Below is a link to the PowerPoint presentation that was used at the meeting with Anthony Browne MP, EWR, SCDC, ‘Option E’ parish council representatives and Cambridge Approaches.
Although there was not unanimity, the majority of parish council representatives:
1) rejected the main body of the Option E area for EWR
2) supported a station to the north of Cambourne
You may have noticed an increased level of activity in the area proposed for East West Rail to come from Cambourne to Cambridge South. Survey teams from Arup or EWR Co. looking at the fields, the wildlife and the general environment as a preparation for a new railway line through our countryside.
We have an interactive map that shows survey requests received by landowners but this may now be out of date. Please would you be so kind to look at it and see if your are aware of survey locations not on the map. Be aware of a potential GDPR issue here, so it is better to report on your own land rather than others, but also to report on anything seen on public roads / rights of way.
So, if your land is being surveyed, you have received a request for a survey or you see a survey team on a public highway / right of way that is not recorded please could you update the map?
To add a survey location and label to the map click the add marker icon (a grey balloon shaped icon) under the search box on the map, click the location of the survey and then label it.
This is important as it allows us to have information from which we can detect lines of activity and inform your parish accordingly.
Handling Survey Requests
We are currently reviewing the pros and cons of accepting survey requests.
We really welcome following press release from Anthony Browne supporting a Cambourne North Station for the East West Railway. This position was also the most popular option that came out of the Cambridge Approaches oversight group in a series of seven meetings leading up to the one held on the 8th October. This was attended by Anthony Browne MP, Will Gallagher of East West Rail, Aidan Van De Weyer Deputy Leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council and representatives from the parishes from Bourn to Great Shelford. Cambridge Approaches called on East West Rail to include a Cambourne North route in their next consultation expected in January 2021.
In a recent meeting between the CA working group and Mayor James Palmer he told us that he also supports a Cambourne North station for East West Rail.
A Cambourne North station implies a route similar to the example set out in this post from Cambridge Approaches and has a profound impact on the routing of the railway at it approaches Cambridge. We stress that the CA route is just an example and there is considerable more detailed work to do in threading the route through the various constraints between Cambourne North and Cambridge South.
The MPs press release follows:
“Anthony Browne, MP for South Cambridgeshire, has welcomed news that East-West Rail (EWR) is considering a station to the north of Cambourne and is calling for the option to be included in any future consultation.
As part of a meeting between EWR and local Parish Councillors, chaired and organised by Mr Browne, officials confirmed that the possibility of a railway station to the north of Cambourne was under active consideration.
Mr Browne worked towards securing a northern option as part of his general election campaign and has written to the Secretary of State for Transport on this issue. He is continuing to arrange high-level meetings between senior EWR planners and local representatives.
Twenty-eight Parish Councils were represented at the meeting, which was addressed by the EWR Director of Strategy Will Gallagher, with Program Delivery Director Ian Parker taking questions on the design and implementation of the railway. Ashton Cull, Senior Policy Advisor to Combined Authority Mayor James Palmer was also in attendance.
Several other local concerns were also raised during the meeting, including early electrification of the railway, potential timetabling issues and the environmental impact of the scheme.
Mr Browne commented: “East-West Rail is clearly listening to local opinion and I am delighted to hear they are considering a station north of Cambourne. I’m now calling on them to include any such option as part of a future public consultation.
“I believe there is a very powerful case for a station to the north of Cambourne, where it will avoid many much-loved areas of natural beauty and will provide better connections with other transport links, such as the A428.
“We need better public transport links through South Cambridgeshire, but it is important that any engagement is wide-ranging, transparent and happens as early on in this process as is possible. Residents have the right to know what they can expect from this project.”
We received the following input from Edd Banks a local farmer in the option E area. His also chairman of the National Farmers Union (Cambridge branch).
“The EWR proposal will have a great impact on many different parts of our community, but one part that will be hit hard is the agricultural sector. Cambridgeshire is the bread basket of England with just over 50% of the all the wheat grown in England, grown within 50 miles of Cambridge. The land is fertile with most of it being categorised as grade 2 arable land and the character of the area is one of large open fields which is what helps make it much more efficient to farm and to boost yields. Often when organisations such as EWR Co. start their evaluation of where to put infrastructure such as new railway lines, the farm land is the obvious choice, but what they do not understand is the impact it will have on the productivity of the farmland and the subsequent effect on the individual farmer. Often the land has been in the family ownership for generations. Everything about farming is for the long term, there are no quick wins in agriculture and it takes a lot of time, effort, money and emotion over countless years to get the land into the condition it is. If the land was purchased more recently the farmer will be still trying to pay that off, which from the income generated from farming will take many years, only making the land economically viable for the next generation to farm it. Physically dividing blocks of land by cutting a railway through it will create many problems and the newly designated route will not have taken into account how that land is farmed.
Therefore, you could end up severing one large field, which is efficient to farm and gives the opportunity to gain the best yields, into several smaller odd shaped fields that become uneconomic to farm and prohibitive for the large-scale modern machinery used these days. This means instead of just losing the area taken up by the railway, the farmer will effectively lose the entire field as the remainder will simply end up fallow.
Another issue often over looked is the logistics of how the new segmented fields are farmed. In other words, if a field is sliced into multiple smaller fields by the railway and if those remaining areas are still farmable, how does the farmer move their machinery (crop sprayers, cultivators, combines etc) from one part of the field to the next. With EWR Co.’s commitment to having no level crossings, this could lead to farmers having to drive considerable distances (they will therefore often be forced to go through villages) just to reach the other side of the field. The new bridges and underpasses created by EWR Co. also need to be large enough to allow the largest machines farmers use to pass over or through them, otherwise this could effectively prohibit access to parts of land or cause even longer diversions.
Other issues which will never be assessed by EWR Co. are the disruption to field drainage schemes, water logged areas of land due to shading from new landscaping and the devastation caused to crops by rabbits that will invariably take up residence in the cuttings and embankments of the new railway. All of these problems are considerable, because not only will EWR Co. create water logged areas of land which become much harder to farm or even unfarmable, but also the farmer will have to take on the cost of the control of the rabbits. Ultimately, they will never be able to control them as well as before and so large areas of land (made worse if the fields are small due to the division by the railway) will have substantial yield loss. This could be to such an extreme that again the fields become uneconomic to farm and therefore production would cease on that block. Putting this is into a national perspective, the UK is currently only 60% self-sufficient in terms of food and with continued pressure on agriculture land from new developments such as EWR, this position will only worsen.”
This input is consistent with the recent feedback that we have received from the local branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.
The high grade farmland in the option E area is important for UK food security. Global sea levels are rising due to climate change and the IPCC prediction is that they will rise by 1.1 metres by 2100. More recently other studies have predicted much higher rises up to the 4.7m predicted by the surging seas studies by the same date. After a single Fenland flood in 1949 it took 8-9 years for the farmland to recover due to a species of nematode in the flood water. Floods could happen well before 2100. This means that we may well lose the most productive farmland in the country in The Fens. However, the higher farmland in the option E area would not be flooded and would therefore become even more precious.
Consider also that if the railway goes through the Option E area, over time, the local planning will favour new stations, jobs and housing along side the railway infrastructure. Perhaps Garden Villages with 5000 houses as already proposed by the Mayor. These will further damage the farmland and reduce the national food security.
Rather than providing a standard template letter for sending to our MP Anthony Browne, we suggest that you write individual letters to him that express your concern. MPs and their researchers have found that an original letter sent by a committed, passionate constituent is far more powerful than a pile of identical letters.
We have provided a list of topics below that you may wish to consider in writing your letter. We do not suggest that you include more than a few of them and only those that you feel strongly about. Your own words would be much more influential than using ours.
If you wish to obtain more information about any of the topics, please contact us and we will try to help.
PROBLEMS WITH OPTION E
Option E is the wrong solution – all feasible alternative alignments have significant problems.
REQUESTED ACTIONS BY ANTHONY BROWNE
Call for Anthony Browne to lobby government and EWR:
We received an update from the East West Rail Company today which reports on the conversations held with parish councils along the line of the route from Bedford to Cambridge. We also reported on this in a previous post for the sessions held in with parishes close to Cambridge in the Option E area. You can download EWR Co.’s full document below:
It’s a long document but highlights include some new material on the location of Cambourne Station on page 8 ..
“As mentioned, the exact location of new stations has not yet been decided, and we will be working with local authorities and other stakeholders to make sure the locations work for local communities.
We would be open to exploring the possibility of a station in the north of Cambourne.”
and aligning the route with the A428 see page 6 ..
“Specifically, on the A428, we are working with their [Highways England] team to see whether there is a practical way to bring the projects together being mindful that it is not as straightforward as it might seem at first – railways do not like hills or bends and the station stops might not fit well with the needs of road users. However, as mentioned, we will keep talking to our counterparts at the A428 and the other projects across the area to create not just the best rail system, but the best transport system we can.“
As previously reported it seems EWR Co. are looking at a route similar to the one we described in this post. It’s nice to see this in a document put out by EWR Co. although there are no commitments yet.
Meanwhile let’s keep up the pressure to avoid the damaging routes in the option E area in favour of ones that work better with the local development plans. See the supporters menu for some ideas of what you can do.
Richard Saunders from Cambridge University Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) spoke to David Revell from Cambridge Approaches on August 31 about discussions taking place between EWR and the MRAO. Richard said that the discussions were at a very early stage and were intended to help each side understand the other’s technical constraints and issues: they were definitely not at the ‘negotiating’ stage.
Richard mentioned that issues included the electro-magnetic interference from the side-to-side movement of the trains.
Line of sight issues (for example, depending on where a telescope may be pointing) are difficult to mitigate against. EWR had said that locally lowering the track would not be feasible due to the high water table and Richard said that raising the telescopes was not possible either. He said that the geographic bowl in which the telescopes sit is pretty unique in the UK and that electrical simulation tests would have to be undertaken to fully understand the impacts.
The extreme sensitivity of the MRAO equipment to vibration dictates that any mitigation against vibration of the telescopes from the trains would have to be exceptionally effective.
EWR were understood not to be totally averse to moving outside the Option E area if essential, or of providing tunnels per se but drainage of the tunnels would need an alternative to a pumped solution.
Richard was conscious of the need to minimise the environmental impact on the area by the railway, including noise, visual and ecological impacts.
We published a map of alternative route alignments in EWR’s option E search area. These have been presented to representatives of about twelve local parish councils (Toft, Comberton, Barton, The Eversdens, Harlton, Haslingfield, Harston, Hauxton, Little Shelford, South Trumpington, Great Shelford), some district and county councillors and members of the public. The presentation and discussion has been at an on-going series of meetings, with the aim to reach some consensus about their relative merits and for subsequent presentation to other stakeholders including East West Rail. Note these are not the EWR route alignments, we expect those to appear in January 2021.
We would like to present these routes to interested members of the public and, given the Covid-19 situation, the best way is via webinar. As with the parish councils, the routes will be presented by David Revell of Cambridge Approaches who is a civil engineer with extensive experience with railways and a resident of the area.
The schedule of these webinars is as follows:
We expect the webinars to last about an hour and there will be opportunities to ask questions.
Please click on the links above to register for the webinar date that you would like to attend (the content will be the same in each webinar).
There is a limit to the number of people we can support on each webinar, so it may be good to register early.
*** UPDATE 4/10/2020 ***
If you missed the webinar you can view the presentation given yesterday on this link.
If you are concerned about the route that the railway may take through our area you can help generate awareness by print out this poster and putting it your front window.
Since our last progress update the working group has had two further well attended meetings of the Cambridge Approaches Oversight Group with local parish councils from Toft to the Shelfords. These were to discuss the relative merits of the representative alternative route options presented here. The approach has been to develop an objective assessment of the impact on the different villages and to understand particular issues from each parish. The meeting on the 3rd September was a presentation by David Revell of the different routes. The meeting on the 10th September focussed largely on alternative route 1/1a and the issues as it passes south of Barton and close to the Trumpington Park and Ride area. The 10th September meeting was attended by a BBC journalist.
The meetings continue weekly.
The CA working group met with Bridget Smith the leader of the South Cambridgeshire District Council on the 9th September. She encouraged us to continue and explained various related activities related to the Oxford – Cambridge Arc. She confirmed that EWR will be a freight route from the Felixstowe to The Midlands. (Note that Felixstowe currently handles 48% of UK container traffic.). It emerged that Anthony Browne has come out publicly supporting an EWR station to the north of Cambourne. If this happens, it will have a profound impact on the route options through the option E area. We are actively researching this.
We have sent a second FOI request to EWR focussed entirely on getting the cost benefit analysis that underpinned the Option E decision. We have still not received answers to several outstanding questions, but EWR are saying that they are working on them.
What Can I Do?
If you are interested / concerned about the impact of the new railway as it approaches Cambridge here are some things you can do.
See below the Response from EWR received at 7pm on 3th September exactly 20 working days after the relevant Cambridge Approaches Freedom of Information Request was sent. We are sad to report that EWR have not provided any substantive information on the grounds that it would be too much work to produce it. They also feel that it would not be in the public interest to disclose such information. Their letter, in full follows:
“Dear William Harrold,
REQUEST FOR INFORMATION DATED 6 AUGUST 2020
Thank you for writing to the team here at East West Rail with a request for information around our current proposals, received on 6 August 2020 (“Request“). We have handled your request in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the “Act“) and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (“EIR“).
We are also aware of a further set of questions, some of which were discussed at online community events on 24 and 25 August. Thank you for the follow up email you sent after the events, which gave useful notes. As agreed, we will answer the letter in full separately.
In relation to your Request, we’ve estimated that the cost of complying with it would exceed £450 which (under section 12 of the Act) is the limit above which public bodies are not obliged to provide information in response to requests. I have annexed the full text of this exemption for your information at the base of this letter. The full text of EIR regulation 12(4)(b) is also highlighted for your reference, which provides an exception for requests that are not reasonable (within the meaning of the EIR) such as those where significant or disproportionate costs would be incurred in handling them.
The reason we can’t answer your requests within the cost limit is because of the significant volume of information requested. We would need to contact multiple officials and ask each of them to determine what relevant recorded information they hold, then to locate, retrieve and extract it. This work would certainly exceed 18 hours of staff time.
We would also need to inspect every record manually in order to redact personal information and additional time would be required to separate environmental information from non- environmental information due to the mixed nature of your Request. This would entail a disproportionate and unreasonable burden in terms of costs and resources.
Much of the information requested will be published in due course, but we believe that until the information is complete, it would be inappropriate and potentially misleading to publish it. For instance, survey results are likely to be reported as part of preliminary environmental information published as part of statutory consultation and a comprehensive environmental statement to accompany an application for a development consent order (“DCO“) under the Planning Act 2008.
While we understand the general public interest in favour of disclosure of information, we consider that the public interest in this case lies in favour of not disclosing the information in response to your Request .
Accordingly and for the reasons set out above, we are refusing your Request under section 12 of the Act and EIR regulation 12(4)(b).
Your reference
CS-00026063
Our reference
TPA/TPA/396550/3 3 September 2020
You are more than welcome to send us a new, more specific request, and we will consider if that can be dealt with reasonably and within the Act costs limit. You could for example significantly reduce the amount of information that you are seeking to a level that is not as resource intensive by specifying and limiting the particular geographical area that is of interest to you.
If you are unhappy with the way EWR Co has handled your Request or with the decisions made in relation to your Request you may ask for an internal review within two calendar months of the date of this letter by writing to:
fOIReview@eastwestrail.co.uk
If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:
Information Commissioner’s Office Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire SK9 5AF
Without prejudice to the comments above, we are keen to be as helpful as we can and have provided you with some additional information below in response to your Request that we hope will be useful. We hope these answers will help you to understand, to some degree, the extent of the work that would have been required in order to provide the information requested.
1. Locations of all requested and executed surveys (structural, geotechnical, environmental, ecological, geological and otherwise in your leaflet entitled “What kind of surveys are happening at the moment?”) in and around the Option E area of the Central Section of the proposed Railway. Please redact any personal information like the names of the residents. Also the results so far of the surveys.
You have asked for locations of all requested and executed surveys. This could mean:
It is not clear from your Request which meaning was intended.
We can confirm that we hold the results of the surveys that have been carried out to date in relation to the proposed new East West Rail line between Bedford and Cambridge. However, as we’ve explained above, the volume of information and the requirement for us to undertake significant redactions of personal information mean that EWR Co would need to incur excessive cost and resource to provide this information.
In addition, the survey results represent only a part of an incomplete body of data. Again, we have taken the view that disclosure at this stage could be misleading. The data will be
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completed and published in due course – both during the statutory consultation on the Scheme in advance of an application for a DCO and through the DCO environmental statement.
2. Documentation of the underlying route trajectory options being evaluated and which are behind the choice of environmental survey sites. We are told that there are no route trajectory options yet. If this is the case, please send the justification for a more blanket approach to these surveys and explain why the surveys we are aware of are all in a straight line from Little Eversden, Harlton, south of Haslingfield and Harston – see https://haslingfieldvillage.co.uk/2020/news/map-of-east-west-rail-environmental-survey- locations/
EWR Co refers to the next level of refinement in designing the proposed new line between Bedford and Cambridge as selecting a preferred “route alignment” (you will recall that we have already selected a preferred route corridor and a preferred route option). This is what we have taken your reference to “route trajectory options” to mean.
We can confirm that a number of potential route alignments are under active consideration at this time, but no final route alignment options have been decided upon. EWR Co’s work in this regard is on-going and the identification, description and consideration of those alignments is not complete.
With respect to the extent of the surveys that we are undertaking, these are spread across the preferred route option area as well as other land outwith but near to the preferred route option area. This is because in many cases we need to survey a larger area in order to obtain information about how the environmental features or species we are studying behave – this is not always limited to the preferred route option area. For example, bat colonies outside the area may still use it for commuting or foraging.
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We can confirm that EWR Co is or will be undertaking surveys beyond and in addition to the four areas listed in your Request.
3. A copy of any communications between East West Rail and the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory or related organizations such as the Cavendish Astrophysics Group or the Institute of Astronomy or any organisation you are involved with discussion around planning constraints in relation to EWR and the Mullard Radio Observatory.
We confirm that we hold correspondence between EWR Co and the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory and that discussions with the Observatory are on-going.
We’re not clear what you mean by “related organizations [sic]” and whether you are referring to:
If you would kindly clarify the scope of your request this would enable us to confirm whether we hold the relevant information.
i ii
4. Communication between EWR Rail and landowners in the option E area.
We can confirm that we hold this information. The scope of your request is extremely broad and the costs of providing copies of every item of correspondence would be disproportionate and excessive. EWR Co would also be required to redact significant quantities of personal data manually.
We enclose a copy of the template letters that have been sent to landowners within the preferred route option area accompanying our requests to agree licence access for surveys and hope that this is of assistance.
If there are particular landowners that are of interest then please let us know – this may enable us to provide more focussed information in response.
5. Any documentation or communications held about the Eversden and Wimpole Woods is a SAC (European designation – Special Area of Conservation) for Barbastelles bats.
We can confirm that we hold information relating to the identified SAC. Much of this information on SACs is already in the public domain and available to you. For example, you can use the interactive mapping feature at https://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx to obtain information on a particular SAC.
If there is particular information that is of interest then please provide clarification so that we may confirm whether we hold it.
6. Any documentation or communications on environmental, archaeological or historical constraints in the Option E area.
We can confirm that we hold information relating to environmental and archaeological constraints in the preferred route option area.
It is not clear whether your reference to “historical constraints” means heritage constraints (such as listed buildings, scheduled ancient monuments and so on) or historic constraints that are no longer in force or have been superseded. Please confirm which you mean so that we may confirm whether we hold the information in which you are interested.
Information on environmental constraints is also available to you already at the following website: https://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx. Details of historical and archaeological assets are also available from the local planning authority and from Historic England.
7. A log of previous FOI requests and their contents (We already aware of 5 FOI requests from CamBedRailRoad)
We can confirm that we maintain a log of requests made under the Act and the EIR.
However, extracting the relevant information and redacting personal information would require a significant amount of manual processing and would entail disproportionate and unreasonable costs.
Thank you for your continued interest in East West Rail, and we look forward to continuing to work together with local groups and community representatives as the project progresses.
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If you have any questions about this response, please send them for my attention through the contact@eastwestrail.co.uk email.
Yours Sincerely
Roland George
Company Secretary, East West Railway Company
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Freedom of Information Act 2000
LEGISLATIVE EXTRACTS
12. — (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.
(2) Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
(3) In subsections (1) and (2) “the appropriate limit” means such amount as may be prescribed, and different amounts may be prescribed in relation to different cases.[*]
(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations provide that, in such circumstances as may be prescribed, where two or more requests for information are made to a public authority-
(a) by one person, or
(b) by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign,
the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them.
[*] The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244.
Environmental Information Regulations 2004 SI 2004 No 3391
12(4) For the purposes of paragraph (1)(a), a public authority may refuse to disclose information to the extent that –
(b) the request for information is manifestly unreasonable
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