Leeds Trolleybus Public
Enquiry
Day 54
Wednesday 1st
October 2014
Recordings of each session of the
proceedings are linked here and I make some commentary about the ongoing
positions below.
In the first morning session of
Day 54 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry, Wednesday 1st October
2014 Neil Cameron QC on behalf of the Applicant NGT continues to cross examine
Emeritus Professor of Transport Planning Studies Peter Bonsall on his evidence
against the trolleybus scheme.
In the late morning session of
Day 54 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry, Wednesday 1st October
2014 Neil Cameron QC on behalf of the Applicant NGT concludes his cross
examination of Emeritus Professor of Transport Planning Studies Peter Bonsall
on his evidence against the trolleybus scheme.
This is then followed by the Inspector who asks a number of questions of
his own.
In the early afternoon session of
Day 54 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry, Wednesday 1st October
Chris Longley of the Federation of Small Businesses presents his evidence and
there is some cross examination from the Inspector.
In the late afternoon session of
Day 54 of the Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry, Wednesday 1st October
cases are given against the NGT scheme by Mr Graham Lauder and Mrs Susan
Sleeman, both long term residents of Leeds 6.
Today’s sessions began with the
continuation of the war of attrition between Mr Cameron and Professor Bonsall.
To be honest I do find some of
this stuff rather opaque to my own personal skills, but even that tells me
something. As a former teacher I’m a
great believer that things should be able to be expressed in forms which can be
easily understood, building from general overviews to more detail once the
foundation has been established.
In his own evidence Peter Bonsall
gave some very clear and simple views on key features of the NGT proposals
which should be obvious to any layperson who gives them more than a casual
glance, and he is able to support these views with evidence, WebTAG guidance
and so forth.
When it comes to cross
examination, the feeling amongst many of the objectors was that Mr Cameron went
into such realms of obscurity that even the Inspector was challenged at times,
as were most of the objectors.
One would have thought that
demonstrating seriously flawed methodologies with consultation, (the absurd
comparison of old and super modern buses apparently justifying a trolley
system), modelling (Mr Hanson’s 50% variability of predicted use at Bodington)
and on and on would have been enough, but Mr Cameron goes into endless detail
which one has to question the relevance of.
One thing I do understand the
relevance of is his continually returning to the assumption that since the DfT
has allowed the scheme to get this far then it must already have received
enough scrutiny to allow it to go further.
He seems almost to be attempting to back the Inspector into a corner
where he can’t recommend against NGT because he would be going against the
wishes of the Department.
If so, why have we had to go
through the process of the Public Enquiry?
There doesn’t seem to be an official figure on how much it will have
cost by the time it is over in another month of so, but it must be a
substantial amount, and I heard the figure of £4million mentioned the other day
which wouldn’t seem unreasonable for the hire of the suite at the Regus
Building, paying the Inspector and seemingly dozens of NGT wonks who come and
go on the Applicant’s side of the room, not least Neil Cameron QC. Silks don’t come cheap and guesses at how
much he might be getting paid (on Leeds taxpayers’ tab) can be based on the
following ‘The 10 to 15 percent [of
barristers who are] Queen's Counsel earn on average in excess of £250,000 a
year.
I don’t know if they fit
into the following category ‘Barristers
doing Chancery, commercial
and other specialist work have incomes twice as great as those working
in criminal or family law do.’ But it
seems possible. So he may be on as much
as £1,000 a day, and then he has his junior Mr Walton, who I understand is not
Silk but nonetheless is probably getting what most of us would consider a
bundle.
Then there are all the NGT
witnesses and backroom people who have prepared all the documents (the late
submitted Heritage Doc B-13 was massive and the printing alone would have cost
several thousand I am reliably informed by a contact I have in the printing
industry).
Of course the objectors,
amongst them First West Yorkshire bus company, have to pay their own way. You can imagine that the Directors of First
would have quite a grudge on with WYCA (formerly Metro), not only for making a
seriously hostile attempt to destroy their business and making unsubstantiated
claims that they had been unco-operative, but also for having to spend probably
a million or more on their own case merely to defend themselves from sharp and
biased business practice. In fact, not
only is the proposed prioritised scheme probably illegal in enforcing a
preferential two tier system, but it is now well understood that WYCA wants to
increase its political control over public transport providers and get into the
game of becoming a provider itself.
If they were to be
successful with the NGT bid, we have been told that they would want to follow
it with a roll out of trolleybuses on several other routes in Leeds and
eventually throughout West Yorkshire.
With a price tag of at least £28m per mile and vehicles costing hundreds
of thousands of pounds, when this would be the only trolleybus system in the
UK, that would be a dangerous path to follow.
One thing that has struck me
for a while, is that trying to put a trolleybus line through the Conservation
Area ‘string of pearls’ that stretches unbroken from the University to the ring
road is setting themselves a very difficult task in terms of planning, whereas
the Kirkstall Road, the A65, is already wide enough for such a scheme at least
in the parts where it approaches the city centre, would connect easily into
Wellington Street for the station, and an extension to Bradford would make more
sense if it were established along the link road between the two cities beyond
Horsforth.
Not that I am in favour of
such a scheme, but it certainly would have fewer hurdles to jump than one up
the A660, through the ‘jewel in the crown of Leeds’ as it was described by the
Chair of the Planning Committee some years ago, who also said at the time that
Headingley should have everything done to protect it.
So why are they attempting this
unsuitable route?
Some readers may know of the
story of Wentworth Woodhouse, one of our finest stately homes, which had Coal
Board strip mining to within a hundred yards or so of the frontage in the post
war period. The man responsible was
Manny Shinwell who it is strongly believed by many simply wanted to put the
owners in their place and let them know who was boss. The need for coal can’t have been so desperate that they couldn’t
look elsewhere for a few tons of the
stuff (I was brought up in the ’60s with the mantra that Britain had enough
coal underground for 400 years, and the deeper stuff is often much better than
the shallow open cast material) so it is not unreasonable in my view to agree
with the position that Mr Shinwell had another agenda, one which the Labour
Party were not ashamed of at the time.
I speak of course of bringing down the hoity toities.
Or as Cllr Richard Lewis said to
me after the Headingley public meeting about the trolleybus scheme last year
‘never think you can have progress without doing some damage’. Nice excuse. However it is one which conveniently ignores the fact that
different people have different values and what some might do with gusto is
what others would consider vandalism.
So it would seem to me that a
significant part of the thinking behind this is that if they can break the will
of the independently minded residents of the A660 route and achieve the
degradation of the finest extended route through Leeds, then implementing a
further series of connecting routes would be made a great deal easier, one
might almost consider inevitable.
During the eighties and nineties
I considered myself solid Labour but I see things differently after Mr B.Liar
decided it was a good idea to get involved in a war without end, and on a local
basis our own Council have been behaving in the draconian manner that we see
exemplified by the way the have attempted to ram NGT down our throats, and
Councillors such as John Illingworth get suspended for doing things that they
didn’t even know was against party policy.
(Not that I have any preference to other parties I should add.)
I hope I shan’t alienate some of
my more left leaning readers, but it has become plain that largely as the
instrument of Leeds City Council, WYCA is attempting to pursue a very
undemocratic and far left policy, not only of looking for more involvement in
transport, but much more dramatically and importantly, to do down the
successful private sector company that provides such a good service to
passengers on the A660, while at the same time putting those smug well heeled
types with their nice heritage in their place.
The manner in which they have
attempted to foist this on the taxpayers of Leeds has involved seriously flawed
and even manipulated consultations, repeatedly making claims which aren’t even
in their case (reduction of traffic congestion, which they actually admit would
probably get worse due to the delays to other traffic caused by trolleybus
prioritisation at junctions) and repeating these false or dubious claims until
the most sceptical listener could be forgiven for repeating them in their
sleep.
Just as Mr Haskins went back to
the WYCA meeting last week to tell them that all was hunky dory at the enquiry
(I assume they don’t wish to flatter me by bothering to actually listen to the
evidence themselves online and thereby admit privately to themselves that they
should have provided some kind of recording or transcript) their more low level
lackeys continue the propaganda war in the response columns in the Yorkshire
Evening Post. Principle amongst these
must be the gentleman (I’m trying to be polite here) who styles himself
‘oldsyphilitic’ and routinely posts replies to news items or letters concerning
the trolleybus. Endlessly churning out
his cyclic tropes about ‘naysayers’ and how we don’t know what a good thing we
are on to, besides which we “will” (his neurolingistic attack on our
assumptions that it could be rejected) get to love it when it is, or rather,
would be, on our streets. Perhaps I
should mention that he is a Bradford resident and therefore is not making a
case at the enquiry.
He never of course makes
considered responses to issues raised or points made, he just goes on about us
naysaying ‘nimbies’. A term I cordially
despise since that too is more neurolingistics aimed at undermining our local
sense of value in our mature heritage community. Of course, you shouldn’t care about your own community, that’s selfish. We can’t be allowed to defend our social
cohesion and environment which contributes to a good quality of life and
encourages community spirit. No ~ to be
a good sheep we have to sacrifice everything to the great god of the
State. These nihilist sneers seek to degrade the sense of local
identity and pride in human value.
And are repeatedly churned out,
again and again and again.
So this is truly turning into a
propaganda war. And as in all such
wars, the facts, or even the truth are to some of no importance. Just as in Orwell’s 1984, the perception is
everything, there is no truth, only what the party designates to currently be
the line.
Meanwhile, the Public Enquiry
grinds on with ever deeper condemnations of the flawed methodologies, vague estimates,
unjustified views and now a continuous stream of outraged private objectors
saying that they have not been properly consulted and that it would be expected
to seriously damage a high proportion of small businesses along the route.
All of which should have been
properly and formally put in the public domain with Council or WYCA funded
daily podcasts, streaming and transcripts, all cheap and readily available
services which can now be put online.
So if we as the objectors group were not co-ordinating the public
uploading of our own recordings to demonstrate what has really been coming out
of the enquiry examinations, no-one, that is NO-ONE who had not been present
would really know one way or the other what was going on except by casual word
of mouth or private correspondence.
This is frankly iniquitous and
is, for me at least, the single biggest condemnation of the whole process. The false assertions made by NGT would
continue to be bandied about and what could people do to rebut them other than to
say ‘Well my friend was there and told me that such and such was
established’. If it is not properly in
the public domain it didn’t happen in the eyes of many, and that is how our
wonderful, supposedly democratic political leaders want it.
As a lighter aside, I’d like to
briefly draw attention to my spelling, which a colleague who is a former
English teacher mentioned to me. My own
spelling of ‘Enquiry’ in particular, as opposed to the official Public Inquiry
spelling. I began using my own spelling
with an ‘E’ since that is the one I was brought up with. A few day into the ‘Inquiry’ I noticed the
variation between the two, so went hotfoot to my Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary, (Vol 1) and was relieved to find that both spellings are
acceptable. However, for continuity’s
sake I have continued using my original spelling on all recording and blog
headers.
Anyway, to briefly return to the
evidence at the Enquiry, or Inquiry, however you like it, I will just give one
last example of how NGT have attempted to pull the wool over our eyes and
hoodwink us. One small detail that was
winkled out the other day was that the Low Cost Alternative which involved
upgrading bus stops (shelters, seats, lights, cctv, real time display) was massively
more expensive per stop than the apparent cost for doing it for a trolleybus
route. As I understood Professor
Bonsall it was the case that they were saying ‘Don’t do that, you won’t get
much for your money, but do ours, you’ll get super duper value!’ but the costs
were not applied in an equal way and so the comparison was entirely misleading. Again…
I have heard it said that the
truth need no defence. On the contrary,
I would agree with Churchill when he said that a lie will be half way round the
world while the truth is still getting its boots on. The truth is a strong weapon, but it has to be wielded
assertively or else it is of little value.
This then is, as are all politics eventually, a
psychological war. A war of mindsets,
where political ideology and will attempts to triumph over truth and common
sense. But with the internet we seem to
have come to a point where people no longer feel isolated and disempowered but
are prepared to stand up and speak things as they see them, for they realise
that they are not alone.
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