EXCLUSIVE: Glossop Spur costs rise by 54%

Exclusive news courtesy of the Campaign for Better Transport and trailed in today's Guardian. The cost of road schemes are going through the roof, and the Longdendale Bypass - or in this case the Glossop Spur is no exception.

If you read page 3 of this table (opens PDF), you'll see that the original estimated cost of the Glossop Spur was £7.18 million. That's now risen to £11.07 million - a 54% increase since December 2000.

However, worryingly for Roy Oldham and Tameside MBC, the currently agreed Department for Transport contribution remains at £7.18 million.

How will Roy & Co. find the money in these times of Financial crisis?

Lidl - bribing the public

We had spies at last week's Lidl 'Open Day', and they brought back all kinds of goodies - though not products produced by Lidl.

We hear that Lidl put on a large spread, but more important than that, they were asking people to write to them to support a future planning application. Whilst we can't think why anyone in their right mind would want to do so, they obviously thought it might work and this flier was handed to all visitors (we've been careful to obscure the relevant address in case any morons who like supermarkets read this blog). Of course, this kind of tactic is nothing new in this area - JD Williams employed similar methods by 'asking' (more like threatening!) their employees on Rossington Park to write in support of a planning application last year (HPBC approved it, natch).

Lidl propose to provide 72 car parking spaces, but lord only knows what disruption will be caused to the area due to an inevitable traffic increases - there's no mention of this in their leaflet.

You can view the brochure they were handing out here and here. But we thought we'd publish the Q&A section, which are (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly positive and seemingly poorly translated from a standard German text, with attendant poor grammar. Our comments are underneath in bold:

Q - Why have you chosen this location?

A - Lidl have chosen this location as it primarily serves as a catchment of Hadfield, Gamesley and Hollingworth and these areas currently have a limited offer for convenience goods.

There is a 7-11 store in Hollingworth, and a similar store in Gamesley. There are 2 minimarts in Hadfield. So it's not needed on that front.

Q - Will the store undermine Glossop Town Centre?

A - No, the small scale of the development will have little or no impact on Glossop Town Centre. A full Retail Impact Assessment is provided with our application. It should also be noted that Lidl do not operate in-store Bakeries, Delis, Butchers, Fish counters, Dry cleaning, Newsagents and therefore complement rather than compete with local small businesses.

One wonders what use the store is to anyone if it does not provide those facilities, and what need there is for it if it is a 'catchment of Hadfield, Gamesley and Hollingworth'? I suppose if you really want pumpernickel and really can't face going to Aldi, it might come in handy. Then again, Lidl and Aldi are currently a zeitgeist thing for the Bourgeoisie who like 'slumming it' as this recent article in the Guardian shows.

Q - How will the store look?

A - The site, as is currently stands, clearly is in need of redevelopment. Lidl design their buildings to complement their surroundings and as such the proposal is for a traditional building in keeping with the surrounding area.

Personally, I'd rather have an empty car garage that generates no traffic than this plan. The logic here seems to be 'if there's spare Brownfield land, it must follow that something new is created on it'. And it's not hard for it to be 'inkeeping with the surrounding area', when that means a small industrial estate, a car dealer and Europe's largest caravan showroom!

If you want to object - in advance - to this proposal, then you could always write to that paragon of virtue Adrian Fisher, the Director of Planning (Disasters) at Der Bunker, High Peak Borough Council, Municipal Buildings, Glossop, Derbyshire, SK13 8AF.

Glossopdale supermarket sweep part 1: Lidl

Keen readers of the Glossop Advertiser will have noticed an astounding advert in this week's edition. The German supermarket giant Lidl have announced that they plan to apply for planning permission for a store on the site of the former Vauxhall Garage at Brookfield, Hadfield.

They're holding an Open Day opposite the site at Glossop Antiques Centre (who have clearly been bought!) next Thursday 15th May between 1 - 4 p.m.

What's astounding about this advert is that we usually hear about things like this in the press because a planning application has been lodged. But in the High Peak, and Glossopdale in particular, there are more and more examples of things like this taking place (as we will show in other articles to follow). As we write, there is no planning application from Lidl on HPBC's website.

Can you imagine that Lidl are taking a huge chance, being cocky, pre-emptive? We doubt it - the recent planning history of this area has shown how High Peak Borough Council's response to advances from developers is to bend over obligingly. And this looks like yet another example where permission has been 'pre-approved'.

There are may good reasons to oppose this idiotic plan. Firstly, the area does not need any more supermarkets. There are enough, and they are destroying the area. They do nothing for the area other than provide minimum wage jobs which have a high turnover rate - not needed in an area where there is full employment. Furthermore, every penny spent there goes out of the community, not into it.

Secondly, the traffic problems that will result will be hugely significant (there's no need to expand on that, surely?).

Thirdly, the way Lidl treats it's staff is appalling. Read here for details and reference points, and this excellent article from the Guardian in March of this year has extensive details. Other reasons can be found on this excellent German flier (opens PDF).

What's becoming more and more clear in this part of Glossopdale is that developers are keenly eyeing the area with the Glossop Spur in mind. First Rossington Park, then the Home farm hotel/Travelodge and now this plan (as well as activity in Glossop itself) all show that the objective that High Peak Borough Council are colluding in is to to turn the A57 in Glossopdale into a long retail strip easily accessed from the motorway network.

We'll be watching this one like a hawk, and doing our bit to oppose it. By any means necessary.

**Update 13/05/2008: Lidl themselves landed today on this blog post after searching Google for 'glossop & lidl' - everybody wave!

Glossop Spur costs & Tory opportunism

Today's Manchester Evening News has a story which is well-known in anti-bypass circles, but perhaps less so more widely: namely, that Tameside Council's costs for the Glossop Spur have reached £800,000. There are two aspects of this we would like to concentrate on in this post.

Firstly, that this is in fact old news, to us at least. Indeed, our fellow campaigner John Hall submitted a Freedom of Information nearly 2 years ago and received a response indicating that the projected costs to March 2007 would be approximately £836,000. Given the hiccups with the Public Inquiry, the costs must surely be far more by now.

Perhaps it's time we rigged up another cost-counter for the Glossop Spur?

The second aspect is the fact that this article is effectively a press release for Tameside Tories. All you need to know about this lot is summed up by these words in the article:

"Councillor Bell said while the Tory group supports the proposal..."

We'd have to assume they do because there's been no opposition from them. It's hard to imagine what points they are trying to score here. Would they have done anything differently from the Labour Party? If they are committed to it, then surely that means they support it to the end - there's no implication that they would pull the scheme because of costs. This is simply a party political matter for this lot.

And who can be surprised? The 1990s Tory road policy got a bloody good hiding from environmental direct action campaigners, to the extent that most of the schemes were shelved by Labour upon coming to power in 1997. That's how unpopular they were, and still are. Why should anyone think this lot would be any different from Labour, should they come to power?

Time for a quote from Thatcher in 1990:

"We are not going to do away with the great car economy."

Any argument that advocates 'changed priorities' as a way to transport and ecological salvation really does not understand the central relationship of the car industry to modern capitalism. The answer lies without politics and capitalism, not within.

Travelodge/Submarine plan vanishes...(or sinks without trace)

We were going to write about this in depth (approximately 4 fathoms), especially after David Jones' gushing article in last week's Glossop Chronicle. But it seems that Cllr Anthony McKeown has told us that Shepherd Developments has withdrawn it's plan for a Submersible Travelodge in Hadfield, presumably now that the Environment Agency have objected once again.

So for now, we can only sit back and smile at David Jones' blurb saying that High Peak Borough Council is 'committed to promoting Glossop as a holiday destination' - yes, lots of people want to stay at a 'luxury' hotel that is slap bang next to a huge roundabout & main road (Glossop Spur) and not far from a load of ugly grey industrial development (Etherow & Rossington Park). Lots of business people needing a stop off a (soon to be) motorway on their way to somewhere else that is...

There's little doubt that Shepherd Developments will re-submit their application again - this project is pinned to hopes that the Glossop Spur planning application will be renewed by the end of this year. How that can happen with the increasing risk of regular floods - and the opposition that will be mustered by anti-bypass activists - remains to be seen.

Woolley Bridge Floods

This week's floods in the Glossop area have again been big news, with articles in both the Advertiser & Chronicle.

But the only hint of a wider view of this problem came in the Advertiser, with a quote from a resident of Woolley Lane:

"We told the council when a new house was built next door two years ago that this area was a flood plain"

Indeed. There's a new housing development being built not far from the flooded area, as well as a Hotel/Travelodge as we reported previously (and whose previously blocked planning proposal is being resurrected - a report will come soon).

So it'll be really interesting to see what happens if the Glossop Spur is built, because the river Etherow tends to burst its banks all along the area where the roundabout from the A57 will be. The picture above gives a projected view of what the possible road signs will need to indicate, because this is the third time major flooding has occurred here this century...

New documents on the Public Inquiry website

TMBC have published their Environmental Statement (ES) on the Public Inquiry website.

The ES covers the 'Glossop Spur' only and it's nearly 2 years old already. As we've pointed out previously, there is no ES for the 'Bypass & Spur', since that scheme does not actually exist, other than in the minds of John Watson and the Secretary of State.

It will be interesting to see how this 'mashup' plays out at the PI

More visitors

After the Prime Minister's Office popped in a few weeks ago, we're now getting visits from our principal opponents. Today, it's the turn of Mouchel Parkman, who stopped by twice today.

This is the crew that TMBC and Derbyshire CC employed to produce an Environmental Statement for the Glossop Spur, which was the subject of much debate on Tuesday. This is because it's now out of date and there currently doesn't seem to be any reliable data for the environmental impacts of the Bypass & Spur together, so the boys and girls at MP must be hard at work trying to scrape something together for their deadline.

So much so that they've decided to concentrate of the real work of building a road instead, and promptly left this blog to head over to Amazon, perhaps to get hold of John Watson's "text book" (his words on Tuesday).

An On/Off Romance

The Bypass and the Spur: An on and off romance

Firstly apologies for what at times might appear a somewhat dry article. My excuse is that I was asked to write it, and sometimes the devil is to be found in the detail. I have tried to be brief, and hope that what is written will if a little technical ultimately prove to be of interest.

1992

Historically these two road projects have had an off and on romance that has lasted for about 15 years, when the first public consultation surfaced in 1992. At that time the proposed Brown Route actually included the Glossop Spur, and they both formed part of what became known in Highways Agency parlance as as the “preferred route”, so called because it apparently it was the public’s choice from the strictly road based solutions on offer at consultation.

2004

Money concerns and the Labour regime replacing the Tories in 1997 held things up, and then things changed fairly dramatically around 2004, when the Bypass was uncoupled from the Spur for what were given as administrative and funding reasons. At the time James Purnell MP for Hyde and Stalybridge appeared to be outraged, saying in the Glossop Advertiser of 23/12/04 :-“I’m just amazed at the way the Highways Agency have taken this decision – they smuggled it out hidden in a letter and didn’t even spell Glossop correctly”. Although Tom Levitt MP for High Peak took a similar view, the Spur Road has remained a separate project ever since because it did not fall under the remit of being part of the National Trunk Route network.

Therefore the Glossop Spur ultimately had to be put forward as a planning application as the baby of Tameside MBC, through consultants Mouchel Parkman in autumn 2006. Unsurprisingly the Planning Committees at both authorities, Tameside and High Peak upheld the Spur application despite registered public opposition for the road outnumbering support quite significantly - 4 to 1 we believe was the case in the High Peak at least. The A628 Bypass consultation followed in the spring of 2006 at St Mary’s Church, Hollingworth. Perhaps inevitably Tameside’s chief engineer put in an appearance in a small ante room with a set of boards describing the Spur, but it was made adamantly clear by Highway Agency Officials in the main reception, that they were consulting on an independent scheme, the A628 Bypass which they viewed as part of the core trunk road network.

So things then proceeded to the current state of affairs, where the schemes are divergent, although paradoxically in funding terms to some degree there has been a slight re-convergence. This is because the introduction of regional government meant that funding for the bypass ceased to be conditional on central government approval and returned to a local budget in the North West. Thus the 2 schemes would once again seek funding from the same transport funding pool allocated by the the North West Regional Assembly.

However despite this relative convergence in funding the situation is very different in planning terms in one key respect, from how it might have been if the unravelling had never occurred in 2004. Stated very simply planning approval for the Spur was granted as described above but that approval was and remains wholly conditional on the bypass being successfully in place. Conversely, and this is perhaps key, should the Bypass survive its many statutory hurdles, it can proceed to construction with or without the Glossop Spur. This effectively means in fairness to Stakeholders and all affected parties, the A628 bypass must be considered on its merits and impacts alone.

2007

As we know the size and nature of Objections from many significant quarters, led to a resubmission of the bypass application this year 2007, which has just closed. There is no material change in the status of the bypass as an independent project - it can still proceed with or without the Spur.

However all interested parties will now be mindful of the imminent Public Inquiry, and with this in mind, possibly it is worth considering if there has been a significant if slight repositioning attempt made by the Highways Agency with regard to the Spur.

That the position for the bypass as an independent project remains no different can be assumed from the Environmental Summary Non Technical Summary which must be comprehensive with regard to the scheme’s scope and intentions. It describes a scheme that traverses a route from M67 to Townhead Farm, and involves a single side road that ends with a t-junction at Mottram Moor. No mention of the Spur there at all therefore.

The wary bypass watcher will perhaps be wondering therefore why the Highways Agency supplies extensive traffic modelling within the full Technical Environmental Statement for the Bypass with the Spur. Moreover with figures that are by the Highway Agency’s own subcontractors, Mott McDonald, which differ from those of Mouchel Parkman the contractors and traffic modellers for the Spur application.

Traffic modelling is at the heart of any road proposal. Words only half describe the impacts and benefits of any scheme, and traffic models, whilst needing to be treated with caution as only hypothetical, may be said to be the surest evidence upon which the scheme’s proponents and opponents must rely on to make their case.
For the bypass alone the Highways Agency has submitted as core evidence in Figure 1.8, sheets 1 and 2, something in the region of 200 separate AADT assessments of HGV and traffic flows in various scenarios from different locations in different years. This substantial body of evidence meets the general expectation for statistical traffic modelling evidence in connection with such a scheme, and forms probably the centre of the Highways Agency case for the road.

However why the HA have also chosen to submit an equal comparable body of evidence of about 200 traffic models/scenarios for the Bypass with Spur in the adjacent figure 1.9, sheets 1 and 2, raises many interesting questions and perhaps a few eyebrows as well. It is almost as if this was evidence the Highways Agency might choose to rely on, although as has been pointed out, the bypass does not require the Spur to gain building approval, and the Non Technical Summary gives the public no indication that the project has any relationship to other schemes at all.

Looking beyond this fact, the way that the recent announcement of the Pre Inquiry Hearing was made might seem to suggest a further re-positioning on the part of the Highways Agency and various Government departments. In the full Environmental Statement the Spur is referred to as an “other scheme” which could be “interacted with” by the Bypass. However the author of this article received a Pre Inquiry letter from Newcastle regarding the Spur Road, where the bypass was described as a “related” scheme, and the Pre Inquiry hearing in early May will determine simultaneously over how these schemes are Inquired into.

Are these issues of repositioning with regard to the Bypass and Spur technical subtleties of no great moment, or pivotal issues, which decide if bypass opponents have to deal with a single headed monster or some kind of hydra.Or to put it less colourfully will the Highways Agency rely on bypass evidence alone, or do they have so little faith in their case here, that they may try to introduce Bypass with Spur figures in the hope of pulling the wool over the Inspector’s and Public eyes.

Should they try to do this, who is going to point it out, and will they be listened to unless they have a loud enough legal voice to be heard? In the view of the writer, these are matters of serious concern to anyone trying to stop this road, and its poor relation, which is the Glossop Spur.