Leeds Trolleybus Enquiry Day 28
June 20 2014
Day 28 of the Trolleybus
Public Enquiry saw Professor Bonsall continue with his extremely detailed cross
examination of Mr Neil Chadwick on his business case for the trolleybus scheme.
Links to audio recordings are
given here, and my commentary follows below.
In the first morning session of
day 27 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry Professor Peter Bonsall continues
to cross examine Mr Neil Chadwick who is responsible for the business case
which underlies the NGT proposals.
In the late morning session of day 27 of the Leeds
Trolleybus Public Enquiry Professor Peter Bonsall continues to cross examine Mr
Neil Chadwick who is responsible for the business case which underlies the NGT
proposals.
Afternoon Session
In the afternoon session of day
28 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry, firstly a private objector Mr Haigh
puts questions to Mr Chadwick, and then Professor Peter Bonsall continues to
cross examine Mr Neil Chadwick who is responsible for the business case which
underlies the NGT proposals.
Following the announcement at the
beginning of today’s proceedings by Mr Whitehead, the Inspector, that a
satisfactory amendment had been made to the email which he had required the
Applicant to prepare in order to rectify misunderstandings which may have
arisen at the DfT from their inappropriate correspondence, Professor Bonsall
resumed his cross examination of Mr Chadwick.
The morning’s questioning
proceeded slowly at first since Mr Chadwick, in my view at least, was rather
evasive and denied that the methodologies which the Professor was seeking to
apply were necessary in the cases examined.
However Peter Bonsall is nothing
if not persistent, and he developed his case slowly but deliberately. He would not let the question of walking
times, waiting times, crowding and standing on trolleybuses go away and despite
Mr Chadwick’s attempts at avoidance eventually cornered him with the facts,
which he had to admit, that due to the limited number of proposed stops and the
distances between them, the walking times to these for most people would be
increased. This must be regarded as a
significant factor, which would impact most on the elderly, disabled, shoppers
carrying heavy bags and so forth. There
was an extremely embarrassing silence of some thirty seconds in his reply to
this which in the context seemed a very long time and was followed by
prevarication and an attempt to wriggle out from answering the question.
On the question of whether the
waits at stops would be longer, he argued that since it was predicted that First
would reduce services from their present more frequent service than what is
intended for the trolleybus, then the waits for NGT would be shorter. Anyone who has followed the Enquiry from the
beginning will know that the matter of consultation with the bus company, or
rather lack of it, has meant that their projections of First’s competitive
response is entirely without any basis in evidence.
There appeared to be a similar
lack of engagement about people’s responses to the prospect of standing. I almost couldn’t believe that there was an
‘NGT 3’ option mentioned which only included 40 seats. I had to play that back on the recording
twice before I could believe he had really said that.
Neil Cameron QC protested that
his learned friend Gregory Jones QC was making too many interruptions on this
cross examination. And indeed it is
true that Mr Jones did make a fair number of interjections on this thread. However, when challenged on this by the
Inspector, he made it clear that on the basis that Mr Chadwick had been making
assertions that Mr Jones had said things which he absolutely had not, and other
prevarications, then he would find it necessary to extend his own cross
examination by at least half a day in order to deal with all of this when his
own cross examination comes up later.
NGT’s claims as to the expected
increase in ‘active modes’ of transport and other claims that the impact of NGT
would be ‘strongly beneficial’ were examined, and the Inspector found it
necessary to ask why this was considered to be the case. He asked ‘how do you weigh or balance’ the
pro and con factors ‘against one another’ and was given the incredible answer
‘it’s not a formulaic process’, ‘explicitly it is based on our judgement and
our experience, and I’m applying this not just here but in many other places’,
‘all these qualitative assessments are fundamentally our judgement on how to
interpret the data that is in front of us.’
‘Every one of these textual descriptions is our judgement.’ To which the Inspector simply replied with a
subdued ‘Thankyou’.
Just read those quotes from the
last sentence again. They can be found
from about 85 minutes into the first morning session recording
Has he not just hammered a six
inch nail into NGT’s coffin? Can it
really be acceptable for the promoter to actually say that they have assessed
that their scheme will be ‘strongly beneficial’ in their own judgement and that
that is sufficient evidence for which the Inspector to base his own judgement
on? This is astonishing. After all the
technical work we have gone over in the last two months, this is no more than a
subjective opinion and one which favours its author. Thus they must surely be dismissed or at least greatly downgraded
in value.
This was followed shortly by the
exposure of an immense clanger on the part of NGT, the examination by Professor
Bonsall of a point which a number of other objectors had also spotted in their
Statements of Case.
In Document A08E – 4 page 15, it
was stated in table 3.6 that new housing at Kirkstall Forge was in close
proximity to St Chad’s NGT stop and that the resulting change in accessibility
is ‘significantly beneficial’, to which Mr Chadwick admitted that this was
‘clearly rubbish’. It transpired that this had been put in by consultants Mott
MacDonald and had been taken out from documents after September of 2013. He attempted to minimise its significance on
the basis that it had been removed, but the point would not go away about how
it got into the report in the first place, and it was left to the Inspector to
point out that this sort of thing ‘doesn’t help the confidence of the objectors’
when things like this are put in ‘if that’s wrong are there a lot of other
things wrong?’
All this occurred within the
morning’s first session.
I should briefly mention the admirably
insightful and well focused examination from Mr Haigh, a private objector who
was only available for a short time today and so was fitted into part of the
afternoon session. He asked questions
around the projection and modelling of the various proposed routes, and the
matter was raised that the original three line NGT (including St James’s and
Seacroft) had had a projected annual number of journeys of some 6 million, but
when the third leg was removed and their estimates were revised, a total of approximately
11 million annual journeys accrued. The
detailed modelling of this was not examined, but one has to ask if this is a
case of one of their subjective assessments, as it is hard to understand how a
reduction in service of approximately 30% could lead to an increased projection
of passenger journeys of about 45%?
An objector who has been unable
to attend the Enquiry in person but has been listening to the recordings rang
me last night and referred to the NGT case as ‘a shambles’. Not my word, it is one which an observer has
made but one with which I find it hard to disagree. One may disagree, and one is entitled to an independent opinion,
but we must base our opinions on the evidence, and I would suggest that this
has not been a good week for NGT in the light of much of it. Professor Bonsall may not succeed with every
shot he takes, but so many of them are so serious, of which I include those I
have mentioned above and on previous
days, that one has to wonder what the Inspector is making of it all.
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