PUBLIC SESSION MINUTES OF ORAL EVIDENCE taken before HIGH SPEED RAIL COMMITTEE On the HIGH SPEED RAIL (LONDON – WEST MIDLANDS) BILL Monday, 23 November 2015 (Evening) In Committee Room 5 PRESENT: Mr Robert Syms (Chair) Sir Peter Bottomley Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Mr David Crausby Mr Mark Hendrick _____________ IN ATTENDANCE Mr James Strachan QC, Counsel, Department for Transport Mr Joe Rukin, Stop HS2 WITNESSES Mr Matt Jackson Professor John Altringham Mr Colin Sully Mr Barnaby Osborne _____________ IN PUBLIC SESSION INDEX Subject Page Kirk Jones (Cont’d) Submissions by Mr Rukin 3 Response by Mr Strachan 6 Closing submissions by Mr Rukin 7 The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust Submissions by Mr Jackson 8 Evidence of Professor Altringham 18 Further submissions by Mr Jackson 29 Professor Altringham, cross-examined by Mr Strachan 34 Further submissions by Mr Jackson 37 Response from Mr Strachan 42 Closing submissions by Mr Jackson 46 Chiltern Ridges HS2 Action Group Submissions by Mr Sully 48 (At 18.36) 1. CHAIR: Order, order. Quiet, please. Kirk Jones (Cont’d) 2. MR RUKIN: Okay. Well, I’m sure the Committee is covered from the sheer excitement that there will be an additional provision 5, and can we slowly scroll through the rest of the slides until 27, please? That was outside of the library on the main road – keep going, that’s fine – and these are a selection of slides showing the area in and around the phone exchange, for some reason that one’s in there twice, and the commercial pumps that we use to drain it out and, again, the car park as Councillor Phillips previously mentioned, and that’s Mill Lane. Finally, we’ll stop on 27, which basically, this shows the level and the extent of the flooding, and the fact that three months later, a lot of the water was still there. 3. This is the property belonging to the neighbour of the Petitioner. The one who is directly next to the river. It took months and months for the water level to drop, and if you go onto the 28th, there’s actually a slide – this was taken about a month afterwards when the bridge in the garden was still quite high. Now, Chalfont St Giles is reasonably close to Gerrards Cross, where you may remember a tunnel collapsed shortly after a passenger train had gone though, and there was a similar case with tunnelling with HS1 in Kent, where a 60 by 25 metre crater was left behind. Now, both of these accidents happened in the presence of arguably very similar but, again, arguably, more stable geological conditions than those present under Chalfont St Giles, and without the addition weight of flood water. 4. Now, in this respect, we’d like to reiterate the evidence that was presented by Dr Hayden Bailey who is concerned that the tunnel crown by Chalfont St Giles has only six metres of competent chalk above it, which he feels represents a significant chance of ground failure. This is of course coupled with the fact that there is also a risk of polluting an aquifer which supplies 22 per cent of London’s water supply. It seems bizarre that HS2 Ltd have the position not necessarily to propose active mitigation, but to monitor and see what happens, see if it causes a problem and then somehow resolve it. I’m not really sure if they understand, if things go wrong here, exactly what making it good will entail. Right in the middle of a village, right next to the bridge that 3 connects both sides of the village, and how much effort and expenditure it will be if something did go wrong, to then rectify afterwards. 5. The proposed attitude towards the Misbourne River – i.e. will look at it and will see, will be monitoring it – has been described by Misbourne River Action as completely inappropriate. A letter from them makes up slide 27. Now, I’m just going to ask everyone – sorry, slide 29. The next one. Obviously, I don’t need to read it if everyone is able to read that resolution as either it appears on the screen or in the paper documents. It was just because it got inverted on its side for the purpose of going in the PowerPoint. I wasn’t sure if it would be good enough, but it does seem that is. The underlying point with this is that the water flow of the Misbourne is not just represented by the water you can see in the river. 6. It’s represented by the water that flows underneath the river, because the chalk surface is heavily fissured, cracked with clay pipes and swallow holes and any movement here in terms of the tunnelling could significantly increase the porosity and cause the bed to leak. People have commented on the letter from the Environment Agency, and I would like to take things in context. I for the life of me cannot understand the context in terms of what this letter is replying to, because it seems to at least basically be explaining to HS2 Ltd what HS2 Ltd have proposed. In response to the bullet points, Mr Older from Misbourne River Action has come onto that as well on these. 7. But the minimum cover of two tunnel depths being employed effectively makes no allowance whatsoever for the unique chalk nature of the Misbourne, which is not a unique thing within Britain. It’s a reasonably unique thing within the world, in terms of the way that aquifer operates, and the way that water flows throughout it. In terms of the second bullet point, operating the tunnel boring machine in a closed space seems to be far more in the contractor’s interest than in the environmentalists’. In terms of closely monitoring the river flows during construction, well, if it’s reasonably dry, if there’s a problem, you’re not necessarily going to detect it straightaway anyway, and if it’s very wet, it’s going to be too late by the time you detect it. 8. For the rest of what the Environment Agency seems to be saying, the second last paragraph, ultimately, ‘before we could approve applications in line with the protective 4 provisions within the Hybrid Bill, we would need to be satisfied that all potential risks to the river and the surrounding environment have been mitigated’. Which suggests to me that they’re not satisfied that the current proposals mitigate the risks to the river and the surrounding environment, and that this minimisation of risk will need to be supported by evidence from the Groundwater Investigation Programme, which again suggests that it hasn’t as yet been supported by evidence from the Groundwater Investigation Program. 9. I just find the whole context of this letter very confusing. It seems to be being used to suggest that the Environment Agency are very happy and quite content with what’s happening, when it seems to simply reiterate what HS2 Ltd have said back to HS2 Ltd, which just I simply can’t fathom and neither can Mr Jones. Anyway, to summarise, the chalk below the river surface is a maze. It’s a rabbit warren. Where the water will go, we don’t know, if the tunnelling makes a significance difference and causes the bed to leak. Now, to prevent this, if the tunnel is go at the depth that’s promoted, then the only option is in environmentally friendly bed reinforcement which would have to be done before construction works. 10. Which isn’t necessarily a massively expensive option, but I would say, given that there is a massive unpredictably with not just the river bed, the unseen river bed, but the entire chalk aquifer and the risk – United Nations have pointed out that the risk to global water supplies and specifically when you look at how much London relies on the Chiltern chalk aquifer, it seems a very blasé attitude to be taking, to say, ‘well, we’ll just if we mess it up, and if we mess it up, we’ll fix it’. So to summarise, there’s obviously significant concerns and my petitioner has very significant concerns about the effect on the Misbourne Valley and effect on the chalk aquifer, and the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been properly assessed, which is par for the course in many parts of HS2 Ltd, and really wants to ask the question, why? 11. In terms of why, not only was the tunnel rerouted to the middle of village when it very much seems that there was a third option between the two proposals, which could have had the best of both words, potentially, but also, why has it has been raised so high when the potential for environmental damage and the potential for vibration with a lot of listed buildings in the area has been potentially significantly increased by increasing the height of the tunnel? Mr Jones did ask me to say, of course, to remind the 5 Committee that Paradise Lost was written in Chalfont St Giles and to ask that this paradise is not lost. 12. CHAIR: All right. Mr Strachan. 13. MR STRACHAN QC (DfT): P10837, please. I showed you this very briefly at the outset, but you’ll see that the Petitioner’s property, which you’ve seen the context of, I think the property itself is in this location, broadly speaking where the arrow is. The proposal for the bored tunnel takes the tunnel below the River Misbourne at at least two tunnel diameters depth, as I explained before.