I visited Britain's most expensive farm track
A dispute over a farm track in Buckinghamshire could cost taxpayers 'tens of millions' in delays to HS2 after local NIMBYs blocked a minor upgrade. I went to see that the fuss was about.
To hear more on this story, including audio clips from the infuriating council meeting that discussed the track, check out this week’s episode of The Abundance Agenda, the podcast I co-host with .
When you build a railway line, a major road, a tunnel, or any long continuous piece of infrastructure, you’re likely to disrupt the flow of groundwater. Britain is criss-crossed by endless springs, streams and rivulets, soaking through the land like the capillaries on an old drunk’s face. They drip and dribble into our rivers, reservoirs and farmlands; and if you block one off here a small lake or tributary could disappear over there, which could be pretty inconvenient for someone. So a key requirement for HS2 is to put measures in place along the route that stop this from happening.
Much of HS2 will run in tunnels. One of these tunnels is the Wendover Green Tunnel, a cut-and-cover earthwork which will bypass Wendover to the south west, on the far side of the A413 which follows the same route1. To sign off on this tunnel, the Environment Agency required the construction of a spring chamber in a field to the north. The spring chamber is an underground concrete box with solar-powered sensors that manages the flow of groundwater to help preserve nearby waterways. Its design is specified by the Environment Agency and there is basically no possible objection the local council could have to it.
But to install the spring chamber and make sure vehicles can reach it for future maintenance, engineers need to upgrade an existing farm track. This is where the proverbial hit the fan last week as Buckinghamshire Council refused permission for the track to be upgraded. Without the track there can be no spring chamber, without the chamber there can be no progress on the Wendover Green Tunnel, and the delays and knock-on effects from this are set to cost taxpayers ‘tens of millions’ of pounds. Not quite bat tunnel territory, but not far off.
To give you some context, I’ve posted a map2 of the area (above) with some features drawn in. The light blue box is where the spring chamber will be buried. HS2 want to use the existing farm track (marked in pink) to access the chamber from Dobbins Lane. This track can already be used by tractors and agricultural machinery, and the upgrade would involve laying two strips of a sort of permeable gravelly-concrete, one under each wheel, to create a stable mud-free track for vehicles to drive down. The upgraded track would follow the existing route and then cut down the side of that last field to reach the site.
I took a walk along the track last week, and you can see some pictures I took below. It’s an old farm track that was laid with stone and gravel at some point but has since degraded and overgrown. The first part as you enter the farm is concrete, but most of it looks like the second picture below.
The council meeting in which the upgrade was rejected is absolutely maddening. (We’ve included some of the juicier clips in this week’s podcast.) HS2 came with a robust, minimal plan for upgrading the farm track that had already been adjusted based on local feedback, and had the full support of planning officers, who recommended that it be approved.
Despite this, the councillors rejected the application, claiming it would result in:
“…harm to the protected Chilterns National Landscape that could reasonably be avoided or reduced.”
There are a number of problems with this statement, but the biggest is that from any reasonable listening of the meeting, this doesn’t seem to be why the councillors refused the application. At several points it becomes clear that the issue is the access point to the track, not the track itself.
Cllr Neil Marshall: “I think you need to be very careful, because if you’re objecting on those grounds principally, that’s not going to redirect the access route, which is your end objective. If you are objecting on the basis of the impact on the landscape, how do you point it in the direction of the alternate access?”
<The development officer explains that they can only consider this application, not alternatives>
Cllr Neil Marshall: “But I thought the end objective was to change the access point.”
Development Officer: “Erm, but we can’t force them to do that, what we’re trying to do is…” <chair cuts them off>
The conversation is confusing to follow, but what the ‘access point’ issue boils down to is the impact on Dobbins lane, a leafy arterial avenue that runs from the main road through the residential district to the west of Wendover where it meets the farm track. Councillors felt the impact on this road from ‘construction traffic’ would be too great, and that access to the site should come from another direction.
‘Construction traffic’ can conjure all sorts of images in one’s mind, so let’s be clear: we’re talking about a single truck per day during the 12 week construction period, outside peak traffic hours. I wanted to understand the impact that this truck would have for myself, so in true Partridge style I parked the Jag and spent a happy 15 minutes eating a pork pie from the local farm shop3 while listening to The Rest is History and counting cars. I think I saw about three vehicles and two pedestrians the entire time.
You don’t have to take my word for it: councillors repeatedly try to make traffic a big deal in the meeting, only to be slapped down by their own advisors.
Cllr Phil Gomm: “We do agree to the chamber but we don’t agree to the access and the impact it will have on the people on Wendover.”
Legal advisor: “I’d just like to come in on the proposition of refusing it on highway grounds. […] We’ve had an appraisal carried out by the council’s highway officers, and it’s led them to the conclusion that there isn’t a defensible reason for refusal on highways, hence they recommended approval. Taking that and the fact that the committee doesn’t have its own technical evidence to base a reason for refusal on, if we were to refuse the application on highway grounds it would leave the councillors vulnerable to an award of costs.”
Cllr Phil Gomm: “But that’s like holding us over a barrel!”
Unable to object on grounds of traffic (because the grounds are complete and utter nonsense) councillors pivot to the impact on the landscape, even though it seems clear this isn’t what they really object to. It becomes clearer still when you see what the councillors want instead, which is absolute madness.
To illustrate how mad, here’s an updated map (above). Rather than using the existing farm track (pink), they want HS2 to run an access route from either Aylesbury Road (along the top) or Nash Lee End (to the left). There are no existing tracks from those directions to work with, and putting in new ones would involve bulldozing mature hedgerows, disrupting streams, building new junctions or entrances onto the roads, and carving up usable farmland. All this to avoid the temporary imposition of one truck per day. To suggest this and claim you’re concerned about the landscape is borderline trolling.
This would also require HS2 to submit a new planning application for an entirely new route, setting back the overall project and incurring tens of millions of pounds in delays. This was put to the councillors, whose response was to… simply refuse to accept that this was true.
In another astonishing exchange that you can hear on the podcast, Councillor Fealey accuses the HS2 representative who raises this concern of making ‘threats’ before scoffing at the notion of any impact. It follows the same pattern as his colleague’s emotional responses to the legal advice given - a kind of arrogant dismissal of experts and their annoying consequences. “I know the highways officers have this and that,” Gomm complains at one point, ‘this and that’ referring to ‘data’ and ‘evidence’, “but we don’t have to agree with them all the time!” Which is absolutely true, by all means challenge your experts, but you can’t just make up objections with no supporting evidence and expect them to be legally valid.
Environmental ‘concerns’ are often cited as the reason for our chronic inability to get stuff built in Britain, but often they’re a convenient excuse. Local campaigners in Wendover are happy to say the quiet part out loud: “When questioned about the feasibility of an alternative access route via Nash End, it was understood that HS2 cited concerns over disrupting hedgerows and wildlife habitats. While these environmental concerns are valid, they must be weighed against the road safety issues raised by the residents.” NIMBYs would be quite happy to bulldoze a quarter-mile of countryside if it means they avoid a single truck driving up their road each day for a few months.
I’m obviously not against local democracy, it’s good that towns and villages have representatives who can demand high standards from companies like HS2 Ltd and hold them to account. Indeed, the same project has an example of this working well: in earlier discussions HS2 were planning to carry out a far more intrusive upgrade before settling on the plan for a simple gravel track after local feedback. That’s scrutiny done well.
But for local democracy to work you need high quality people acting in good faith. At times the meeting sounded more like red-faced old bores ranting in a pub, setting the world to rights. The outcome seems to be a bad faith fudge, allowing councillors to posture in front of residents while abandoning the grown-up question of ‘well how the hell do you built it then’ to others.
That’s not surprising when councillors are unpaid volunteers4, and the average age is trending over 60. In the same way that the quality of Westminster politicians has declined since ‘Member of Parliament’ ceased to be a prestigious or highly-paid job for professionals5, councils risk becoming repositories of semi-retired amateur opinion-havers; out of touch, elected by small numbers of residents who barely know what the council does these days. A problem that extends to local mayors as well.
We desperately need to recruit better people into local government. Simplifying councils into fewer, larger unitary authorities might help, but we still need good candidates and engaged voters. Instead, next week’s local elections will see low turnouts, protest votes against national parties and a new wave of hastily-vetted candidates taking office. When they arrive, they will hold a ready-made toolkit to block, delay or frustrate the ambitions of those who want Britain to grow, to prosper, to succeed. The cost to taxpayers could be incalculable.
To hear more on this story, including audio clips from the infuriating council meeting that discussed the track, check out this week’s episode of The Abundance Agenda, the podcast I co-host with James O'Malley.
Why exactly HS2 needed to be in a tunnel here is beyond me given the route runs through nondescript fields alongside a major A-road, past an industrial timber depot, but that’s a whole other blog post.
God I love drawing on maps.
It’s an excellent farm shop which I highly recommend if you’re in the area - good butcher, a deli counter and a nice area with benches outside where you can sit and watch the sheep while you eat their children.
Belated footnote: I should say that councillors do receive a basic allowance, although not a full salary by any means. Paul Cotterill shared a link showing that this allowance is £14k in Buckinghamshire, with some able to access a further £6k.
Parliament continues to be the only example where people seem to think paying less would result in higher quality staff.
Nobody should be surprised by this. Here in South Bucks, local councillors see HS2 as an invading army and themselves as brave resistance fighters, where any act of trivial sabotage is to be welcomed. Following any kind of due process would be seen as collaborating with the enemy.
Madness. My friend is a councillor. She happens to be a very experienced solicitor specialising in infrastructure. She tells me that she regularly has to cut across similar such deliberations. Thankfully, she has the patience of a saint.