to Featherbed Lane, P4637? I’m sorry, it’s the next one – it’s 4638, I apologise. We’ve given assurances to the District Council and to the – and indeed to the Parish Meeting regarding the creation of a haul road, as is shown on that plan, which will enable us to limit the construction traffic that goes along Featherbed Lane. As the Committee heard earlier, there’s been a suggestion from the District Council as to how that assurance might be amended. But I just wanted you to tell the Committee what the current predicted construction traffic movements along Featherbed Lane are,

both in terms of numbers, duration and the purpose for which we would continue the need to make residual use of that route.

314. MR MILLER: Yes, we will need to use Featherbed Lane to get this site compound up and running, and that would be for a period of between eight and 12 weeks, and we will need to have a limited number of HGVs coming into that site, and we expect that to be no greater than about 20 per day, and also light vehicles, perhaps 25 to, I think, around about 30 per day. That’s necessary to get that site up and running and then, when we get that up and running, we can think about how that all – how the construction operates through here, and then that gets the traffic out of everyone’s hair, along Featherbed Lane. So there will be – I’m afraid there will be a little bit of disruption, but it’s necessary to make this all work as I think we’ve been discussing. I think we talked about this on the bridge here when we were out with the Committee. So our view is that I think we’ve done our best to make sure that works for you. I think it’s worth saying, it’s probably in the assurance anyway, but we don’t have any traffic going through the village as you were concerned about in you presentation, but then it all goes A421 along the haul route there.

315. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Thank you.

316. CHAIR: Do you have any questions of Mr Miller, Mr Brunton?

317. MR BRUNTON: Yes, I’m afraid so. First off I’d like to point out that we had to use those contour comparisons between the draft and full ES because we were told by HS2 they could not give us any other form of prediction about what noise barriers would do for us, so we did hope we would actually have a better idea of what noise barriers would do around the countryside, and the point I was basically making, throughout our presentation, was it’s not so much the noise in the centre of the village of Mixbury, it’s the noise that is going to limit our use of the countryside that is more of a problem. In particular for horses.

318. One or two things for Mr Miller perhaps: how do you move an ancient wood? Do you pick up the soil and put it back in the right order for instance? I’m just wondering how you move an ancient wood or how you can compensate for moving an ancient wood by planting another wood.

319. MR MILLER: Well I’ve given that answer in the past.

320. MR BRUNTON: Sorry.

321. MR MILLER: And just – I won’t go into the full answer, but just to broadly say what we would do. Where it is – we will have to take down the trees. We will look at root balling the trees that are cut down if they’re of a coppiced kind of variety. We will think about biodiversity in the soils and we’ll take care of the soils and we’ll move them to a suitable receptor site. That is generally in areas of low grade agricultural land alongside ancient woodlands. That’s the best – those are the circumstances where there has been some good degree of success on that, and my example is Cossington Woods on the A2-M2 widening scheme where all of this was carried out, and you can see the report online if you want to go into any greater detail than that.

322. MR BRUNTON: Okay.

323. MR MILLER: So we will do our best to look after the biodiversity of those soils and try and use that as a medium to provide the biodiversity. So it’s not replacing the ancient woodland, per se, it’s trying to replant the biodiversity. Obviously we’d have to wait a few hundred years for the woodland to come back.

324. MR BRUNTON: I shall do that. Another question about the costs of the cut and cover tunnel compared to the cutting, and how do those costs compare to the present cutting? I mean these are extra costs over and above what you would spend for the 9 metre deep cutting at the moment to go down to, say, 13 metres maximum depth?

325. MR MILLER: Yes, I believe that to be the case. I don’t know whether there’s anyone else better to deal with it…

326. MR BRUNTON: So you have to – you spend an extra £125 million to go down 4 metres over that length, roughly?

327. MR MILLER: Yes, what’s happening here is on the cut and cover type of arrangement you’ve got the cutting itself and the handling of the material. So you’re having to handle it and you’ve got to find space to handle it all, which would go to some considerable distance away from here, and then you’ve got to put the structure in and you’ve got to put it all back in again. So you’re handling material quite a lot and

you’ve got your structure going in, and those structures, over that distance, are quite complex, and again we have provided some technical evidence on that sort of thing in the past, so I won’t labour that. In terms of the deeper cutting here, perhaps I take it from the other way round, is trying to use material in a balance of the cut and fill, in so far as we are able to, along the line of the route, and that’s what we try and do. Either putting the material that we take out of the ground into earth filled embankments, or earth filled embankments and the sort of false cuttings, the bunds, and that sort of thing either side of the railway. That’s what we’ve elected to do.

328. MR BRUNTON: So replacing the viaduct with an embankment would help? In terms of balance.

329. MR MILLER: The – I wouldn’t disagree with what you say there. You’d obviously try and find other ways of using that material and our approach would be to try and use as much of that material, for good effect, as we practically could do so. There are differences of views on viaducts. It’s interesting that this local view is perhaps more akin to a preference for embankments. Elsewhere, Hampton-in-Arden is a good case, we’ve got an embankment there and the preference is to have an open view, so…

330. MR BRUNTON: Whatever HS2 suggest they get the opposite, do they?

331. MR MILLER: No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is we’ve taken this in the round, that’s what I’m saying to you.

332. MR BRUNTON: Yes.

333. MR MILLER: And we try to provide a balance of structure, cuttings and embankments, to good effect as our approach to use of materials along the line of the route. If you go to the cutting, the wider cutting, we have more material which ends up having to go off site, with the requisite traffic movements and additional costs, but that and landfill would –

334. MR BRUNTON: Could I just get back to those figures again, just to clarify things? Your two and a half kilometres of cut and cover tunnel will cost an extra £150 million plus?

335. MR MILLER: Yes.

336. MR BRUNTON: Yes? A similar length of extra cutting will cost – a 4 metres of extra cutting – will cost an extra £125 million…

337. MR MILLER: Yes, I believe that to be the case.

338. MR BRUNTON: Was that what I understood, yes?

339. MR MILLER: I believe that to be the case.

340. MR BRUNTON: So the difference of £25 million is the extra cost of putting all the material back, for the cut and cover tunnel…

341. MR MILLER: Oh sorry, between the cut and cover tunnel and the deep cutting? No, I suspect that’s probably down to the structure that you’ve got to provide.

342. MR BRUNTON: The piece of concrete that’s dropped in the bottom?

343. MR MILLER: Yes, there’s a lot of concrete.

344. MR BRUNTON: Yes. Okay. I don’t think I have any more questions for Mr Miller, thank you.

345. CHAIR: No? Okay. Brief final comments then Mr Brunton.

346. MR BRUNTON: My final comments really are, I’m afraid, I still think that we are worth spending the money. I think that HS2 should honour the commitments of various transport ministers who’ve said that mitigation will not be limited by costs, and I think their best mitigation is still to drop the line by four metres, and that all the other suggestions I have made really, I find, are secondary to that, and I believe that a proper costing of the effects of dropping the line really need to be made by HS2, to convince us how much extra money it will cost to do it.

347. The other thing is, of course, that the mitigation is for our countryside. It’s not for the village, not really. The village is, compared to many other places up the line, quite well off, to be honest. I would feel embarrassed to be here if it was purely for the village. But the village does use this area of countryside and, without further mitigation, we are cut off in a triangle between the A421, which can’t be crossed safely,

with a horse for instance, most of the time, and this HS2, which we are doubtful will be able to be crossed, unless something significant is done about green bridging it.

348. CHAIR: Okay, thank you very much indeed.

349. MR BRUNTON: Okay.

350. CHAIR: Thank you.

351. MR BRUNTON: Thank you.

352. CHAIR: We will get HS2 to send us your little bit in your presentation for the noise. Perhaps we can hear it in our office.

353. MR BRUNTON: That would be very nice.

354. CHAIR: That’ll give us a treat another day.

355. MR BRUNTON: Admittedly it was a TGV, and no doubt technology will have moved on, but certainly the expectation is that trains through on HS2 will be going a great deal faster. Thank you.

356. CHAIR: Alright. Finmere Parish Council.

Finmere Parish Council

357. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: That aside was to your Clerk who very kindly managed to spell my name correctly. Unfortunately, when I submitted my petition, my signature was obviously unclear. I trust that my presentation will be less confusing. There are only two of us in the world. There used to be four, but the others got married to escape the name. Thank you very much indeed.

358. I represent Finmere Parish Council, which is slightly bigger than Mixbury. It is a Parish Council. It’s a fully constituted one. We have more than one meeting a year. We are part of Cherwell District, in the Banbury and North Oxfordshire Constituency. It’s called either. Finmere itself has an electorate of 386. Cherwell, the district in which it lives, has an electorate of around 100,000. The constituency has around 84,000 and Oxfordshire itself is around 600,000. There are four parishes in Oxfordshire that are directly affected by the implementation of HS2. Their total electorate is under

700. 0.1% of the whole of Oxfordshire. So we’re very small beer when it comes to the county level, unlike Buckinghamshire and South Northamptonshire and the like. It’s a very quiet, tranquil and pleasant part in which to live, and it is prosperous. Unemployment in the constituency is under 1%.

359. Now, if we look at the map of the HS2 as it’s provided, we see that it is, on the chainage, which I presume represents with a plus 100, 200 and so on and so forth, I presume they represent kilometres. We are 90 kilometres from London, and 85 kilometres from Birmingham. So we’re effectively in the middle so, to be able to use the train, we’ve got to go almost as far as anybody in either direction to catch the darn thing. So the benefit to our small area, the 0.1% of the electorate of Oxfordshire, is virtually none in terms of access. In terms of employment and opportunity, there is very little it can gain given that there’s only 0.8% of our population are registered unemployed, and we’re not in the north, south. So as far as the advantages of the HS2 project to our 0.1% of the electorate are concerned, they are very, very small, if not zero.

360. Now when the project first came out, just under five years ago, we were obviously taken aback by it. First thing I heard of it was phone call from the local radio station, saying, ‘What are you going to do about this railway line through your back garden?’ We got some consolation – when we realised what it was going to do, we were obviously alarmed, but we took some consolation from Secretary of State Hammond who said, and I quote, ‘I am determined that we will do everything possible to try and reduce the impact of the line.’ Okay, that was a try. Subsequently your current Secretary of State, Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin, in the draft Environmental Statement of July 2013, said, ‘We must ensure that everything possible is done to mitigate the impacts of HS2 on people and the landscape.’

361. Could you move on to slide number two, please. Sorry, I’ve got to keep tabs with this as well. We also studied the various documents that came out from HS2. Not all of them, I hasten to add. There were rather a lot. But the review of Route Selection Speed, dated January 2012, section 3.1 page 12, paragraph 3.1.3, bullet point 1, to be precise, said that they outlined four principles and said they were to, ‘Avoid, or where this was not practical, to mitigate direct or indirect harm to the communities, the landscape, water and ecological resources, and to maximise opportunities to such

features.’ So we’re looking on the basis of everything possible must be done and, wherever possible, to avoid, if not, ‘Mitigate direct or indirect harm to communities and landscape.’ To the next slide please.

362. So we were looking at the process – when we were involved with the consultations that were taking place with respect to HS2 we were trying to look at the impact of construction, and the impact in operation. Obviously construction will be a short – a relatively short term thing. Operation, like a puppy, is for life, and the discussions and communications to date, relating to the engagement and the environmental statement consultation – I apologise for saying this if you have already heard it before, but they weren’t of the best quality. The community forums were interesting. We had a lot of information given to us. We felt that we did not have much opportunity to ask our questions and get satisfactory questions to the – answers to the questions that we were posing. Also, it was frustrating that the community forums ceased just before the Environmental Statements came out, because most of our petitioning topics are related to subjects that were only made aware, directly aware to us, and the consequent scale of them, in the Environmental Statements.

363. However, in the petition response reply, page 7, it talked about the, ‘Consultation was in compliance’ with a whole load of guidelines, conventions and so on and so forth, and I have no doubt that that is the case. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were good. They were just in compliant. If we could move on to the next slide please, which is the first – one of our first petitioning points, which was road closure during construction, and this has largely been addressed, in as much as you have made us a proposal which is acceptable to Cherwell Council, Finmere Parish, I think, although I haven’t had time to speak to them about it, and also to Mixbury Parish, about the alternative route for Featherbed Lane or Fulwell Lane. We welcome this. One small p.s. to that, opposite – so south side of the road – there is a large landfill site which has been with us for some 20 years. We found it absolutely paramount, given there was a haul road from that landfill site to the main road, that adequate wheel washing facilities were installed on the entrance and exit to that site, because of the amount of mud and stuff that was being deposited on the roads, and I hope that would be a condition of the implementation of a haul road which, of course, would not have been the case had they been using the tarmacked Featherbed Lane.

364. Now the reason – one of the reasons that we were concerned about the road closure during construction is that the traffic that was – that currently uses that road would be diverted and the routes for diversion were sent through Finmere. Finmere, on entrance to it, you may see a sign saying, ‘Unsuitable for HGVs’. Well, you would do, except that it was knocked completely skywards by an HGV that came round the corner. Such is life. But nonetheless, an increase in HGV traffic, purely by virtue of diversion of the existing traffic following the closure of Featherbed Lane, was of concern for us by virtue of the roads that we currently have. Unimportant country lanes.

365. Now I’ll return to that a little bit later, if I may, but the diversion that you were proposing through our village was wholly impractical. It was going past the village school, which serves a multitude of villages around, so there’s a lot of traffic morning and evening. The road surface is poor and, as I’m sure you’re aware, once a road starts to deteriorate the speed of deterioration accelerates. So we were seeking, once it was over, a resurfacing of the road to a standard that would be suitable for ongoing use, post construction, but resurfacing as oppose to repair. We’ve all seen what the repairs are like and how long they last. Right, having – I’ll move off of that, but I will make a couple of references a bit later on. If I move onto the next slide please, the construction traffic.

366. Now this is a rather busy slide I’m afraid. First of all, again, we welcome the agreements made with Cherwell District Council with respect of motorway junction 11 and the area surrounding it. That’s a plus. Our concern is more with the non- construction traffic. If I may explain: The picture you have in front of you shows the various numbers of HGV journeys - that’s each one of those represents a two-way journey, not a one-way journey – in a 10 hour working day for a period of around two years, give or take, along those various roads. So on the A421, which is currently highlighted, there will be 855 or so. On the A422 there will be 1,140. The other A422 it will be 1,145, and the A361 there’s another 1,095, and four community forum areas all have their traffic – HGV traffic – converging on those two junctions, 10 and 11, along with the A43.

367. Now those numbers – obviously, what’s a number? That is the midpoint of the range of numbers quoted in the CFA document. It is not the upper number, and I have

not used that. I have taken the mean at each case. Also, I have not included the additional car and light goods vehicle journeys that were also put in there. Those are merely the HGV journeys. In the case of the A421, if you go back that’s the one that’s got 855, there are somewhere between 650 and 1,240 more two-way journeys per 10 hour working day scheduled as a result of the work that’s going on there. Now the consequence of that is that there’s going to be an incredible increase in the amount of traffic going east to west along the A421, and east to west along the A422. So those are two on the extreme right of your screen. The ones where the box is, 1,140 and 855. Now that’s going to mean that while the HGVs may be regulated by routing agreements, all the others won’t be and nor will any of the traffic that isn’t HS2 construction. So the consequences are, as human nature is, as night follows day, all the other traffic will seek a route past those pinch points, where the A421 meets the A423 and where the A422 meets the… it’s going to be quite busy. And the logical progression from that is that the road, the small unimportant country roads, down which the Featherbed Lane traffic was going to be diverted, will now feel considerable extra burden of traffic as a result of non-construction traffic trying to – non-construction HGV traffic, trying to seek a way through this particular area.

368. It also should be pointed out that I learned recently that the A421 is one of the primary relief roads, should there be a major blockage on the M40 between either junctions 9 and 10 or 10 and 11, and that is one of the primary diversion routes. It is also the primary diversion route for the A43 when Silverstone is in operation every year, for a four-day period. So the traffic, we believe, is going to be very, very severe. Again, we will see the generation of rat runs in vast numbers as a result of this, particularly between the A421 and the A422, and, as a consequence, these unimportant country lanes that we manage – with which we manage at the moment, will be deteriorating, and the deterioration will accelerate. So again, we are seeking a commitment that once the work is over some resurfacing is done, rather than repair.

369. If we could move to the next slide please, that is a photograph of Finmere at night. Because North Oxfordshire is dark. Now we had no response to our petition on light pollution, save a restatement and a quote from the Code of Construction Practice and one particular special document, ED5 I think it was. There will be three floodlit compounds within a mile of Finmere: One at Newton Purcell, one at Warren Farm, and

one at Featherbed Lane. Now at the turn of the century a proposal was received by Aylesbury Vale District Council, whose authority it fitted, to put a car storage site at the junction of the A421 and the A4421. This was rejected, and the rejection was sustained on appeal, and one of the grounds for rejection was the fact that they were intending to floodlight the place with security lights, overnight, every night, and that the presence of those lightings would be severely detrimental to the night sky. So given that there is some history here, we would very much like some alternatives, and I feel sure that - I understand that Mixbury received a comment that they will do their best they can. But we’d like to know what those possibilities are, because it is quite – that is how – that is a photograph, as I say.

370. Okay, if we move on please. Barn owls. Might seem silly, and it’s slightly ironic. The Environmental Statement acknowledges the fact that barn owl’s population within one and a half kilometres of the line, on each side, is likely to be obliterated by virtue of – they’ll be displaced or they’ll be caught by train strike, and we saw that the HS2, sorry, the undertaker, is seeking arrangement with landowners. We were anxious that those arrangements be absolutely cast iron, or an alternative be provided, and we suggested that if in the event that insufficient arrangements were made with landowners to accommodate the displacement, that some off-site – some contribution to an off-site location be made to provide alternative – bit like putting another wood somewhere else. In a similar manner to that. We’re looking for a much greater – but I’ve got – ironically, about a week before HS2 was announced, I was given a barn owl box to plant, and of course I haven’t put it up because I live very close to the line. However, that’s just bad luck. Move onto the next slide please.

371. The profile of the proposed line. Finmere lies on a plateau, that’s why it’s got an airfield. A wartime airfield. It has a landfill mound to the south. That landfill mound has got – is a mixed blessing. Perhaps it’s a mixed curse. We are downwind to the proposed line and so, consequently, the profile of the line will have consequences in several areas: specifically road and train noise, and also road safety on the A421. The next slide please, I think. Yes. Now, we see from the maps that the A421 is elevated by 4.3 metres, to an artificial crest at Warren farm, which is above the existing hedge lines.

372. CHAIR: Carry on.

373. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Okay, cheers. Now the landfill site itself is currently being restored and covered. As a consequence, there are a number of heavy bits of machinery running around on the northern flank of it, which is our side of it, moving earth around and putting down various soil, trees and plastic covers. The noise from those vehicles, as they’re running up and down the mountain, they’re bulldozers and the like, is certainly not inaudible. It may not match the magic numbers that appear in the documents we were sent, but it’s certainly – we can certainly hear it and, of course, the presence of a large landfill mound acts as a bit of a sound reflector for anything on the northern side of it.

374. On top of that, the A421 in a previous history, in the 80s and 90s, was actually the B4031. Again, that’s relevant in a couple more slides time. But the B4031 was upgraded to the A421 around 1998 and, in so doing, they filled a dip in the B4031 just to the east of the proposed crest. Now it was very interesting because, at that time, when vehicles which were travelling along the B4031 – and it took quite a significant amount of HGV traffic, even though it was a B road – when they went down into the dip the sound of their engines, and their passing, was greatly diminished, only to be restored when they came back out the other side of the dip, some 80, 100 yards further to the east, or west. It’s very, very noticeable. As soon as they filled in the dip, the noise was constant. Because there was nothing to get in the way. They’d raised the road up, so the sound came up with it.

375. Now, if you raise the A421 by four metres, a little bit further to the west, you’ll be lifting all the vehicles, with their consequent engine noise and the tyre noise, to above the hedge lines that are currently there. There are some hedges there, which do provide a measure of protection, even in winter. But if you lift the vehicles above that, the noise will be much greater than it currently is. Again, it might not make the magic numbers, but nonetheless it will be a great deal louder than it is at the moment. Now if you lower the line - it’s a completely different reason for lowering the line than that’s been proposed so far – that would remove that particular problem. Failing that, the alternative is if it is absolutely essential that the line has to be done, we would formally request that we have an SMA type – SMA is a technical time for the quiet tarmac. The maintenance costs of which are significantly greater. So if that was the case it would be not unreasonable for a commuted sum to be made available to the Highways Authority

so that they can continue to maintain the SMA surface so that the relative silence was preserved.

376. If you could move to the next slide, please. The train noise. We checked with HS2 and asked specifically – we’ve confirmed that the catenary is 8 metres above the track, but the cutting, at the A421, is about 5.1 metres deep. So the catenary and the wires and some moving parts will be – nearly 3 metres worth of it – will be above the track. The noise barrier is four metres above the track, so in fact, even though it’s in a – it will only be – it will be below the level of the ground. So again, we’re saying our solution again, in this respect for train noise, is to lower the line. If that proves to be impossible, to raise and extend the noise barrier so it will reduce the amount of noise that we get. The next slide please.

377. The road safety on the A421. Now, to this – subsequent to depositing my exhibits, I received the exhibits from HS2, which included one which was, I think, P4593, let’s bring that up. The third paragraph talks about, ‘The Promoter is realigning the A421 to allow it to pass over HS2 on an improved vertical alignment.’ I’m not quite sure what that means, if it doesn’t mean lowering the line. I’d like some clarification of that, if I may. But, ‘Improved vertical align…’ I can appreciate the horizontal alignment, but it’s the vertical alignment that makes – that puzzles me. To go back, my exhibit number – it was the second – well, the maps at the back of – well I haven’t got them – B4031 at Warren Farm, which it was at the time in 1998 – if you could move on to the next slide, that will be number 12, okay? Right, now that slide there, if you could move your cursor – yes, that’s it, right in the middle. Lovely. Okay, now prior to the upgrading to the A421, the B4031 was dead straight, and the Grand Central Railway ran under a bridge that was at Warren Farm, although that railway line, within the cutting which you’ll be excavating, was filled in as part of the landfill project. When they upgraded the A421 to – sorry, the B4031 to the A421 in 1998 they actually put a small kink in the road such that the original bridge, and the walls on it, are still visible. The proposal now will re-establish the A421 along the line of the original B4031, i.e. dead straight. But it will still be elevated, unless this, ‘Improved vertical alignment’ proves me wrong. But if that was the case there would be this artificial crest.

378. Now, given that in 1998, and therefore 1998 and all times before it was dead

straight, and the condition of permission for converting Warren Farm into multiple housing was that the entrance be stopped up and moved 600 yards to the west, to improve for reasons of highway safety. I find it difficult to see that the entrance is being restored to its original position. Especially with the introduction of a crest. It strikes me as strange. My slide number – I presume it’s the last – it’s on my slides, the very last one – can you go the very last one please? I’m sorry. Keep going. There’s a couple of others. 15 and 16. The one preceding that one. And that one, sorry. Number 2. AA22, number 2. That’s it. Section 4, at the bottom, there you go: ‘Before the proposed access is first used the existing main farm access shall be permanently stopped up and shall not be used by any vehicular traffic whatsoever in the interests of highway safety.’ The road was a B road at that time. It was straight. It is now going to become an A road, which is also straight, but they’re restoring the access. We find this very difficult to understand. We seek some clarification. We fully accept that the Highways Authority will be the final arbiter, but nonetheless, it strikes us as anomalous that we’re going back to the status quo and we’re restoring – we’re reversing that particular condition. Fine, if you can now go back to number 13, which I suspect will be thrown out.

379. My real point on there is that we’re going to – we are parish – we are residents – we are all taxpayers as well. It is our taxpayers’ money that is being spent. We’d like to know exactly how much it’s going to be. But beyond that, I’ll say no more, because – out of respect to you. Move on to my summary, which I may, which is 14. HS2 – it is very difficult to see if HS2 brings any benefits to the parish and its surroundings. There will be an impact on the area during construction. There will also be an impact in operation.

380. Given that two Secretaries of State have said they would do everything possible to mitigate the effect and impact on us, we ask that you fix the roads when you’ve finished, you turn off the lights when you’re there, at night, you pay up for the barn owls, or make sure that they’re safe, you lower the line and restore the balance. And our request to HS2 is please talk with us. Talk to us. We’ve had no conversations whatsoever with HS2 since the Environmental Statement came out. So please talk with us, and not to us. Thank you very much.

381. CHAIR: Okay, thank you very much. Mr Mould.

382. MR MOULD QC (DfT): If we could put up P4656. I’ll try and deal with the points as they’ve come up. It’s in the Cherwell exhibits. This is a slide which shows the proposals to route HS2 traffic along the strategic road network in the area of this part of Oxfordshire. You can see the M40, the A43, and then the A421 and the A422 respectively feeding off the A43. Finmere is just to the north of the A421 and, as we know, to the east of the railway line and, just to orientate ourselves, Featherbed Lane is just to the right of the A421 notation. I’ve explained already this afternoon, or rather Mr Miller has, the limited use that we need to make of that road under the arrangements that we have given assurances about to Cherwell and to Mixbury, which you’ve heard.

383. Now the Scheme, having assessed traffic effects on that strategic road network, is predicting that the – all of those strategic routes will operate within capacity, and that the HS2 traffic should therefore be able to be accommodated, within capacity, on that strategic road network, and that the fear of rat running due to vehicles being forced to find alternative routes, by definition that is not expected to arise. So that is the response to that.

384. In relation to the question of repairing carriageways, in the event that they are damaged due to the passage of HS2 construction vehicles, I think the Committee knows from all the way back from the Warwickshire County Council petition that there are provisions, under paragraphs 15 to 17 in Schedule 31 to the Bill, which make arrangements for the repair of the existing road network, where such is needed to remedy damage caused by HS2 construction traffic.

385. Turning to the question of surfacing, a more local point was raised about using a particular type of quiet surface for new sections of highway taking existing roads across the railway line on overbridges. The position is that the noise assessment that we’ve carried out is not predicting that any significant adverse noise is likely to be caused to the settlement of Finmere as a result of the creation and operation of the overbridge over the A421 and, for that reason, we don’t expect to need to install any particular type of surfacing. But, of course, if our detailed negotiations and discussions with the local Highway Authority lead to a conclusion that some special surfacing is needed, then that is something that would be dealt with under the detailed arrangements of the Bill.

386. Turning to the question of light pollution, in fact the response to the Mixbury

Parish Council petition on that issue, that they, as you know, pronounced themselves, ‘Satisfied with’ is in exactly the same terms as the response that we have given to the Finmere Parish Council. The only difference is that they had a particular concern about an autotransformer express feeder station, which we dealt with in response to them. No such concern arises in relation to Finmere so, by definition, we don’t address that. But that response, in a nutshell, drew attention to paragraph – to a particular section in the Code of Construction Practice, Section 5.4, the gist of which is that the nominated undertaker will be expected to take all – take appropriate and reasonable steps so as to limit the spread of light from construction sites. I can also say that we do not expect any of the construction sites in the locality of Finmere to need to be operated on a 24 hour basis, and we do not expect, therefore, to need to light those sites during the hours of – during the night time hours. They will continue to need to be lighted obviously into the evening, but save perhaps for immediate security measures lighting during the night time hours will be kept to the reasonable minimum.

387. In terms of noise, if I just show you the noise contour sweep series for Finmere. That begins at P4594. Finmere is the settlement in the centre of this slide. You can see a number of assessment points to the west of the village. I also draw attention to the assessment point which is intended to be representative of the residential development at Warren Farm, which the petitioner mentioned. That’s 277 403. If we then turn the page we can see at 4595 the noise contours, and you can see that the LOAEL contour is to the west of the main settlement of Finmere. True it is that we are predicting significantly adverse noise effects on those residential premises, I think there are nine of them, at Warren Farm, and that is the effect of the notation, ‘OSV14-CO1’ and that prediction is based upon the change in noise levels resulting from the operation of the railway, and it’s attendant infrastructure, which you see, in tabular form, at P4597 and the – you can see that for third line down in the table of 277403 that’s the representative assessment point for Warren Farm, and you can see we’re predicting an increase, during the daytime, of 5 decibels over existing. The ambient noise levels for the railway and road and, indeed, the predicted noise environment overall, is within the – within the LOAEL contours. But those are properties which, for the reasons I’ve given, are identified as suffering a significant adverse effect.

388. Turning then finally I think to – no, penultimately – to the overbridge. If we just

put up P4590, the overbridge to which the petitioner referred is identified in the middle of the slide, and you can see the new access point that is proposed for the Warren Farm properties, just to the east of the railway line, with access on to the approach to the overbridge. The overbridge will be designed so that there is a gentle approach on both sides of the road, which enables the bridge itself to be constructed on the level, over the railway line, and the position with regard to the safety of that proposed access point to serve Warren Farm is as shown on the slide, which is at P4591. Provided that – I’m so sorry, that’s not the right one, 4593.

389. Provided that forward visibility can be achieved to serve that access, in full compliance with highway design standards, then the Highway Authority are content with that access point. We are able to achieve those standards, and therefore we are confident that that access can be provided in a way that is satisfactory, will satisfy the requisite road safety audits, and will satisfy the requisite approval of the – or secure the requisite approval of Oxfordshire County Council as the Highway Authority and, as I have mentioned a moment ago, the noise assessment included an assessment of the likely noise effects of the railway and of the road as it passes over that location, and that is reflected in the noise contours that you saw before you a few moments ago.

390. Finally, barn owls. We have, within 1.5 kilometres of the railway line, in this community forum area, area 14, we have four nests that we are aware of. Our proposed mitigation is to provide new nesting boxes in locations that are over 1.5 kilometres away from the railway, and to negotiate agreements for the siting of those nest boxes with landowners and with wildlife trusts and so forth, and we are confident that we will be able to deliver on that mitigation satisfactorily, as part of the detailed design and delivery of the railway. I think I’ve covered all the points.

391. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: On the barn owls, presumably the danger period is not particularly during the construction, it’s when the railway’s running? So if the railway – if construction – assuming the Bill gets royal assent…

392. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes.

393. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: There’s plenty of time to actually provide them more attractive – replacement attractive sites for them?

394. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes, yes, and that’s a route-wide strategy on the part of the Project, which is set out in the Environmental Statement.

395. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: My personal experience is that barn owls can be remarkably stupid in going on trying to nest in places that aren’t very good for them.

396. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I’m afraid I can’t comment on that. I have no personal experience of barn owls at all. But hopefully we can educate them to some degree.

397. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Put up a sign.

398. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes, exactly. Unless there’s anything else on that?

399. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: No, no.

400. CHAIR: Brief final comments please.

401. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Well, it would appear that all of our things are not a problem. All of our concerns. Traffic isn’t a problem, there’s not going to be any traffic jams, you’re not going to have any SMA, the light pollution, fair enough, okay if it’s – you’re going to – I was under the impression it was going to be severely lit 24 hours a day. I’m relieved at that. It’s not going to be noisy. The overbridge is going to be okay, and the barn owls are going to be saved. I wish I was a barn owl, because I – if you live 121 metres away from HS2 you don’t get a new house. If you’re a barn owl, you do.

402. MR MEARNS: I think you should be careful though, because Sir Peter’s just pointed out they’re quite stupid.

403. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Quite honestly, to some extent I feel rather stupid, having come all this way, and to be told all my fears that I’m trying to represent on behalf of my parishioners are to no avail, and…

404. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Hold on for a moment – that wasn’t what was said.

405. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: No –

406. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: It’s not the impression you should have.

407. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Well, I’m disappointed because –

408. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Just for the sake of sort of, you know, my sense of balance. If the previous road access wasn’t safe, because you didn’t have the sight lines, and if now there will be the sight lines, that is actually taking the point you took seriously.

409. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: I quite agree, sir. But with all due – I must say that prior to – the B4031 was flat and straight. It is now going to be flat and nearly straight, and it’s going to be an A road. And it had to be moved for the previous incarnation…

410. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: We listened the first time.

411. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: I’m sorry. It’s just disappointing. I also find – by the way, your map on P4656 has got the A422 incorrect. It isn’t the A422. You’ve got the A43 on that one.

412. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I’m sorry.

413. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: No, no, it’s alright, it’s not a problem, and I appreciate that all – you will certainly make good all the damage that is done by HS2 traffic as per Warwickshire. This I understand. I am concerned that if the traffic does tend to be a little bit more busy than your current expectations, and we do have rat runs, and the non-HS2 traffic does cause the non-important country roads, who is going to fix them and when? That is my concern. I mean it’s a matter of expectation. I expect it to be worse than you do. Which is fair enough. But we will have to suffer the consequences of it and, as I said in my opening part, we’re getting nothing out of this whatsoever. We couldn’t be further away from a station. We’re not going to have our employment fixed, and we’re not in the north south. So we get absolutely nothing. But our taxes will have to pay for it, and I feel very disappointed that we haven’t got something out of this.

414. MR MEARNS: Well, I think – I can understand your frustration, but you’ve heard the line of the Promoter, but we are not the Promoter, you know. We have the duty to determined what the outcome should be after this has finished. So what you’ve

heard is the line from the Promoter. We’ve got to deliberate about what we’ve heard from both sides now, okay?

415. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Okay, well fine. At least you know the strength of my feelings.

416. MR MEARNS: Indeed.

417. CLLR KERFORD-BYRNES: Thank you very much indeed for your time.

418. CHAIR: Thank you for the time, thank you. We now have Newton Purcell Parish Meeting. You know what the form is now.

Newton Purcell Parish Meeting and Mr Patrick Clarke

419. MR CLARKE: Yes, sir. Is the form to finish at 5.00 p.m.?

420. CHAIR: No…

421. MR CLARKE: Till 7.00 p.m.?

422. CHAIR: Possibly 6.00 p.m.

423. MR CLARKE: Okay, so I’ll just carry on.

424. CHAIR: Yes, a little bird told me you might be 40 minutes. Is that sort of where you’re likely to be?

425. MR CLARKE: It’s my best guess so far.

426. CHAIR: Because you have rather a lot of slides, which were starting to worry me a bit earlier.

427. MR CLARKE: Well, I don’t really speak PowerPoint, so I haven’t taken that approach.

428. CHAIR: Okay.

429. MR CLARKE: What I’ve done is I prepared, in the middle of last week, a submission that I can talk around, over about 15 pages, and two exhibits. The first

exhibit was a chronological bundle of correspondence that I’ve had about engagement, and the second exhibit, my exhibit B, was a list of HS2 documents that I will be referring to.

430. CHAIR: Okay.

431. MR CLARKE: From the Environmental Statement. I think the best approach, I might suggest, is to have the submissions in hard copy and to look at the maps on screen, rather than put the submission on screen, to work at all. Now you should have, I called it an exhibit, exhibit A836. Which is my outline submission for today. And I’m here – I mean there’s no real distinction between me being here for myself or Newton Purcell Parish Meeting. The reason I put both in was just in case there was some point taken about jurisdiction or standing, or whatever that might be. So the point doesn’t arise.

432. If we go to paragraph 8 of that submission, on page 3, those are the five main headings that I wanted to go through today. The first is the lack of any mitigation whatsoever of the proposed railway, on the north east side of the line in Newton Purcell, and I think that’s going to take the bulk of the time, because that’s where we have the issue of principle. The following three are largely, but not entirely, use of detail which Cherwell District Council can pick up at detailed planning stage, and those are the lack of mitigation on the re-routed A4421, the mitigation of the railway on the south west side of the line, which has most of the houses in the village, albeit most of those are further away, construction issues and, finally, and this is not a point of detail, design compensation.

433. Now I can set out where I’ve got to on the first issue in particular. I don’t know what the issues really are with HS2, because I’ve never had any detailed response to anything I’ve said, and I’ve said what I’m about to say to you several times over the past few years.

434. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is it worth just having a quick look at a map, just so we’ve got clear in our minds…

435. MR CLARKE: Yes, well that was the first thing I was going to do, and I’m just hoping technology works. This is exhibit B. But the matter I’d like to go to is in the

Environmental Statement Map Book for CFA 14. The budget didn’t stretch to pagination, but it’s map number CT06060B. I’m hoping this works, because I’ll struggle otherwise. Excellent, thank you. So here we have – and it’s really on the left hand side of this map where you have Newton Purcell. Most of the houses in the village are just cut off at the bottom of the map, that’s the south side of the line, and you’ll see the existing A4421 as a number of houses leading up to the route of the line.

436. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Just on the right hand side of that, just down from that, I think, aren’t they?

437. MR CLARKE: Yes, so this is the existing route of the A4421. Then we have the north side of the line, where there are two houses close by and other houses are much further away. And that shows you – we’re going to left of the re-routing of the road, because I think, it would be next to impossible to build this line and keep this road open, and there will be a long closure and I think that’s the thinking behind the re-routing, is to allow the road to remain open.

438. So, taking through those – take us through those issues, quickly, we can see that the north of the line, so on top of the line here, we can see – we can see from the key below, there is a line of what they call, ‘landscape mitigation planting’, that goes across the top of the line, and there is a gap where the existing road is, so there’s no mitigation planting there and that’s adjacent to the houses, one of which is mine, so I declare that interest very early on.

439. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Sorry, you’re the –?

440. MR CLARKE: I am, if we move the arrow up, slightly, up, up, yes, stop. That’s where I am. We’ll see another map shortly where it’s highlighted in green. But you’ll see – the main point I’ll come back to is on that north side of the line, there is no mitigation whatsoever, there is no noise fence, there’s no earthworks, there’s no planting, no nothing. And that’s quite a confusing state of affairs.

441. South side of the line, you can see there is, obviously, recognition in principle, that we need mitigation, because you’ll see that there’s a purple line there which is the noise fence barrier, and we’ll see to the left and the right of the main road, there is substantial earthworks. So really, the issues south of the line for the mitigation of the line itself are

going to be performance issues and that is of detail. The principle has been established that mitigation is required.

442. The third issue is we obviously have the diverted road, which creates its own problems, particularly south of the line, as the traffic is now driving facing into the village, and there are concerns about the mitigation of that, but from the correspondence I’ve seen between Cherwell District Council and HS2, HS2 recognise, ‘in principle’, that mitigation has to be addressed for that road and so there is not so much to say about that; it’s a detailed design issue rather than a issue of principle.

443. CHAIR: Yes.

444. MR CLARKE: Construction issues don’t arise on this map and compensation is compensation. So, with regard to the mitigation of the north side of the line, where there’s nothing at the moment, and albeit there are only a few houses there, I wonder if I might first refer to, again, to another Environmental Statement document, which is the Community Forum Area Report. So, yes, again CFA14, is out of Brackley, it’s ES 3.2.1.14. Thank you. And it’s section 9.5 of that. Sorry, 9.4, if you could go to page 160 please. Now, the bottom of page 160, well, we’ll have to take these in order, we’ll go to the photograph in a minute; we have above paragraph 9.4.37, reference to viewpoint 170.2.001, which is looking southwest from residential property on Buckingham Road, north of Newton Purcell, so this is looking north down at the top of the line.

445. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is this roughly the same one as P4604? It may flash up; I’m not expecting you to know. P4606 is in your bundle.

446. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes, it corresponds pretty closely to that.

447. MR CLARKE: Yes, that’s what I’ve done. It is that, because that’s been lifted from the Environmental Statement. And I’ll come to that in a second; I’m just going through the assessment first and then the photograph.

448. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: I’m just trying to – this is roughly where you are?

449. MR CLARKE: It is, it is exactly where I am.

450. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Okay, thanks. Sorry to interrupt you.

451. MR CLARKE: Not at all, not at all. So, if we go back to the narrative, and look at the assessment, what we have here at 9.4.37 is the assessment of the temporary effect of the construction of the line. I may as well go straight to the punch line which is at 9.4.38 on the following page, where it says, ‘The high magnitude of change assessed alongside the high sensitivity of the receptor’ – I think ‘receptor’ is person living there, ‘Will result in major adverse effects’. So there’s a construction issue there, there’s a temporary major adverse effect.

452. So, if we look at the permanent effects and go on in this document to page 183 please. And it’s the bottom of page 183, so it’s again, the same view point, 170.2.001, and we go to the next page, 184, to look at HS2’s conclusions, from 9.5.49 onwards, so I say it again, take a winter view and a summer view, look at the photo montage in a second, but in summer, this is – when we’ve just finished the line, ‘The magnitude effect is considered to remain high and as such, will also result in a major adverse effect. By year 15 of operation, there will be noticeable change in the view, as a result of maturing vegetation and the assessment will reduced to medium, resulting in a moderate adverse effect, and that moderate adverse effect is from year 15 to year 60, you can see from 9.5.52. So we have a major effect at construction, reducing to moderate as the planting takes hold and or become – sorry, reducing to medium as the plating takes hold, goes to moderate after 60 years.

453. And finally, if we can go to page 202 of this document please. So this is the summary, where HS2 are effectively saying, ‘Look, we’ve done what we think we can, you’re going to like it or lump it, this is what’s left over and we don’t think we can do anything about it’. So, it’s the first bullet point here, ‘There will be residual effects on views from the northern resident edge of Newton Purcell, due to the influence of the Buckingham Road overbridge, noise fence barriers, trains and overhead line equipment.

454. Now, the reason why there’s an adverse effect from noise fence barriers, is because there’s a noise fence barrier on the other side of the line. So we only have it one side of the line, so that will – we’ll have to look at the back of it, and it’ll bank the noise straight up north of the line, so it’s not going to help at all, in fact the opposite. But this, as we see above, is something they can’t do anything about, because no other

mitigation measures are considered practical, so this seems to be the line. We can’t mitigate here, because it’s not practicable, and I have to say that all of this is to do with the visual eyesore of the line. Noise is a further and separate issue.

455. So, if then we can go to the photograph, and I think if you still have the reference and photograph you went to before.

456. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: P4604.

457. MR CLARKE: We can see – this is actually – this is the later version – there is an earlier version of this photograph we can go to in a second; so this is the best it’s ever going to look. We can see, we look down the road – this is now effectively a country lane, so this will take the traffic into the villages of Chetwode and Barton Hartshorn. First thing they’re going to do is encounter this. We can see the bridge on the side where the arrow is helpfully pointing, and straight ahead, we have this gap in any mitigation, so we can see the railway in all its glory. Because it’s not practical to do anything else. My first point is to challenge that practicability. So, if we can go back to the original drawing we had, which is was the CT06060b, from the map book. Thank you. I don’t know if it’s possible to enlarge that section around those balancing ponds. I’m grateful, thank you.

458. So, there are a number of points to make on this gap, at the top of this line here. Because as I said before, I mean, rare for this line, because there’s always some kind of mitigation, there’s usually some kind of cutting or some kind of embankment, or there’s – where you can’t avoid the viaducts, that some measure can be found. Here there is nothing, there seems to be a deliberate gap in between the area of planning and the re-aligned A4421. Somebody clearly thought that planting was desirable, at the north side of the line, but oddly left this gap here, at the closest point to the two properties. So that leaves it open to the countryside.

459. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is that looking over the balancing pond?

460. MR CLARKE: Sorry?

461. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Is that looking over the balancing pond? I’m trying to –?

462. MR CLARKE: Yes. So the balancing pond is in the gap. So half of the gap is taking up by the balancing pond, but there is no suggestion anywhere that the location of the balancing pond is critical. Because if we look at the right hand side of the drawing, we can see a huge balancing pond that is some distance away from the line, so there’s no principle – there’s no design principle to suggest the balancing pond has to be right on top of the line. I mean, I’ve been making this point for years and nobody’s suggested to me, ‘Well, we can’t mitigate there because there’s a balancing pond’. So, yes, so by the balancing pond is half the gap. There’s nothing in the way of mitigation, because you’ve got the balancing pond itself, which I assume is moveable, because nobody’s said otherwise, you’ve got the disused road and verge which is there to be used, that’s a piece of infrastructure that’s been entirely abandoned and taken up and done away with. And you’ve got this area of planting anyway, and as I said in my submission, I know the landowners and I’ve said before, they’re amenable to earthworks, mitigation there anyway. They own the other house that’s over the road from my house. So there doesn’t seem to be anything in the nature of the land that says, ‘You wouldn’t mitigate this’, or, ‘It’s impracticable to mitigate this’.

463. It’s difficult to look at the cost benefit of mitigation in circumstances where we haven’t really engaged at that level, but at the same time, we’re going to look at some noise figures that HS2 produced last week, and they talk about construction noise in relation to hauling spoil. Now what they’re going to be – so they’re going – we get eye watering numbers of HGVs are going to hauling earth away from here, all round the country. Because that’s what the construction traffic is. That’s what everybody’s worrying about. So the idea it’s going to cost a fortune to leave some – a big pile of it here, in between this, what will be hopefully, a quiet-ish country lane, and this wonderful piece of 21st century engineering, it’s quite difficult for me to get a grip of, at the moment.

464. So we have got the space, there seems to be a need on the basis of their narrative description, no issue of cost has been raised, but we just seem to have this odd gap in mitigation, at a really odd place on the line, albeit only two properties, but adjacent to two residential properties, and there are others a little further away.

465. So that’s the visual amenity and the practicality of mitigation, north of the line. We then get on to noise, which is another consideration all together. And if we can go

to paragraph 19 of my submission, go beyond all my moaning about engagement, paragraph 19, we get to reference to the High Speed 2 information paper E20, Control of Airborne Noise from Altered Roads and the Operational Railway, 30 July 2014. So, this is what – this is the only reference in the response to the petition about noise. And the attitude of HS2 appears to be, ‘Well, there’s a policy in place, we’re following the policy, that’s the end of the story’. So, as we have the hard copy of the submissions, if we can turn up paper E20 please, on screen? I’m very grateful. I just need to catch up there. And go to paragraph 4.2 please?

466. So, 4.2, ‘The following measures to control airborne noise from altered roads and the operational railway be considered by the nominated undertaker’. And it gives the types of noise to be – the types of noise attenuation to be considered, paragraph 4.2. And at 4.3, we have the assessment criteria, ‘To ensure that the these measures to control airborne noise are reasonable, the nominated undertaker will take account of –’, and it gives five bullet points. And I go through those five points at paragraph 19 of my submission. And clearly there are a number of judgment calls to be made here, social responsibility, including social equity. Now, what on earth these terms are supposed to mean, but I can have a go.

467. Social responsibility, may mean to the users of the road, to the occupants of those properties. Social equity, I pointed out they would seem to be dealing with two sides of the line very differently here, I mean, this is a single village that’s being bisected, and stakeholder interests. But I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s ever been a report or assessment of how social responsibility has been assessed at this location.

468. Now the benefit of the measures, I think I’m at odds with HS2 on the benefit of the measures because we’re going to look at the noise map in a minute that says I shall be opening the champagne because they’re building this line, it’s going to make my house so much quieter than it ever was before. So, we’ll return to the benefit of the measures.

469. The cost of the measures, I’ve addressed and at its most basic form, I just want a big pile of dirt, please don’t move it 100 miles away, leave it more or less where you’re digging it out. And we can see from the photographs the difference that would make because it would provide a contiguous mitigation. Engineering practicability; I am not

an engineer, but I look at the map, and there just seems to be a gap there to be filled with mitigation either side of it. And there doesn’t seem to be any infrastructure or interests in the way.

470. Finally, other environmental effects cause by mitigation measures. Again, I can’t see how this bullet point can possibly count against me; clearly, if we can put some earthwork mitigation in, it is going to improve the landscape, it’s going to be more in keeping with the landscape and the visual amenity. But, I haven’t seen the assessments, I don’t know. All I have is the bear assertion that, ‘We’ve done an assessment, and it’s come out wrong’, so I’m not in a position to challenge it, as yet. I’m hoping we will get a little bit further forward on that today.

471. Now if we can then go back to that second bullet point and the noise assessment, again, it’s in the map book.

472. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Just to help us –

473. MR CLARKE: Of course.

474. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: – if we could look, just for a moment at P4609, you have the minus figures that apparently show that your noise is reduced, is that –?

475. MR CLARKE: Yes.

476. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Just so we can keep a picture, you’re, I think, at 2772(61)?

477. MR CLARKE: Yes.

478. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Which has the minus four, minus six?

479. MR CLARKE: Yes. Two properties.

480. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: And the one on the other side of the line, I’ve sort of identified as 277206, which is two above? Which apparently you’re going to have some sort of reduction. When we come back to this, that’s in effect the point we have to have in mind as –

481. MR CLARKE: I was going to one document before coming to this document, so I

was only one out.

482. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: You’re more familiar with it than we are, but just so that we can get an idea of what you’re talking about.

483. MR CLARKE: I am really not. I’m waiting for the explanation. But if first we can go to the map which is SV05031 in the map book. Which is this red amber green ratings. And this is at – for the purposes of the note, it’s at paragraph 21 of my submission, my written submission, onwards.

484. Here we have the effects of noise assessments, I say, I don’t know how they’ve been carried out, I haven’t seen the detail or the methodology. I’ve seen policy, and that’s it. What we can see, working down the line from the far left hand side, you’ve got Tibbetts Farm, which is orange, moderate adverse, and that’s where the route is, in a deep cutting, because we have the green line engineering cutting etc. We have Warren Farm, which is orange, which is further way, which is behind a noise fence barrier. We have Widmore Farm, I think that’s red. Again, is behind some earthworks, but that’s a major adverse effect on there. Moving further along to the right, we have the bottom Newton Purcell, all of these minor adverse effects in yellow. They’re behind a noise fence barrier and earthworks. On the far right hand side, we have, between Newton Purcell and Barton Hartshorn, above, at the north side of the line, we have an orange, which is another farm, so that’s moderate adverse. And then we have this cluster, next to the line itself, in Newton Purcell.

485. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: They’ve taken the road away, your road noise, I guess?

486. MR CLARKE: Well, yes. That’s what we are told, we are told that, ‘We are taking the road – 20, 30 metres’, I haven’t got the ruler here, ‘Away, and in the face of an unmitigated HS2 line, 100 metres away, 150 metres away, you’re actually going to be quieter’. So, it seems obvious, looking at the rest of this map that those properties would be the deepest red, but for moving the road a few metres away. That can’t be controversial, but I’ll be corrected.

487. Now – so what they’ve done is netted the noise across – sorry, netted the noise off, they’ve said, ‘Here’s the noise of the road now, we’re going to lower the noise of the

road, and we’re going to add the noise of the trains, and we’re going to mix all of that up together, and it comes up with something less than you had before’. Now, I make the point at paragraph 25 of my submissions. Even if that’s right, and I can’t test the methodology because I haven’t seen it, I don’t think that’s a fair or logical approach to noise. Noise profiles of the railway and noise profiles of the road are bound to be very different.

488. Now, I appreciate you can have a methodology, it’s not imposed on you, you’re – they’re not bosses, you are. You can produce a methodology where you go by noise energy over 24 hours. But that’s not to say that you can add and subtract noises from each other. It’s a bit like, it goes away from how the human ear works. This issue that comes up every now and again on the television, where, you’re watching a film, the adverts come on and they’re twice as loud as the thing you’ve been watching. The TV company comes out and says, ‘It’s not actually louder, it just sounds louder’. And it – I don’t – it’s not a number crunching game. I think we know – well, we’ll find out if we can get any numbers in a minute but – the idea that moving the road 20 metres away goes from the darkest red to bright green is something I’m really struggling with, something I can’t assess, I can’t challenge it. How it got there, I don’t know.

489. If the railway line I have in my submission is, you may as well say, the railway is going to scare all the birds away. There is a certain amount of noise energy generated by birdsong, we’ll just deduct that from your noise as well, and that’s another thing to go in the equation. It’s nonsense.

490. Second point is, I simply don’t believe it’s credible anyway, the area’s going to feel quieter, just moving the road a bit across, given the obvious effect of the railway on any other property, on any unmitigated part of the line. And in any event, none of this affects the visual mitigation issues we were looking at earlier, where they said – it almost said in the narrative, ‘We’d love to mitigate this, but it’s just not practical’. Well, I just don’t see how it’s not practical to mitigate that. It just seems a really odd anomaly that you would just leave this gap, at this point.

491. CHAIR: Okay. This is your principal point? Are you going to raise the other points as well, or the – compensation, the other points? Because we’ve done quite a lot of those in the past.

492. MR CLARKE: Well, I was just – I think most of the detailed design has been dealt with. Can I just go to one more document on this?

493. CHAIR: Yes.

494. MR CLARKE: And I – as I said at the outset, this is the guts of why I am here today, because the other points tend to be detailed design. Well, one more document on this is – and I know that Mr Mould is going to be introducing this in a minute, but it’s P6409. And the key receptor is – sorry, receptor is probably the wrong word, but it’s assessment location ID 277261, so it’s – yes. If we go up to the baselines, thank you, can we get the title in, ‘Baseline sound levels’. Yes. So it’s the penultimate line here, 277261. So we have existing baseline sound levels. I assume this is what they say is there at the moment. For construction sound assessment, who knows what that refers to?

495. MR MOULD QC (DfT): It’s the construction phase rather than the operational phase; it’s a slightly different assessment approach for both. So the one you’re interested in is on the left hand side, the operational side assessment.

496. MR CLARKE: Well, we’ll get some evidence on that in a minute. So we have noise levels during construction. The only point I’d note on there is, look at the haul route movements, they’re talking all the lovely soil I want for mitigation away from here, and shipping it around the country. And then the final graph, sorry table, not graph, ‘Noise level during operation’, penultimate line is the 277261, is where we get the netted figures, minus four decibels and minus six decibels, which gives the green allocation to the houses. Now, I assumed that the baseline is effectively the road noise. Now, they’re moving the road away, and so the baseline is being somehow reduced by moving the road 20 metres away, how are they reducing it? The road is being elevated, elevated roads have, as you’ve heard from petitioners quite a lot, elevated roads have a different effect on properties, being 20 metres away, how is the impedance on noise calculated? Have they just taken a measurement 20 metres away, if so where? Is it a fair position to measure it from etc? I have no idea where they have taken the road zero metres away, and the road 30 metres away calculation and done that.

497. And the second is impact of the railway, well I’m sure there’s a model for that. And third point is, the netting off. Now, before you just – I – on any view, these are not

going to be straight line noises, this is not a continual noise of X for the road, where it is, Y for the road 20 metres away, and Z for the railway. So you just take one for the other. There are noise profiles here. The noise profiles for the three noises are going to be very, very different and I think we need to have a look at those before you can make any assessment that it’s fair just to take one away from the other. So that’s as much as I can say about there. At the moment, on the face of what we’ve been provided with, this is all I’ve seen. Apparently we’re going to hear some more detail about what’s behind it in a minute, I think that the case is simply not made out; there should be mitigation here, even if you just limiting it to noise and not visual.

498. CHAIR: Okay.

499. MR CLARKE: If I can rattle through the other four points on my submission.

500. The second point is the lack of any mitigation for the re-routed A4421. This one might be easier just to have the backup, even though I’m only going to be a minute. So it’s the original map, I’m grateful. So, we can see that the road is being moved. I can tell you that the road in its existing format – in its existing form, it’s quite twisty and turny, it does slow the traffic down even more than the speed limit signs do. It’s now going to have a much quicker profile, which is of concern. It’s now going to face the village, which is of concern. However, mitigating that line into road itself, I can see from correspondence, is something HS2 accepts needs to be looked at, and I am perfectly prepared to accept that’s a detailed design point we can deal with to level with me sitting on their shoulder.

501. The only other point on the road is that we have asked for some time, for it to be considered that this re-routing around the crossing, go all the way around the village, so effectively it bypasses the village. This gives us obvious benefits and it’s just during the construction phase. In the response to the petition, HS2’s position appears to be, ‘Well, look we would give you a bypass around the village, but the issue is, that’s just going to make things worse for people at the other end of the village. Now, I’m not convinced about that really depends on where you put the road around, and therefore, the next step on the road alignment, in my submission, should be looking at whether an actual route is possible around the village, without being to the detriment of the houses at the south end that are not on this map.

502. Very similar point, the mitigation at the south side, the bottom of this map, you can see that there is a recognised need for mitigation, we’ve got the noise fence barrier, we’ve got the earthworks. We do have a gap in foliage where the original road crosses the railway and we have that balancing pond, and it’s a matter of detailed design to consider filling that in with planting, but again, a matter of detail.

503. Also, very similarly – sorry, one more point on that is one way of killing a number of birds with one stone would be if you see on the middle of this map, there is a big earthwork supporting a footpath across the railway? If you did something similar around Newton Purcell, you could retain pedestrian access from one side of the village to the other, and create the mitigation on both sides of the line, because at the moment, any pedestrian access from one end of the village to the other, goes the long way around the new bridge.

504. Construction, there’s going to be detailed issues about use of roads, working hours, noise, etc, but again, I regard those as areas of detailed design.

505. The issue I have on compensation, stop me if you’ve heard this one, is that up to 100 metres from the centre of the line, there is a voluntary purchase scheme which – under which you can apply to the Government to purchase your property. Now, beyond that, there are some fixed payments out at 300 metres. In my submission, that’s not compensation. If it is not related to loss, it’s not compensation. You have this bizarre approach where somebody’s plucked some figures out of the air and said, ‘This is what we pay people more than 120 metres from the line’. We know the Land Compensation Act is not fit for purpose for this particular project, which is why we put all these schemes in place. But the idea that you can just make some figures up and have an arbitrary payment of something that’s not compensatory at all, in my submission is unhelpful. It’s actually, it’s quite cynical to say, ‘Look, everyone in the countryside is better off, we’re going to give them these payments, in circumstances where it’s going to have no bearing at all’. Again, declaring an interest, my house is there, 150 metres away from the line, in an area that’s completely unmitigated, no compensation.

506. CHAIR: You can apply for the Need to Sell scheme.

507. MR CLARKE: Sorry?

508. CHAIR: You can apply for the need –

509. MR CLARKE: Oh yes – hmm. And I just wanted to go to one more document and that is one we went to earlier, on the atypical properties, because I’m hoping to say I’m in an atypical property. And I think it was slide 828(9). Or 828, page 9. Might be P828 page 9. Just came up with the Lower Thorpe petition. Because one of the approaches was, to say, ‘Look, here we have the Government saying that if you’ve got an atypical property, come and talk to us and we’ll see what we can do’. One approach might be, let everybody go away and do that, before we think we have to do anything dramatic with the legislation. The line at the bottom says, ‘Property compensation consultation, section 9.1.1’ and I remember this being on the consultation, and I remember my response saying, ‘This seems to be a good idea, we need some flexibility’. It’s not, as far as I can recall, in the scheme.

510. MR MOULD QC (DfT): It is.

511. MR CLARKE: If it’s in the scheme, then that’s fantastic, but my concern was, I hadn’t noticed it, and this was in the consultation, so, as long as it’s in the scheme, it can be tested. So for now, that’s what I have to say.

512. CHAIR: Alright, thank you very much, Mr Clarke, you’ve done very well. In exactly 40 minutes. That surprised me. Mr Mould?

513. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I’m going to ask Mr Miller to come again, if I may? Can we get the ES page from the CC06 series that you had? We’ll take matters in Mr Clarke’s order, Mr Miller, so we’ll deal with visual first and then turn to noise, so first question is –

514. CHAIR: Can I just – we’re going to have a five minute comfort break, I think, if that’s alright.

515. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Of course.

516. CHAIR: I’d like to keep the workers happy. Order, order.

Sitting suspended On resuming—

517. CHAIR: Thank you everybody for that. For getting back quickly. Mr Mould.

518. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Thank you. Mr Miller. The first topic is prospects for further works to ameliorate the visual effect of the railway line on Mr Clarke and his neighbour, I think. Just help us with that. What can you say in response to that proposal?

519. MR MILLER: I think in the detailed design, the first thing I think is worth saying is that the final details for approval will go to the local planning authority and if the proposals are reasonably capable of modification and there is an environmental benefit that would arise from that, then we should look at it. Sort of unpacking that, I think that, as you say, there is the gap there, and I can’t help you with that, there is a gap there. The blunt end of the road which we’re stopping up and re-providing the road next door. So, I think there might be some scope here to have a think about the location of the balancing ponds and the turning head and what might actually exist around that balancing pond alongside the railway. So I think that in the detailed design we can have a look at that. I think we can understand the objections that you are trying to seek.

520. And further, we might, under the guise of the schedule 16 response that we’ve given elsewhere, it may well be that landscaping and planting alongside the road embankment may well also be considered part of the proposal. But, obviously those will have to go back and be adopted by the Highway Authority. So, they may or may not want that. But they may see some merit in doing that. But I think on the visual point I think there’s some scope here. As you were talking, we were looking at the limits of land to be acquired and used and the limits of deviation in that. And we think the railway could accommodate that. Yes, you can see where the construction limits are on there. So, there is a bit of room to manoeuvre, I think. And as you pointed out there is material elsewhere on there. That may well be that we can incorporate some of that material at the top of the cutting. So, I think in the detailed design we can look at your objectives and we can have a think about those and see whether we can help out.

521. MR MOULD QC (DfT): So, that might include a combination of mounding and planting, for example?

522. MR MILLER: Yes, it could be a bit of mitigation earthworks around a balancing pond. I think we’re doing that elsewhere along the line of the route. On the other plan, you can see where there’s the drainage ditch which is alongside the road. And that obviously goes to the balancing pond. But, I think we can play our tunes on that and I think we can get that turning head configured in a slightly different way. But I think all of that can be dealt with in the detailed design.

523. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And could we give an assurance to the parish council that we will, as part of the detailed design, the parish meeting, I do apologise, could we give an assurance that we will as part of the detailed design review the arrangements for the railway at this particular location and consider opportunities for further mitigation in conjunction with the detailed, to refining the location of the balancing pond as shown on the plan?

524. MR MILLER: Yes. As part of that detailed submission that we’ll have to give to the local planning authority we’ll take that into account. And I think that there’s not a great deal of cost associated with this because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to reconfigure within what we’ve already got, perhaps with a little bit more planting. That can’t be beyond our means.

525. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Right. And so if we then turn to P4604?

526. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Just before you do that.

527. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Do you want to go back?

528. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Keep that map. If the balancing pond had to go slightly further to the east, and to land you aren’t acquiring, it doesn’t look like the biggest additional provision you might have to go for if that were convenient?

529. MR MILLER: No. But I think what we would first do is explore where the tarmac is of the road. You can see that first of all. You would try to flip that over. And

see whether we could just move it a little bit further to the east.

530. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Almost continuous embankment?

531. MR MILLER: Yes. Yes, on the road. And then you could have the planting, whatever, which is I think the visual screen that you’re after. And you might even be able to move some of the earth around a little bit in that area. It just seems to us that there is scope, room to move, within the bill limits. Without actually having to find additional.

532. MR MOULD QC (DfT): There is one point I wanted to pick up here. Just so that we don’t lose sight of the full picture. If we go back to that, sorry, go back to that plan, the previous plan? The railway is in cutting as it passes through this location, isn’t it?

533. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Yes. It varies. It does one thing. It does another.

534. MR MILLER: From north to south, it’s in, north, it’s in fairly deep cutting.

535. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes.

536. MR MILLER: And you’ve got earth on the southern side, you’ve got sort of earth works, bund. Then you’ve got, as you say, the barrier along the side, where the cutting starts to tail away as it goes further to the south. And then you go into this big area of false cutting, where are you’re on a grade, essentially. All of that is, to the west of the route is. What I was trying to respond to is the potential effects arising in Newton Purcell. And that has a beneficial effect on those properties immediately adjacent, where the pub is or was or certainly the pub building is. And what we’re saying is that you don’t need to have the same response to the north. I suspect what’s happening to the north, with the noise –

537. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Sorry. Sorry.

538. MR MILLER: That wasn’t me was it?

539. MR MOULD QC (DfT): No.

540. MR MILLER: Magic pen.

541. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes.

542. MR MILLER: Is there any chance we can go back to the other one?

543. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I do apologise. For once, we are out of sync.

544. MR MILLER: Right. Okay. I’ll keep going. I think what’s happening here, for the rail noise is that because we’ve got this embankment of the road, either side, I suspect that’s actually having an effect which is modifying the noise from the railway at this location. In terms of the noise overall, perhaps we’ll come back to the figures in a minute, what I think is happening here is you’ve got a fairly heavily trafficked road already on the existing road. Sorry, that’s the grey road through here which are all quite close too. And although we’re moving away and elevating it, that predominately high noise level which you’re getting from the road, is being removed away from you, as others have commented. So, you’re benefiting from the road noise rather than a mitigating, a further mitigating effect of the rail. And what’s happening when we look at the noise figures is that your ambient noise figures, which is at the top of the chart in the exhibit. You’ll see that we’ve got quite high noise levels, not typical of the countryside generally around.

545. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: That’s P4609?

546. MR MILLER: Yes. Unlike the noise levels that we saw earlier on, elsewhere, just a little bit further along the route, and they’re quite high because of the dominant road noise. And whilst you are in that green category of receiving a reduced noise level, you’re noise levels are generally quite high, even with that sort of resultant road realignment. And it’s arguable whether there’s really that much of a change in your particular circumstances. But, obviously the modelling is throwing up something which

says that you’re receiving a marginal benefit. I don’t think we put the noise figures up.

547. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Before you do that I just wanted to show P4682, which is the slide that’s flashed up momentarily, as I went ahead of you. We have here essentially the same image but with some cross sections. And if you just see cross section 3, which is the cross section just to the south of the realigned road and to the south of the balancing ponds and then if you turn to P4603? We’ll pick up that cross section and you can see that cross section 3, west is obviously to the left, and then we have the noise barrier on the western side of the railway. And then the railway in a cutting. And then we see, the planting just to the south of the section that Mr Clarke has mentioned. Is that cutting likely to have some impact in limiting noise from the railway as opposed to noise from the road?

548. MR MILLER: Yes, it will. Yes. All the cuttings will have a beneficial effect for the wheel. I think we’ve already said that the predominant noise is the wheel rail integration, which is low down, will benefit the noise characteristics from the railway through there.

549. MR MOULD QC (DfT): I think what Mr Thornely-Taylor has said, if I’ll be forgiven for this, is that noise from the railway trains tends to comprise of two main components. One is the noise from the interaction of the wheels with the rails. And the second is the aerodynamic noise that results primarily from the operation of, from the pantographs.

550. MR MILLER: That’s right. Yes.

551. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And so cuttings tend to ameliorate the former. They’re less successful, unless they’re very deep indeed, at ameliorating the latter.

552. MR MILLER: Yes. That’s correct.

553. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Yes. If we then just, at the risk of delaying matters over much, if we just go via the photomontage, which is at P4604? It may be helpful just to

orientate in this lower image what you were discussing on the plan. We see the existing, oh, just look at the top, actually. The top of the page we see the existing road and then at the lower image we can see the green coloured parapet, southern parapet wall, of the new over bridge, can’t we?

554. MR MILLER: Yes. That’s right.

555. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And the approach, the eastern approach, will be behind the vegetation that is being pointed out now.

556. MR MILLER: Yes, it’s behind that vegetation and it’s sort of cutting back around to rejoin the road which is in the foreground here, which is further off.

557. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And then I think we can see the upper body of a train passing along a railway line.

558. MR MILLER: Yes, that’s right.

559. MR MOULD QC (DfT): In the gap. And the noise barrier beyond. And though although not visible in there, just below that mounding there is the balancing pond.

560. MR MILLER: That’s right. Yes.

561. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And so what she was saying about opportunities for detailed design, refining, reorganising the arrangements here and mounding and planting, that’s broadly the area within which that would be taking place?

562. MR MILLER: Yes. And I think that where you can see up here where the road’s sort of disappearing down. What we’ll end up with, or what’s on the plans at the moment, is I suppose, a tarmac surface which ends at the railway. What I’m saying is that in our further detailed consideration and having heard from the petitioner the concerns that I think, visually, that we can have a look at that. And it may well be that we can have a look at the material that’s being moved around anyway for earth filled

bunds elsewhere and see whether that could be accommodated as well. So, there’s clearly a gap there. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that. And that coupled up with a revised balancing pond which might go here rather than over here, I think that there is some room to manoeuvre to change the outlook, I suppose, than that of which we have in the environmental statement. And I think we can do that in the bill limit.

563. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Thank you. Well, then, let’s go finally to the noise tables, P4609? And if we can just zoom in on the top table? We know that the relative assessment point is 277261 and we have a series of numbers under the heading, ‘Existing baseline sound level for operational noise, for operational sound assessment’. And there are four columns. The first two, ‘day time’ and ‘night time’, are expressed in Leq index. And we can see, just remind us, what do they tell us? What is, that’s the ambient noise, isn’t it? What does that tell you?

564. MR MILLER: Yes. What this is trying to do is describe the energy in the environment, which is causing noise throughout that day time period and the two hourly periods that are identified with day time and night time categories. And what people say is that’s an average noise level. It isn’t an average noise level, but for shorthand, I suppose, that’s okay. But, broadly, what that is saying is that you’ve got fairly high noise levels. They’re quite typical of much more of a suburban road rather than a noise level in open countryside. I think the noise levels we looked at earlier today are more in the forties, mid forties, kind of range. So, this is describing what’s happening on the road, essentially. And then, there are a couple of high-end measurements.

565. MR MOULD QC (DfT): They are to do obviously, is it right, they’re to do with what people have called peak noise?

566. MR MILLER: Yes. I understand that LAmax to be peak noise. I’m not a noise expert but those can be assumed to be peak noises. And they are individual events that might have cropped up. And will crop up from time to time on such a road.

567. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Right. And so I suppose one can’t tell directly from the figures a peak noise night time event of 84 is at least a possibility that might be the

passage of a vehicle?

568. MR MILLER: Yes. I mean, I live in the countryside and sometimes what you get, you can get very high noise levels around harvest time, for example, where farm vehicles are out quite late at night or even 24 hours a day. And if you’ve got a very low ambient noise level, you would quickly pick up on that. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on there, but it might be a vehicle of that sort of nature going past. It might be several. I don’t know.

569. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And then if we go down to the lower table on the page? That’s right. Again, I think the Committee has been shown this already but we can see for that assessment location there are a number of sets of columns.

570. MR MILLER: Yes.

571. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Proposed scheme only – that’s the railway line and the proposed scheme in isolation?

572. MR MILLER: Yes.

573. MR MOULD QC (DfT): You can see that again these are predicted ambient noise levels, day and night, and then peak noise, all the LAmax, in the right-hand of those three columns.

574. MR MILLER: Yes. And even with the railway there, they’re correlating quite well. They’re quite high noise levels generally and although there’s a partial reduction, we think that that goes to the road being moved a little further away from the properties. But, it’s right to point out that this areas still remains with a high ambience of noise and that’s why I was indicating a little earlier that there is probably not great limits, to be honest. But the model is showing that it goes down by four and six respectively.

575. MR MOULD QC (DfT): And just finally, picking up on the point made about comparing different noise sources and the different characteristics that people might

associate with traffic noise or railway noise and so forth. Do you recall Mr Thornely- Taylor in his presentation to the Committee back in July explained how the noise levels that had been adopted for the purposes of the setting design objectives for the railway, including those that are set out in the information paper, E20, that the petitioner referred to in the course of his presentation. They were based upon social surveys which measured, which surveyed people’s reaction to different types of noise and which are used as part of the overall process of establishing what an appropriate noise, appropriate series of objectives for the design of the railway should be when one is dealing with a transport network of this kind.

576. MR MILLER: Yes. I believe that to be correct.

577. MR MOULD QC (DfT): It’s on the record. So, it’s just a convenient way of reminding everybody that that was what Mr Thornely-Taylor was talking about.

578. MR MILLER: Sorry. I think that that sort of thing has been accounted for in the scope and methodology that’s been developed for the environmental assessment and we consulted on that back in 2012 and we subsequently amended, I can’t remember whether we amended it for noise particularly in these circumstances, but it was subject to some amendments after that. So, we went from spring to autumn through that consultation and amended that. Collecting and considering local authorities and in particular environmental and health officers views about the assessment methodology. What we’re aiming to do with that is to try and gain some consensus of our output on our approach, so that when we saw the results, that we weren’t madly in disagreement with the results as they started to appear through the assessment process.

579. MR MOULD QC (DfT): Finally, I have here the operational assessment sound noise and vibration for CMA 14, which is one of the many documents employed in five of the environmental studies.

580. CHAIR: Thank you, Mr Mould. Do you have any questions, Mr Clarke, for Mr Miller?

581. MR CLARKE: Just a couple. Very quickly, Mr Miller, so good news. In principle then you agree we can design some earthworks and some planting here to try and close this down.

582. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Well, try and put in there.

583. MR MILLER: Yes. Well, we’ve heard what your objectives are. It’s the sort of conversation I’m having with the others following their appearance in these proceedings. So, it’s good to know that. And we will try and accommodate those.

584. MR CLARKE: And you said a couple of times, and had reference to the model. The model throwing up effects, and the model showing our figures. What’s the model?

585. MR MILLER: Yes. The noise information goes into a noise model with taking into account the physical characteristics of the railway and the operational characteristics of the railway and other things that are going on with the changes that arise through the scheme, like road diversions and that sort of thing. And I don’t pretend to know all the detail about that. But, what comes out of that are the results. So you get the rail noise contours that you see in the LOAEL and SOAEL diagrams. And then you also then see the effects on properties and you’ve seen the green notation on your property.

586. MR CLARKE: But, we’re not in a position to say that model is going to produce a clear result on every single location?

587. MR MILLER: I don’t think I’m the right person to give the evidence on that, to be honest with you. I think that we have given that evidence. And Mr Thornely-Taylor has done that in the past. And in the round. And I think we’ve made a reasonable assessment based on knowledge from other railway infrastructure projects. If there’s one thing that we’ve looked at very, very carefully on the project is noise. Noise and visual issues are probably the top two environmental issues. Then closely followed by ecological issues, and we know that noise is of particular concern in any circumstances through infrastructure projects, and particularly rail. And from my experience, that’s

true in HS1 and the West Coast Main Line. So, there’s a great deal of knowledge which has gone into this. And I think I’ll leave it there.

588. MR CLARKE: Very last point is that if following on from the Mixbury and Finmere presentations, if the railway was in a deeper cutting, that would have a beneficial effect on the noise of the wheel to rail in the environment, wouldn’t it?

589. MR MILLER It follows if you put something further into the ground then there will be beneficial effects. You have to be careful about saying that it would overcome significant environmental effects because of the way that the noise gets propagated. Sometimes, you might overcome a noise in fact very close to the route and induce, by putting something deeper down and putting a barrier up, you might induce an effect which goes broader and further away from the railway. So, in all cases you would have to go back to some form of professional assessment, just to make sure that you’ve got that right. So, it’s not simply a case of just putting it straight down into the ground and you overcome everything.

590. CHAIR: Okay? Alright. Final brief comments, Mr Clarke?

591. MR CLARKE: Final brief comments. I don’t think in terms of the specific location the points have been answered. We have a model that shows effects and we’re doing our best by standing back on the evidence we’ve heard. I would say there is room for noise mitigation here, in all of these circumstances. Although, I will grab with both hands the assurance that we will try our hardest to move some earth around in the right direction.

592. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you very much Mr Clarke and for representing your parish. We now move to Burnie Douglas.

Bernie Douglas

593. MR DOUGLAS: Thank you.

594. CHAIR: Can we see where Mr Douglas lives please? Oh, there it is.

595. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: The other side of the cutting.

596. MR DOUGLAS: I am indeed. I’m going to try and be as brief as I possibly can.

597. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you Mr Douglas.

598. MR DOUGLAS: Okay. If we can just come up with my presentation on the second slide, please? The introduction. Okay. Just a little bit of background. I live where you can see marked on the map. The little dot X. It’s about 650-700 metres from the proposed line. Moved to the Mixbury in 2009. As you’ve heard before, it’s a very quiet village. Rural setting. And I’ve spent a considerable amount of time there. Just concerning HS2. Obviously, had a considerable impact, both operationally and during construction. Concerned about impact of quality of life, landscape, and all of that good stuff. Let me kick off and say very pleased with some of the things which have turned up in terms of designed bridges, that type of thing. That’s very, very positive. What I’m trying to do you here today is not to beat people about the head. Just come up with some suggestions to actually improve things. If we can go on to the next slide, please?

599. Fortunately, for my sins, I do a lot of work in the insurance industry, in General & Life. I’m not an underwriter. But one of the things which interests me was during construction, local crime rising due to acting as a honey pot, as it were, for various criminal elements. So, the construction compound attracting criminal elements. Theft, vandalism, burglary, illegal dumping, etc. Not just within the compound, but in the general area around it. So, I had a bit of a deeper look at it and there was a big construction project, the RV incinerator, which is the other side of the M40. It’s about seven miles southwest and in a similar rural area to Mixbury. And you can see here, I am the blue dot and I’ll use the little red flag.

600. So, what I did, as I actually started to go through the Thames Valley Police statistics, had a look over a period from December 2010 to December 2014, just see what impact there would be in terms of crime, particularly property crime. It’s not

things like violent crime. It’s purely around vandalism, burglary, robbery, that type of thing. And as you can see, when you have a look at the data, there has been a big increase from when the construction started in October 2011, all the way through to finishing in August 2014, July, August 2014. Three months, there’s a drop. And then again the M40 construction starts. And we see a another big increase in property crime. And for the nine crimes in December, there was actually quite a large increase in burglaries around the M40 services. So, I think, generally when I had a look at this, I thought, there’s a bit of a problem here, can we actually see what the scope of it is and what we could do to actually improve it. So, if we can go to the next slide?

601. MR MEARNS: Can I ask you Mr Douglas, before you move on?

602. MR DOUGLAS: Mm.

603. MR MEARNS: I mean, is that, in terms of the overall trend, widely different from the rest of the police force area?

604. MR DOUGLAS: Yes. This is within one mile of Ardley.

605. MR MEARNS: Okay.

606. MR DOUGLAS: And I just want to say Mixbury is an extremely low crime area. We’re lucky if we get one crime a month. And we had a major crime area last year – crime wave – where we had about six houses broken into in a couple of nights. It’s small. It is tiny. So, if we go along to the next slide, please? We actually raised this at the community forum in 2012.

607. We thought it would be a good idea if HS2 could contact the insurance industry, the Association of British Insurers, to try and understand what the impacts might be. Just for a bit of explanation, when you actually write a policy, 90%, 80% of them are done automatically using what’s known as a risk engine. And they would type in various characteristics: your postcode, and the crime figures are built into that. So, if there is an increase in crime, there’s a very high chance that there will be an increase in

insurance premiums. This may seem small. But, if you’re talking about a £300 a year insurance policy, it goes up by 10%, that’s £30.00, over 12 years, multiplied by the high village, the number of houses in the village, you’re talking about a significant cost to the actual village. I received the PRD from HS2 and it’s very much on how it’s going to protect its property rather the potential crime impacts on the local area. So, one of the things you might find is that the local criminal fraternity will have a look, see that all the storage areas are nicely secured. They will wander around our little village, which has got access to fields around the back, and start to nick stuff from the local garages, etc. Potential crime impacts on the local area were pretty much ignored.

608. Secondly, the effectiveness of the measures outlined in paper 10 on worksite security actually sounded – so, I went on to the Chartered Institute of Building and found out that about 23% to 26% of respondents on the survey, it was about 10,000, found those measures weren’t particularly acceptable. They didn’t actually work as well as they thought. One of the other interesting things that came out, I won’t run through all of them, but 32% of respondents say illegal waste dumping occurs regularly, i.e., weekly or monthly around construction sites. 48% would not report it. 63% say theft occurs regularly, weekly or monthly. 12% would not report it. 62% say vandalism occurs regularly around their site. 33% would not report it. So, I think what we’re looking at here is there is a significant problem that extends beyond the boundaries of HS2’s construction compound. There’s a high potential for increased crime, which is obviously going to impact on insurance premiums and insurance costs.

609. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell the Committee the effect the crime has on ordinary people. It can be quite devastating to find your car’s being vandalised, your garage has been broken into, etc. So, there’s the financial impact of crime, not just insurance costs. But, also on businesses, because my business insurance could well rise. And lastly there’s a further potentially negative impact on house price blight as potential purchasers will note crime levels have gone up in the area there looking at, it’s factored into a lot of websites etc. So, I think we actually have quite a bit of a problem here. Potential problem. So, what were actually asking for, or what I’m asking for, literally is something quite simple. I would just like HS2 to be as good a neighbour as they possibly can. To actually work with us and don’t just say that we’re going to put all the fences and barriers around the place. Become part of the solution to any problem

which might come up. So, for example, things which we might be able to do is get a commitment from HS2 to start to work with the local police in terms of can they collect telephone numbers or mobile phone numbers and send an SMS out if something goes on. We’re just talking about a commitment to talking about practical things like that.

610. One of the things we can’t do, and which HS2 can do, is consult with the insurance industry to understand the risks, the impact on insurance costs and the local community. They are the experts. The insurance industry, I’m quite sure, will be more than happy to talk to them. And possibly work a way forward. If there is no risk and we find that the risk criteria haven’t changed, wonderful, we’re really happy. But, when not in a position to speak to the insurance industry. HS2 is. Work proactively with local people to keep crime to a minimum. And lastly, if there is shown to be an increase, look to do something about it. I’ve got actually, indemnify residents and businesses from increased costs arising from the increase in local crime rates, because this is not over all on a two year period. This is over ten to twelve years from time the construction starts until the railway opens. So, that’s what we’re looking for to do. Not asking for anything I think across the board. Nothing which is going to cost huge amounts of money. We’re just asking the HS2 take the issue seriously. Realise it doesn’t just start and stop at their gates and work with local people and work with the insurance companies. It’s been done before with the Somerset floods. I’m quite sure it can be done here now. So that’s it on that. If we can move to the next slide, please?

611. This is very much on freight. And I know this is a route wide issue but it’s something that I’ve actually raised. I find the HS2 statements on it quite vague in terms of assurances on possible freight use, frequencies or noise standards in the promoter’s response document. It says the HS2 have considered freight and have only currently ruled out. Justification for no freight on HS2 seems be based on capacity projections, train paths being met. Well, I think the experience from HS1 indicates that capacity projections may be somewhat optimistic. And I have a concern, as I’m sure a load of other people, that future operators, once HS2 has been sold off, will actively look to freight for revenue.

612. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: We had a very long session –

613. MR DOUGLAS: Right.

614. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: – on the affect that freight has on that. I would leave it.

615. MR DOUGLAS: Well, I just want to say, an undertaking in the Bill would be wonderful or a bit more reassurance.

616. Can we move on to the next slide, please, which is about noise? I don’t want to talk about noise anymore, except to say that the HS2 provides mitigation in line with the district council, Mixbury Parish and other parishes. But, I was quite taken with what was said about, recently, by Peter Miller, that they had looked at other rail infrastructure when developing the noise standards. When I was looking to respond to the ES in January last year, I actually asked HS2 to give me what information they held on noise standards in Japan. And the answer came back, ‘They did not have that information’. So, I find that a little bit strange. The AFI number is 13973. I’m happy to provide that later. I just found that quite interesting they’ve looked it all the particular noise standards but they didn’t know what they were in Japan. Okay. Moving on to the next slide. This is road and construction traffic again. I think this pretty much has been done.

617. I must say the photograph on the left hand side I picked purely off the internet and I didn’t realise that the name on the truck was the name of our local MP until I’d actually posted it to one of my colleagues to check. So, that’s actually there. But, I think this is an example where I think progress has been made. So, very, very pleased with that. On to the last slide. Which again is the landscaping and planting. Again, this is more a slide again, a lot of this has actually already been addressed. That’s really great. But, it would just say to HS2, I think there’s a real opportunity here for HS2 to work with local people to get the planting right and use local expertise. Because we will know more what grows faster in these particular areas, so I’m very, very pleased on that. Last slide is just purely a summary, if you can bring that up?

618. I think it’s going to have a detrimental impact on myself, both financially and in terms of quality of life, unless we get further mitigation. I’m concerned that if I just simply choose to move away from the village to avoid HS2 I’m going to suffer a financial impact. I don’t want to go into that. But, as it has to be said. Lastly many of the impacts can and should be reduced or eliminated. And again, you’ve heard this so many times, no meaningful consultation or discussion yes has been undertaken. So, for example, in terms of insurance, I found out that HS2 have made no contact with the insurance industry whatsoever, even though this issue was raised with them over two years ago. And that’s it from me.

619. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you very much for being brief Mr Douglas. Ms Lean?

620. MS LEAN (DfT): Sir, I’ll try and be equally briefly in response. Just to pick up a couple of points, if I may? One, I think there was a concern that was raised about construction in this area and compounds being here for a period of ten to twelve years. As set out in the ES, we’re looking at the compounds being here for a period of about five and a half years. I wonder if that provides some degree of reassurance about timings.

621. As regards the security and crime matters, if we could just briefly pull up the draft code of construction practice? I’m conscious this deals with work site security which deals really with compounds as opposed to local community generally but I just want to pick out a couple of quick points, which may provide some reassurance. In 5.5.2, the code identifies there may be some measures that may be used by contractors to prevent unauthorised access to the site. And we see at the penultimate bullet point on the screen, ‘consultation with neighbours on site, security matters’ and the next bullet point down, ‘consultation with local crime prevention officers on security appraisals for each site with regular liaison to review security effectiveness and response to incidents’. So, there is an expectation there that there will be engagement with the community and community officers about the effectiveness of security measures for the compound.

622. And clearly it goes without saying that’s in the interests, the contractors’ interest and the project’s interest not only to make sure that we have secure compounds but that they are not seem to be any target. As regards with insurance, the project isn’t aware of

this having been an issue. Obviously, it’s important to make sure matters don’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy and by suggesting there will be a problem, when obviously the project’s intention is to make sure the work sites can coexist as happily as possible within the local communities with a minimal amount of problems.

623. Picking up on the issue of noise, something that was dealt with very briefly, there are noise maps in the pack which show that there’s very limited impact on the village of Mixbury and that includes the petitioner’s individual property. And the issue about the noise barriers. Obviously the Committee has already heard from earlier today from Mr Miller and Mr Mould and I won’t repeat those matters.

624. Just a final point, quickly, on landscaping and planting. I note in particular from the petitioner’s documents, there was an issue about maintenance of landscaped areas and time to establish that. Just it may be of interest to the Committee and the petitioner, that the project has recently published an IPE 26, which I think we can bring up, which sets out the approach to indicative periods for the management and monitoring of habitats created for HS2 phase one. That’s picking up on a recommendation from the EAC about making sure there were monitoring and management whilst habitat was established. And if we go through a few pages, there’s a table that has been produced. I think it’s a two page table that has been produced which sets out some indicative monitoring management time scales for looking at things like woodland planting, hedgerows, grasslands, for those being kept under review by the project. Unless there’s anything in particular that that would assist to respond to.

625. CHAIR: Has the project thought of neighbourhood watch? I mean I think the petitioner has raised a good point. There are probably quite a lot of neighbourhood watches up and down the line and clearly local village people, when you have only 100 people or a 150 people in a particular village, they notice when somebody is around that isn’t usually around. And once they get used to who the construction vans are, what colour they are and roughly who they are, they can clearly, there might be some, interest in having some kind of coordination here.

626. MS LEAN (DfT): As the Committee will be aware, it’s set out in the same

section in the draft code, there’s obviously the expectation on the nominated undertaker to work up an engagement strategy and to liaise with the local community to make them aware of work sites, what’s going on. There’s a complaints helpline. So that would be seem to be, that could be factored in as part and parcel, I’m sure, of the general community engagement strategy that the contractors and the nominated undertaker will be required to put in place.

627. CHAIR: Right. Thank you.

628. MR DOUGLAS: Thank you for that. I think some of that is good. However, I do find on the crime, it sounds a little bit like motherhood and apple pie to me. I’d actually like to see at some stage a serious conversation taking place between HS2 and the people impacted. You’ve raised an excellent point about local people seeing things which I alluded to obliquely. In terms of text messages, I can show you if we get a strange van come through Mixbury or we think somebody’s stealing something, everyone knows about within half an hour. And that’s positive. So that can work both ways but I’m not talking about HS2’s site security. I’m talking about the impact of the site on the local area in terms of raising the crime rate and the costs there might actually be on local people. That’s all arising. I’m not asking for HS2 to do an awful lot.

629. A self fulfilling prophecy. I don’t see really works. As I am saying, if you were to take this up with ABI, just to look at the options, I’m quite sure that can be done confidentially, without anybody knowing. But, I’d just like to seek some reassurance that we can work together rather than just what’s on the paper. I think that’s all rise and fall. We can both help each other out.

630. CHAIR: I think you would have more to worry about if it was a motorway.

631. MR DOUGLAS: Oh, tell me about it.

632. CHAIR: I used to live near the M4 and most of the people who were arrested or came up in court came from either London or Bristol, because I lived in Wiltshire. So they went out for the day and around the villages.

633. MR DOUGLAS: Yes. Well, we’re very aware of that as well. Honey in a pot. Bees swarming.

634. CHAIR: Okay.

635. MR DOUGLAS: Thank you very much.

636. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr Douglas. And last but not least we have Mr Alec Howard.

Alec Howard

637. MR HOWARD: Next time I’ll sit on the coffee table. A point to remember. Alright.

638. CHAIR: Okay. Have we got where you live? Okay.

639. MR HOWARD: Have you found us on the map?

640. MS LEAN (DfT): If it assists there’s a local map at P462.

641. MR HOWARD: That’s it, yes. Very good. Okay. We’re almost there. Won’t be too long. Can we just go to my second slide, please? Sorry. Big images. Take time to load. Marketing background. So, I just want to give you a little bit of colour about what it is like to live in Mixbury. I know that some of you kindly visited us a few months ago. Ray mentioned earlier that obviously our outside space is very important to us, but we don’t have many amenities and so our outside space is our amenity. And one of the amenities we don’t have in the village is a playground for our children. And he used the playground earlier. But, the kids play football in the street. As they give a bit older, they begin to learn their independence by roaming the bridleways and footpaths and playing in the hedges and the woods and begin to grow up that way. And we obviously encourage them to do that and we consider it safe to do that.

642. As you just said, we look after each other and we look out for them. So, say, for example, my son goes to school in Westbury. He rides a couple of times a week either down Featherbed Lane to Westbury or down the bridleways, across that new bridge to Westbury. My daughter, you can see here, riding down one of the bridleways, often rides with her friends on the weekend around the bridleways. And that’s great and they’re learning to grow up. But my younger children won’t because in two years’ time there’s no way I will let them go marauding around the footpaths or bridleways on their own, nor ride to school or go riding on their own. That’s all going to stop. And so they are going to miss out on what their elder siblings have enjoyed so much and one of the reasons why we enjoy living in Mixbury. Fortunately, the tree on the left hand side is going to stay there. One of the ones is going to stay.

643. But, if you look down to the bottom right hand corner you’ll see a little chap singing his heart out, a little English partridge. And the English partridge is I think mentioned in the ES. It’s actually on the red list for the RSPB because of its massive decline in breeding population over the last 50 years due to habitat decline. We are very fortunate that we have a breeding population either side of Featherbed Lane of about 15 breeding pairs. And actually one of the joys for me living where I do, as you saw on the map, and will see my house on the map a bit later on as well, is the fact that I can stand in my garden, I can listen to these very rare birds, which you don’t very often see, because they’re ground birds and they’re very sensitive birds. We don’t see them very much. If Mr Bellingham was still here, I know that they’ve made quite a good recovery in Norfolk.

644. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: That’s because he doesn’t see them!

645. MR HOWARD: That’s because he doesn’t see them. And they’re not very disturbed, you see. So, I love this listening to them. And I often go outside in the evening and just listen to them to talking to each other and because they live in dispersed groups, that’s how they communicate across that area. As you already have today, in the ES quote, and the ES, Mixbury was described as a relatively quiet, natural sound predominates. Well, that natural sound is often the sound of those birds, as well

as other things. But, I think some of the evidence I was sent recently by HS2 in response to this that my background noise is going to increase from 46 decibels to about 54 decibels. Well, I gather birds sing at about 44, 45 decibels. So, once the line comes, that’s the end of me listening to my lovely English partridges. Now I know it’s only quite a small thing. I know we talked about owls a bit today. So, bring in some other ornithology, but it just shows that with the children and how we use our environment, these things all layer up, and it’s the impact that this has had on our lives. And if you can go on to next slide please?

646. You know, we understand that there our rural idle is going to be destroyed and I know it was a particularly lovely morning when you came to Mixbury that morning, and we walked down that old railway line. And sort of looking at it like this, the Chiltern line is extending from Bicester down to Oxford, at the moment. So, I went down there to have a look and see what that was like because obviously I live very close to the corner of the construction sites. The good news is some locals I spoke to said that the local contractors were very, very good. And the engagement was very good. So, I was really positive about that. The bad news, it was so flipping muddy that I couldn’t get out of my car. Because even though the sweeper was there, it was that dreadful grey mud. And so we’ve got years of this and that’s an important bit; that we can’t get away from that. But, one thing I would like to say is thank you for your engagement and the fact from HS2 that we are now going to keep Featherbed Lane open because my wife works in Westbury and so she goes that way every day. My kids go to school there. And so that’s quite an important route for us. So, that’s quite any big impact. So, appreciate the work done there. And we go on to the next slide.

647. The thing that keeps me awake at night and, as my daughter said yesterday, ‘daddy, why are you grumpy these days?’, and I think it is because I am kept awake at night. By the fact that I do worry about this. We’ve invested a lot of money in our houses and last year we re-mortgaged and the surveyor told me that he was going to downgrade is by 15 to 20% on the valuation of our property. Which, bearing in mind, we were borrowing against the value of the property so we could invest and build an extension so that all of our children could get a bedroom because we’re here to stay in Mixbury. We love living in Mixbury. And we’re here to stay. So, yes, we accept the value of the house has decreased considerably. And we’re hoping that one day it comes

back again. But, if you go on to the next slide? There, as you can see more closely where we are and why we’re impacted. And we’ve seen this today. So, my house is obviously circled in the red there. We’ve got a moderate, adverse impact, which I think like my friend Patrick, he was trying to work out some the definitions. I think that probably means that I have sleepless nights two nights a week rather than five nights a week if that was a significant impact. My neighbours, who are somewhat older than me, who live just near that receptor, 2767(81), just across the road from me. They’ve had their house on the market for about two years. They haven’t had any offers. Haven’t been able to sell it. Their property, their grounds are too big for them to maintain. And at the time when they’d like to downsize and go and live near their grandchildren, they haven’t been able to. And so, I don’t know what their long-term plans are.

648. We’re fortunate that we’re 20 years younger. But, it doesn’t seem right to me, I suppose I’m here representing them to some degree, as well, that they should be left in that situation. We’re fortunate, as I said, that we’re going to stay. We’re going to sit it out. And I’ve heard a lot of times that once the lines all finished and it’s all gone back in from HS1, that the value of properties come back. And we kind of banking on that because we are spending quite a lot of money at the moment, investing in this extension, and we’re very much looking forward to that. The challenge, I suppose there, is the fact that we, if it was the status quo, I could sort of believe that. The challenge is we’re going to have a moderate, adverse, you know, 5 to 10, nearly 10 decibel increase in background noise and therefore it does concern me. Are we ever going to get our investment back? I’m not sure. The next slide, please?

649. We’ll whizz through these quite quickly. Sorry, it’s not particularly bright this one. It’s taken of one of the maps. You can see here that the red line shows that the line, we’re very lucky in Mixbury, as Ray mentioned earlier, that most of it goes through a cutting. Because especially compared with some of the people earlier on today. However, there is obviously that weak point in it there, where it goes through Mixbury embankment. And if you could go on to next slide? You’ve seen this picture a few times today. I agree with Mr Miller that we have been a bit light on the mitigation. But, year one, this is what it could look like, when the saplings are planted and they’re not very big, that’s exactly what I could look like. It may take 10 years. By which time, I’ll be 70, which is a bit frightening. Since this was announced on my 40th birthday. A

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40th birthday present. That’s what it going to be like. But if we could just zoom on to the next slide which is the key point here. You know, clearly, as we’ve heard today the source of noise. I’m not looking for compensation, I’m looking for mitigation. And as far as I’m concerned, we haven’t really had any conversations with HS2 for four years about mitigation here.

650. I would like to hear from Mr Miller later on if I could about what he said about Westbury. And if we could come back to look, when we discuss that, about the impact on Westbury, because as far as I was concerned the impact of the draft ES on Mixbury was the fact that a couple of houses were actually covered by the noise whereas in Westbury, it barely touches them. And as you can see up there, in the top left hand corner, then if you can go up towards Westbury, a lot of those buildings that it was touching are industrial units, agricultural buildings. Whereas clearly you can see we are directly impacted. Not just in some of our houses but in the footpaths, as we discussed. So, I’d like to hear from HS2 on why Westbury got a sound barrier when the impact on Westbury was, scientifically based on the ES, no greater than the impact on my house and my neighbour’s house? If we can move on to next slide please?

651. This one’s kind of quite telling. I thought about wearing my batman outfit because clearly if I was dressed as a bat I might get some more serious but then I thought with history and this building that might not be quite such a good thing to do. But clearly you can see here that there’s been a lot of focus on the ecology, noise measurement has obviously happened but the engagement to discuss that over the years has been negligible, if I could say so? We have a pond in our garden. We have quite a big garden. We are very fortunate with that. We’ve had a number of people in the garden at night, counting newts and bats, looking for barn owls. And just on that note, I am presuming from the discussions today that the owl box that’s in my garden, the barn owl box in my garden, will be compulsory purchased on the fact that it’s less than 1.5 kilometres from the line. And it was designed by the same architect as Mr Peter Viggers, the MP, so it’s quite an expensive owl box. Somewhere in the region of £100,000.

652. So, we’ve had lots of visits for HS2, but I’ve never had one on noise. And that the fact that my house is marked as having a moderate impact but no one’s called me to

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explain why that is or what’s being done about it. In fact, no engagement really at all until you kindly came to visit us in the back end of last year. Next slide please? I know we touched on this quite a lot this morning around horses and I’m afraid that my experience of horses, unlike our colleague David, who’s sitting there, pretty much comes to moving hay bales and picking up poo. So, I’m probably not terribly qualified but having brought up one daughter and another one who’s just learning to ride, I do have real concerns that Mossy Corner Lane, as we call it, it’s being called lots of things today, we do have direct line of sight of the line before the mitigation comes. And I appreciate what Mr Miller has said about we’re going to do some work on trying to make that better.

653. CHAIR: Is that where we walked down when we visited?

654. MR HOWARD: Sorry?

655. CHAIR: We walked down a lane when we visited.

656. MR HOWARD: We walked down the lane and we looked and I tied a bag up in the tree where, a white bag up in the tree, where the track was going to go and the bridleway goes down on the left hand side.

657. CHAIR: I think at that point there were some concern about, not the noise of the rail but actually the sight of it coming?

658. MR HOWARD: The sight of it, absolutely.

659. CHAIR: Some mitigation to go up to the height of the bridleway?

660. MR HOWARD: Indeed. And if we can go on to the next slide, you’ll see actually the view, if we’d walked down the bridleway. It was pretty muddy down there, so you wouldn’t have enjoyed it that that morning. That is the view from the bridleway. So, we were looking from the right hand side and where that star is there, it’s pretty much the height of where the trains going to come across that corner. So, obviously, we have

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concerns about that. And if you go on to the next slide, please? So, the site is one thing and Mr Miller says that can potentially be addressed. He also said there was no benefit from us by having a sound barrier on Mixbury embankment there. But, clearly if there was a sound barrier there, that pink noise wouldn’t be there. If when we look in a minute may be at the impact of the noise barrier on Westbury, on the diagram. In fact, I might ask you to pull that up actually? Could you possibly pull that up? It was in Ray Brunton’s slides. It was 842(21). It’s alright. From this morning. 842(21). Mixbury Parish. Sorry. 842(21). So, this just brings out the point.

661. You see the two things here. If you could go up to Westbury obviously, you can see where it says SV14 with that pointer, C03. You can see where the pale green barely touches the village. You can see those big industrial buildings. It barely touches the village whereas, as you can see, this was in the draft ES, down in Mixbury where I live. I was impacted. It reduced in the real ES. Not sure how. And my neighbour was obviously impacted and my neighbour the other way was almost impacted there as well. But, actually, I know I’ve made that point already. The second point I’d like to make is if you go to Westbury viaduct itself, on the green bit, and look at the pink noise there and the massive amount of pink noise there. Which is, and then if you could go on to the next slide, which is A4222? You’ll see that with a 1.4 metre noise barrier that pink noise completely disappears. So, my argument being that if you had noise barriers on that bit through Mixbury embankment, but if you rode down that bridleway, and if you could go back to my last slide? Sorry. That that noise would disappear completely and therefore there is a value in putting a noise barrier there because it would make it so much safer to ride down the bridleway. The other point I would make just while we’re talking ecology and things, and just stay on that one if we can? Is because I know these woods quite well. Well, there’s actually a pair of tawny owls that live very near the bridleway there. But, there’s also a badger sett at the other end of that balancing pond. So, I’m just presuming that they will be safely moved.

662. MR MEARNS: Are the tawny owls more intelligent than barn owls?

663. MR HOWARD: They’re not actually because the night I got engaged one landed on the road and stood in front of my. They’re not. A lot get hit on the road. They sit in front of traffic lights, and so they get hideously killed. I expect they’re probably toast.

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But, then there is a badger sett at the other end of that balancing pond which will be interrupted by the work there. Well, I presume there is a way of alerting people when the digging starts that these things are happening. But it would just be good if that could go for the record that there is a live badger sett down there.

664. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Well, if the badgers do not tell us, why should we tell them?

665. MR HOWARD: Very true. We do have lots of badges around us. We’re very lucky. If we come on to the next slide and I’m not going to do a lot on this. Sorry. And the next one again. In the response to my petition, there was the idea that horses become accustomed to repeated noise. David touched on that early us I’m not going to repeat it. But, clearly we ‘re talking about young children on ponies that leap when a pheasant flies up, let alone a passing train at 70 decibels. So, two slides to go. The next slide please? From a personal point of view, my neighbour as well as what Mr Brunton has talked about today, for us, we believe a sound barrier of some description covering 250, 300 metres along Mixbury embankment. And one thing I would like to ask is we did ask for that to be modelled at some point in one of our engagements with HS2 and we were told that wasn’t possible, too busy drafting other documents. So it would be interesting to see what that would look like. Second, I would be really interested to know how much it would cost. We’ve talked about £125 million for covered tunnels and sinking the railway by four metres but we’ve had some quotes and with our buying power we were getting quotes of about £30,000 for 100 metres, so I’m talking about 100 grand, which is interestingly about what’s been knocked off the value of my house since this project started. So, for 100 grand, you could build a fence there.

666. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: A barrier.

667. MR HOWARD: A barrier. A noise barrier of three or five metres which would obviously have other benefits. So, if we just move on to the next slide, which is my summary? So, as I said, I noticed this just out of the window actually when the sun shone. So, as I said, we’re paying a heavy price in Mixbury. I think you’ve heard quite a bit about that today. Be it through the children or our environment. We are suffering

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from stress as a result of this and particularly from a lack of engagement and it’s been compounded by this lack of engagement, which we found pretty frustrating. We’ve heard little even since you came, we’ve heard little from anyone to come and talk to us and all we’re asking for is put the science aside as to whether it’s going to make a massive difference or not but we’re just asking for some mitigation that we believe will help our cause. And make our life better going forward. And 250 metres just happens to be the length of the red line on that building there that we happen to be sitting in. Thank you very much.

668. CHAIR: Thank you very much, Mr Howard. Ms Lean.

669. MS LEAN (DfT): Thank you, sir. If I could just ask Mr Miller to come back to briefly to the stand to pick up on a couple of those points?

670. CHAIR: Okay. You’re earning your money today, Mr Miller.

671. MR MILLER: Sorry?

672. CHAIR: You’re earning your money today.

673. MR MILLER: That’s right. But I’m not the noise person either.

674. MS LEAN (DfT): Mr Miller, firstly, can we just pull up P4631? I think a query was raised as to why this property was a moderate adverse affect. We see just down the bottom of the table the change highlighted. Day 7 in orange and night 4. Is it there, that’s what’s given rise to the grading of this property as having moderate adverse affect.

675. MR MILLER: That’s right. Yes.

676. MS LEAN (DfT): Picking up on the Westbury Mixbury point. I know you addressed this briefly with Mr Mould earlier, but perhaps we could go back to that. It’s at A842(21). And that’s how we have the position in the draft ES. And then A842(22),

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the position now. I think you explained earlier in response to questions from Mr Mould that when adding in the noise barrier on the Westbury side it pulled back the noise contours from the edge of Westbury and obviously Mr Howard has raised the question about the fact that that doesn’t seem to, didn’t seem to be previously touching any particular properties, whereas on the Mixbury side of the line, three of the properties are shown as having a moderate adverse affect and no change was made there. Was any consideration given to putting a noise barrier on the Mixbury side of the line? Or has that been looked out?

677. MR MILLER: On this side of the viaduct?

678. MS LEAN (DfT): Yes. Well, on the Mixbury side of the line in a way that may benefit the properties that are still affected.

679. MR MILLER: Well, we certainly looked recently at the where the embankment is and where the red bulges out on the contour there and the noise affect and we’ve considered a three metre high noise barrier along for I think a similar length, 200 metres that you’ve looked at. And that comes to a cost of something like – it’s about 440 odd thousand pounds for such a fence. We may differ in terms of our price estimates because the way that we look at these fences, we have to think about fences along the line of a railway which actually have to stand up to the test of railways operating between 330 and 360 kilometres an hour. So, there are other things that need to be taken into account.

680. We are not ignoring trying to understand the merits of bringing in the noise contour by adding in such mitigation. But what we’ve looked at and it’s more of a local calculation rather than a modelled event, is that at your property and the other two properties, in the affected categories, the moderate categories you’ve described, or as we’ve described, we might get one or two dB out of such a provision and we, at the moment, can’t see that that intervention, that that barrier, would take you out of the low adverse affect level or alter the situation that you find yourself in with the noise levels. They’re will be a noise change here. You will still be moderately affected in the terms of the noise assessment but it is a matter of degree. It’s not as though we haven’t looked at it. We have looked at it. We did look at Westbury.

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681. CHAIR: Would a short of barrier make any difference?

682. MR MILLER: Not to any great extent, I don’t think. Because I think Mr Thornely-Taylor has described this; as we get further away from the rail, you get more of a sort of the landscape kind of noise effect rather than if you’re right close to the railway, the barrier operates in quite a different way. So, at the present time we can’t see the justification for the expenditure for such a minor gain. I’m sorry about that. It just doesn’t seem to work in our mind. You don’t really get that much of a difference.

683. MS LEAN (DfT): Has the project given any consideration to the effect on the bridleway of adding in some additional noise mitigation on the Mixbury side of the line?

684. MR MILLER: The bridleway certainly goes into the SOAEL area of the noise assessment, so as you’re getting quite close to the line you do see these red marks which are quite a high noise levels and I think that’s, as I described earlier on, I think that perhaps we need to revisit that a little bit in light of what we think we might need to do with the ancient woodland provision now that ancient woodland has been accepted by Natural England. I think in there and the way that I was describing the over bridge, through the equine over bridge here, which has the 1.8 metre noise barriers we were talking about, I think we can revisit that in that location. So, the bridleway, I still think it will be attractive. You might need to have a hard barrier alongside the railway, in that location, but we are willing to have a look at.

685. MS LEAN (DfT): Mr Miller, you mentioned about revisiting. Is there somewhere where we would be willing to look again as part of the wider work we are doing here and what we might be able to put in to improve the situation, particularly in respect of bridleway?

686. MR MILLER: Yes. I think that’s the approach which is really set out in the information paper, E20. What we’re saying here is that we will continue to investigate these sorts of matters. But, it may well be that through the detailed design, we just don’t know it yet, but others to come in and work on this project may have different

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ideas about how this might operate. And I’ve given evidence in the past around the environmental minimum requirements and the second principle of that is to further address adverse environmental effects. So, we’re not going to leave us alone. We’ll keep coming back to it. I can’t promise that we’ll have a solution. Ultimately, we may, if we don’t resolve this, your noise issue, it may well go to a compensation measure in respect of your property. That’s not the ideal situation because it goes to the part one compensation claim which is one year after the start of the operation of the railway. So, those are the mechanisms. Ideally, we wouldn’t want to rely on the compensation measure. But, hopefully, I’ve given you a degree of comfort that we’re not just going to leave you alone on the point.

687. MS LEAN (DfT): That’s all I can say.

688. CHAIR: Any questions of Mr Miller, Mr Howard?

689. MR HOWARD: No, thank you. All I would say is please don’t leave us for six months without any conversation. If you are thinking what might work, please include us in those conversations because we know this ground like the back of our hands. It is 400 yards from my house and therefore we know what works and what might not work. So, please don’t leave us in a vacuum? Talk to us because I think that’s been part of our frustration. We had to come here today to get that dialogue going. But, thank you very much for your time.

690. SIR PETER BOTTOMLEY: Can I add before you close this part, chairman? And say that it would be interesting to hear that the promoters will go on talking with the British Horse Society and the local horse interests about some of the points about being able to obscure the view of the train for horses and some of the other points which have come up. I think this does sound like an area where that kind of consideration could make a difference.

691. CHAIR: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for being brief, Mr Howard.

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692. MR HOWARD: Thank you.

693. CHAIR: And I think that’s the end of a long day. Order, order. If you could please withdrawal from the room and let us gather our thoughts, please? Thank you.

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