Leeds Trolleybus
Public Enquiry
Day 46
Wednesday 10th September 2014
The audio recordings of all today’s sessions are included
here and commentary follows below.
In the first morning session of
Day 46 of the Leeds Trolleybus Enquiry, Wed 10th September 2014 Mr Kevin
Leather presents his evidence in chief on the NGT Environmental Statement, is
taken through this by Mr Walton for the Applicant and then Gregory Jones QC for
First West Yorkshire cross examines him on his evidence.
In the late morning session of
Day 46 of the Leeds Trolleybus Enquiry, Wed 10th September 2014
Gregory Jones QC for First West Yorkshire continues to cross examine Mr Kevin
Leather on the NGT Environmental Statement.
In the early afternoon session of
Day 46 of the Leeds Trolleybus Enquiry, Wed 10th September 2014
Gregory Jones QC for First West Yorkshire completes his cross examine of Mr
Kevin Leather of Mott MacDonald on the NGT Environmental Statement.
In the late afternoon session of
Day 46 of the Leeds Trolleybus Enquiry, Wed 10th September 2014 first Mr Stuart
Natkus for Morley House Trust and then Mr Bill McKinnon for Friends of
Woodhouse Moor cross examine Mr Kevin Leather of Mott MacDonald on the NGT
Environmental Statement.
Firstly may I express my
continuing gratitude to all the Objectors who have, and are continuing to,
assist with the recording of the Trolleybus Public Enquiry, without whom the
documentation, and indeed my own blogs, would be extremely patchy. For newcomers to this blog I should like to
point out that there is no formal minuting of the Enquiry, no stenographer, and
no attempt in any form by NGT, Metro or Leeds City Council to provide
documentary news updates of what has been covered in the proceedings. This is utterly disgraceful and the
Executive Board of Leeds City Council should be ashamed of themselves for
refusing to make any attempt to do so.
The inadequacy of the BBC in failing their statutory duty to inform the
public is not far behind that of LCC.
The Exec Board doubtless rely on the minutes kept by the Promoter’s own
stenographer, but one doubts whether these will ever be made public, and I am
extremely glad that we have an objective record with the recordings, as I do
not believe we could entirely be sure of the reliability of the NGT minutes, to
put it as diplomatically as I can.
The examination of Mr Kevin
Leather was a fascinating experience. I
shall focus on Mr Jones’s examination as it was a long day with other
examinations which made headway, but I shall try to give a broad outline of how
the examination developed in the morning.
There are times when one wonders
where Mr Jones is taking it all, and then suddenly it becomes clear. He does like to prepare his ground well
before he goes in for the kill, and this takes time, but when you get to the
point where you can see the big picture you have to stand back in amazement and
acknowledge that he knows what he is doing.
The morning began with
exploration of Mr Leather’s position in the making of the Environmental
Statement and the fact that he relied heavily on the evidence of Mr Ward, whose
original Heritage Statement has been supplemented by the new document B-13, an
almost 400 page document of which about 300 pages were new, and Professor
Purseglove, whom it was elicited has no science degree, and is a landscape
architect whose degree was in English Literature, facts which I do not recall
having had a lot of attention drawn to them previously.
Mr Leather would not admit that
the original HS was defective or inadequate and claimed it was based on best
practice, but we were left wondering why such a massive additional document had
been considered necessary if this had been the case.
He had not actually done the
Environmental Impact Assessment or the Environmental Impact Statement himself
and was quizzed on the fact that he is basically an overview administrator of
all this rather than a technical expert.
Having laid out these
shortcomings, a quite lengthy analysis was entered into by Mr Jones, and I have
to confess that I was for a while at sea wondering where he was going with
this. However the argument had to be
prepared by laying out the work that had been done on air quality measurements
and the modelling that had been derived from that, in the first instance on
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) levels. There
was a rather large amount of detail on the supposed predictions for that and we
were also given extensive reminders of how Mr Hanson’s traffic data modelling
had been admitted to have been made with a possible variation of as much as +
or – 30%, the park and ride predictions up to + or – 50%, and the local side
road traffic modelling had been admitted to be inaccurate. Further preparation was made with
questioning of whether we can really expect the baseline predictions for air
quality and emissions not to get worse in coming years as their modelling
assumes.
All rather complicated technical
stuff which I freely admit I found a little hard to follow in places but
necessary when you bear in mind that Mr Jones was building up to a
demonstration that the impact of the increased emissions, which it is admitted
would be caused by general traffic should the NGT scheme be allowed to go
ahead, causing an increase in congestion, had not been properly assessed when
it came to how it would affect those ‘receptors’ (people) in the areas where
this was expected to peak.
Put simply, all the increased
emissions were averaged so as to argue that it would not be a major impact, and
yet it was argued strongly by Mr Jones that with such a major degree of
variation in the models which Mr Hanson had provided, the impact in local
hotspots could not be reliably forecast.
All good stuff bringing the
modelling data into question, but this wasn’t the killer blow. After we had been treated to such marvellous
skill with words from Mr Leather as ‘they will be categorised into
categories’… Mr Jones winkled out the
fact that among the matters Mr Leather had been discussing with colleagues the
previous afternoon when he was unavailable for cross examination was the + or –
30% figure, which apparently he had not been aware of when compiling the data,
and had only found out the afternoon before his examination.
One can only take criticism of Mr
Jones’s lengthy style so far when you realise that a great deal of time was
wasted by Mr Leather over whether the degree of uncertainty of the data was of
any importance or not. To quote Mr
Jones ‘It is not a safe basis for relying on the Environmental Statement as
being robust when its authors are not aware when giving their judgement of the
uncertainty of the parameters’. At one
point the witness seemed to agree with this, and then appeared to change his
mind as the Inspector pointed out.
While predictions in air quality
had been based on Mr Hanson’s uncertain predictions of traffic flows it was
admitted that the probably more reliable data which had been compiled by Mr
Gordon Robertson from traffic signalling inputs had been ignored.
When it came to particulates as
opposed to the NO2 it was found that only two monitoring stations for these
existed in Leeds. Clearly this is no
basis for making any realistic predictions on how these may or may not be
affected by changes in traffic volume and flow. All Mr Leather could say was that it ‘gives a view’ on the
situation. The data that had been used
for this was not even the most recently available, coming from 2012 rather than
2013. We were also given an argument
that just because emissions might increase, this did not mean that air quality
would deteriorate. Hmmm….
I lost count of the number of
times that Mr Leather said ‘I don’t know’ and frankly his manner of delivery
led me to consider whether he is suffering from depression as he exhibits
extreme ‘flatness of affect’ to use a technical mental health term. In other words he is entirely lacking in any
expressive confidence and shows no emotion.
He hesitates for long periods in giving his replies and doesn’t speak
up. One may have not agreed with the
likes of Mr Haskins or Mr Smith when they were up as witnesses, but at least one
could hear what they said.
One trusts that the Inspector is
able to follow and understand the technical analysis which Mr Jones subjected
Mr Leather’s evidence to as this seems to be crucial to the claims of NGT. Basically, their predictive modelling is
extremely tenuous and highly unreliable it would appear, as has been the case
repeatedly with a large number or witnesses.
It takes a long time to lay out the stall when preparing to take this
apart, but in the end I believe Mr Jones succeeded in achieving this. One can imagine that Mr Leather might well
feel depressed when you consider his lack of knowledge of the background to how
his own statement was prepared. ‘I
don’t know’ appeared to be one of his favourite answers.
There was much more of this, but
I will just leave you with a fact that was elicited by Mr McKinnon towards the
end of the day. Mr Leather, and
therefore probably his whole team, were not aware that Monument Moor was a part
of Woodhouse Moor when they proposed the works that would be required there for
the NGT scheme. One is reminded of a
previous witness who didn’t know that the Dales Way began on Monument Moor, a
fact which the Inspector found out for himself independently. The lack of knowledge which these people display is alarming.
These are the kind of details
which the people who are proposing this scheme either don’t know, or don’t care
about enough to bother to find out about, even though they are in the public
domain, on Ordnance Survey maps and the like.
But one is reassured that the Inspector clearly shows an interest, and
one suspects from the tone of his voice on such occasions that he is not much
impressed at this ignorance.
I try not to get too personal
about the witnesses for the Promoter, well not too often at least, but the fact
is that these people are working for the enemy who wish to permanently mar our
beautiful heritage. So when I see and
hear a witness whose presentation is frankly dismal, and who seems ignorant
even of his own case (he had to be pointed to paragraphs in his own documents)
one cannot help but feel some degree of animosity. I believe that those who have been present at a reasonable number
of sessions at the Enquiry will agree that Mr Leather is probably the poorest
witness we have seen so far, and at times one wanted to cover one’s head in
embarrassment at his evident lack of competence.
I would urge readers to review the recordings of
the day, especially of Mr Jones’s cross examination, to see how an argument can
be prepared and then fully actioned. Slow
work at times, but the flimsy nature of the case put forward by NGT is often veiled
beneath so much technical jargon and scientistic assumption and presentation,
that a layperson could be forgiven for being taken in. I have to express my gratitude to Mr Jones
and indeed First West Yorkshire for taking the trouble to expose the inadequacy
of a case which would be catastrophic not only to the local community and its
environmental heritage should it be allowed to go ahead, but also to Leeds and its taxpayers.
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