Government Slopes Shoulders On Stonehenge Bypass

We've been wondering how HMG would fund the Stonehenge to Berwick Down Scheme for the A303.  The reassurances that the money "would be found and ring-fenced" have always sounded a bit hollow and very fuzzy and it seems our concerns were justified.

Take a look on the Winterbourne Stoke Parish Council website at their latest story.

So, HMG are now looking to private finance to design, build fund and maintain this section of road.   Given the record of PFI's in the past, this prospect fills us with a rising sense of dread.  Worse still, the projected timescales will certainly be missed - leading to many more years of rat-running and congestion.

The alternative, of course, is to go for a lower cost above ground route...

On Ignoring The Obvious and Pulling The Wool Over People's Eyes

The last couple of weeks have been rather surreal,  ever since Highways England launched their plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge and a bypass for our beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke - and added a sting in the tail by offering a southern bypass route as an option.   Although Highways England claim not to have a preference for either route, it is clear from their presentation material, from general reactions and to be honest, from verbal comments made by their own staff at several of the consultation events that there is a degree of bias towards the southern route.

Now we here at WiSBANG prefer the northern route for a couple of very simple reasons:  lower levels of noise and pollution.  Figure 1 below shows exactly why this is.  The prevailing wind, as is easily confirmed by recourse to the UK Met Office is from the south west, at lower levels, within the village there are 5 years-worth of readings that show the wind at ground level comes from the south-south-east - there is a wind-rose in the bottom right hand corner of Fig 1 that shows this clearly.

Consequently, noise and pollution would be blown from the southern route into the heart of the village.  Now, leaving aside those members of the community whose business interests would be best served by not having the northern route, you have to ask who in their right mind would opt for the southern route?

So, putting the bypass to the south of Winterbourne Stoke is quite simply, on environmental grounds alone, a crass idea for Winterbourne Stoke.  The genius who had this brainstorm doubled the environmental impact by stuffing the route midway between Winterbourne Stoke and Berwick St James to the south; doubling the numbers of folk affected by additional road noise at a stroke.

In the case of the northern route, the noise and pollution is helped on its way by the prevailing wind, up into the Salisbury Plain Training Area where it might annoy the odd rabbit that isn't already stone deaf from listening to the Army AS-90s and whose sense of smell has been dulled by screening smokes.

Oddly, Highways England reckon, in the turgid depths of their Technical Appraisal Review that there is little to choose between these two routes on environmental grounds.  Really?  How can this be so?

Let's be charitable and call it "pulling the wool over people's eyes."  This is how it seems to work.  Rather than considering the impact of each route just from the A360 to Berwick Down and the people directly affected by it - say 80 or so households in Winterbourne Stoke and 70 or so in Berwick St James, why not consider the whole route from Amesbury to Berwick Down and aggregate all those affected in Amesbury as well (about a 1000) with the numbers from Winterbourne Stoke  or Winterbourne Stoke + Berwick St James.  Then apply a crude level of granularity, by considering only blocks of 100 houses in your evaluations.

So if you consider the first case and look at each route and those households directly affected within 1km of it, then the northern route affects around 80 households.  On the other hand, the southern route affects 80 + 70 = 150 households.  So again, no right thinking person would ever opt for the southern route - it affects nearly twice the number of households as does the northern route.

However, if you live in the brave new world of Highways England, the equation is like this:  the northern route affects 1000 + 100 (because 80 is nearly 100) = 1100 households.  On the other hand, the southern route affects 1000 + 100 (because 80 +70 = 150 which isn't near enough to 200 to be counted as 200) = 1100.    QED!

Both routes have the same environmental impact?  Well I'm blowed.  Highways England have just proved black is white.    Whoever came up with this way of 'selling' the bypass should hang their head(s) in shame. 

Highways England would clearly like us to take their assessments as articles of faith.   Getting any real information out of them is hideously painful and is following an all to predictable course.  The rules of the game are simple, the more you already know, the more you will get.  You first get a flat denial that information exists.  When you apply a little pressure you are told that they wouldn't normally collect that sort of data at this stage .   Some may falter now, but don't.  Grab them by their metaphorical testicles and squeeze - please do not do so for real, no matter how tempting things get!

The third stage is confession and confession they say is good for the soul - it isn't quite as good for our blood pressure though.  They admit to having got the data, but suggest that "you probably wouldn't understand it" and when you point out that "yes you would." the pantomime descends into its final stage of obfuscation.  "The data is available, but you have to go through official channels to get it!"   But this isn't a game! It is our future!

Well, the channels have been gone through and the silence from Highways England is positively deafening!

Call us cynical, but you get the feeling that the prime driver for route selection, at least as far as Highways England is concerned, is to pick the route that helps them get rid of all the spoil dug out from under Stonehenge for the tunnel and that happens to be the southern route  That's the elephant in the room, the spoil.  That might go some way to explain why Highways England are reluctant to share information with the public - they might spot the 2 million ton elephant.

Now don't get me wrong, we need a bypass, badly.  But not a bypass at any price, not a bypass route that isn't the best option for the most households, not a bypass route that we have to accept as an article of faith.   We want to be able to make our preference known on the basis of evidence and not the smoke and mirrors that sems to be the mainstay of the Highways England approach.

Those That Walk Amongst Us

We predicted, some time ago, that the announcement that the Government wished to push ahead with improving the A303/A30/A358 corridor to the West Country would flush out every failed and ill-considered proposal that has ever seen the light of day over the last half century or so.  Sadly, but all too predictably, we have not been disappointed.

We've said, all along, that our goal is to dual the A303, bypass the beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke and improve the traffic situation on local roads, particularly those in and around Shrewton to our north.  However, in achieving our goal, our second aim is to ensure the best possible environment for the whole of the World Heritage Site; much of which lies within our Parish boundaries - almost certainly making us the most visited village in England, on a per capita basis, as English Heritage's Stonehenge Visitor's Centre lies within our boundaries. Also lying within our perimeter lies what is arguably the most important feature of the World Heritage Site - not Stonehenge, which is something of a "Jonny Come Lately", but the Longbarrow which pre-dates even the earliest phase of Stonehenge by half a millennium.

Actually, only the left hand side of the Longbarrow lies within the parish of Winterbourne Stoke, the right hand (south eastern) side lies in the parish of Wilsford Cum Lake.

You'd have thought that there would be a common view, locally, to enhance this landscape.  Not a bit of it, it seems.  Though to be fair, no-one has yet, in recent times, sought the views of the locals in any consistent way.   That said, there seem to be several favoured alternatives locally:

A - Any solution that gets rid of the traffic jams;
B - A tunnel of 2.9km;
C - An even longer tunnel;
D - Dualling along the existing route, but sinking it in a ditch;
E - Putting the road way to the north, across the southern edge of the Salisbury Plain training area - to the north of Larkhill;
F - Putting the road south of Amesbury on any one of half a dozen routes.

The first solution (A) is borne of desperation by those who live along the A303 - understandable, but it may not help preserve our heritage.  (B) and (C) achieve the aims of dualling the A303 and taking the road out of the World Heritage Site.  The longer the tunnel the better, in environmental and heritage terms, but it comes at a cost.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that it would enable ALL vehicles, including most of the coaches used by English Heritage and the risible Land Train, to be excluded from the environment.  Of course, you would need to provide some mechanised transport for the disabled and elderly, but every other bugger could walk into the landscape from the Visitor's Centre, Larkhill, Amesbury, etc.  The route of the A303 could be returned to a green Bridleway throughout the WHS

(E) is an interesting option.  The Armed Forces would kick and scream, but even with the current re-basing exercise, it's hard to justify still needing as much space to exercise our much diminished Forces as we did at the height of WWI and WWII.  It would be an inexpensive route, with few landowners to deal with and would remove the A303 from the WHS.  Far too sensible an option to be considered.

(F) looks superficially promising, until you get stuck into the detail. There are way too many vested interests that would help kill it off.  It may have been a viable option 50 years ago when the idea of improving things was first mooted, but the world has moved on - unlike many of the proponents of this schemes.

Finally, we have option (D).  About the only positive thing that can be said about this option is that it is cheap and cheerful.  It does nothing to enhance the environment of the World Heritage site - and here it is important to stress one thing - whether or not the landscape around Stonehenge remains as a World Heritage site is immaterial to the argument of how the area is crossed.  It comes down to whether WE as a region, WE as a nation, want to leave something valuable to posterity - or simply want to bung in a cheap and nasty road and to hell with the consequences.   Those that are pushing for this option are doing so on the basis of simple cost (certainly not cost in the broader sense, or else they would soon realise how utterly indefensible their position is).

So, do they have a point when it comes to pounds shillings and pence?  Lets look at just a couple of hard facts.  Even the 2.9 km tunnel is going to cost at least £2billion.  Now that is a big number and I can't imagine what it would look like as a pile of fivers, but is it really excessive in the greater scheme of things?  Well let's compare it with something else equally controversial.

Now I could choose the cost of membership of the EU as the comparator, but the booklet of facts on staying in the EU, or leaving, dropped through the door the other day and when I opened this piece of Tory propaganda, I found all the facts were missing from my copy - and the same was true in every other copy I've looked at, so that isn't going to be overly helpful.   What else might be a good comparator?  Something else that is expensive and controversial - like the UK's Foreign Aid budget.

In 2013, the UK spent 0.7% of GDP, £11.4bn on foreign aid - money spent that does not benefit the UK directly and some would argue is often misspent, maladministered and way to much.  We can point the finger of blame at the Lib-Dems for pushing the 0.7% of GDP target in Parliament.  The Tories and Labour seem happy with the spend, through the Greens would like to increase it to 1% of GDP.  UKIP on the other hand, want to reduce the Foreign Aid budget to 0.2% of GDP and spend the rest within the UK.  In a time of austerity, it's hard to justify spending anything not of direct benefit to UK citizens, but I digress...

Back to a fact or two.   Back in 2014, we gave India £279 million in Foreign Aid and that was 40% down on 2011.   India has its own space program, it has a planned mission to Mars, and the whole program costs £500 million to run per year. So, in bald terms, the money we put into the Indian economy was equivalent to more than 50% of the cost of their entire space program or could have funded 7-8 missions to Mars. We may have been funding it entirely prior to 2011.

Now DfID will argue that the money was targeted on things the Indian's wouldn't have spent their own money on anyway, but the bottom line was that India had a choice on how to spend its money and chose a space program over health and education.   I'm sure a little digging would uncover even more egregious examples, but this one will do for the moment.

So, the 2.9 km Stonehenge tunnel option might cost £2bn at December 2014 prices, but over the 40 years (more like 50, but lets be conservative) that there has been talk of improving the A303, we've probably ploughed a demonstrably un-needed £11.6 billion into Indian Foreign Aid. During the same period, we've probably ploughed close to half a trillion pounds into Foreign Aid in total.

Well, there you have it.  A one-off spend of £2bn on a tunnel for Stonehenge is peanuts in the greater scheme of things and can easily be afforded by cutting the Foreign Aid budget from those countries, like India, that can well-afford to look after their own population's interests, but choose to ignore them.  Of course, digressing again, there are real emergencies and situations that call for Foreign Aid and I wouldn't want to stop that, but we need to spend more wisely.

We have those that walk amongst us who believe a £2 billion tunnel is an extravagance, whilst their political bed-fellows were responsible for the concept of blowing 0.7% of GDP on Foreign Aid without any clear demonstration of need.  I would beg you to treat these people gently; their sanity is surely in question.

Contract awarded for the A303 between Amesbury and Berwick Down (Stonehenge)

There hasn't been a great deal of new information to write about on the A303 improvement scheme in recent months.  That isn't to say that nothing has been going, far from it.  It's a bit like watching swans on a dark, glassy pool.  They move gently and with supreme grace, but you don't see the furious paddling underneath.   So it has been with the A303, with much work and consultation going on in the background.  So it is a great pleasure to be able to record another step forward in the shape of an annoncement from Highways England:

"As part of the £15 billion five year Road Investment Strategy the government has pledged to improve this section of the A303, including a tunnel near Stonehenge and a bypass of the village of Winterbourne Stoke.

Highways England today announced that a package of work with an estimated value of £17.5m has been awarded to Atkins/Arup joint venture to develop options to take to public consultation and ultimately a preferred route announcement. Subject to statutory procedures, the proposed scheme is on target for construction work to start by April 2020.

Project Manager, Andrew Alcorn, leading the A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down scheme, said:

This award takes us another step closer to our commitment to deliver the A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down Improvement Scheme.

Now we have Atkins/Arup on board to help with developing options for the scheme and pre-construction planning, we will be able to take the next step towards making this scheme a reality.

Tony Marshall, Global Highways Business Leader, Arup said:

We are delighted to be a part of the team tasked with helping to relieve congestion and improving the setting of a world renowned heritage site. By working collaboratively we can produce a transport solution that is sensitive to an area that is of immense cultural and environmental importance.

Lesley Waud, Strategic Highways Market Director, Atkins added:

This is a much needed scheme that will play a pivotal role in relieving congestion and improving journey times. We are delighted to work in partnership with Arup in delivering this vital project that will not only generate major benefits to better meet the needs of the travelling public, but will also support local economic growth in the long term.

The contract has been awarded under Highways England’s Collaborative Delivery Framework (CDF). Following the preferred route announcement Highways England will draw up a development consent order application, which will be examined in public by the Planning Inspectorate, before a final decision by the Transport Secretary.

The A303 trunk road links London with the South West and is a key route for long distance commercial and holiday traffic. The scheme will unlock a pinch-point that has restricted the economy of the South West while enhancing the world heritage site at Stonehenge. This scheme is an integral part for creating a A303 ‘expressway’ to the South West region."

We will await further developments with great interest and report them as and when they arise.

Dan Snow, The History Man, Spouting Nonsense As Fast As He Can!

Oh dear, what a performance.  Back on Tuesday, 17th March 2015,  the Stonehenge Alliance (aka the Stonehenge Aliens), a somewhat befuddled collective of the well-meaning, but easily confused,  pitched up at Byway 12, near to Stonehenge, to launch their campaign and showcase their tame celebrity - Dan Snow, the History Man.

 
Now whilst there were a few journalists around to witness events, the biggest Press presence was that of the BBC in the form of Paul Clifton, BBC South Today's traffic correspondent and local resident with a camera crew.  Now it must be said that Paul has been scrupulously impartial in his reporting of issues surrounding the A303 at Stonehenge; often to the frustration of us members of STAG.

I was curious to understand the ethics of the BBC interviewing Dan Snow - who seems to do rather a lot of TV and book work for them.  That's perhaps a point for others, particularly BBC management, to ponder.  Perhaps, to restore confidence in their impartiality, they might want to consider getting Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear team to do a bit of off-roading through the World Heritage Site (WHS)?  Then again, given the current fuss about Jezza, perhaps not...

...but Captain Slow and the Hamster would suffice!

If you want to read a bit more about the nonsense Dan Snow and the Stonehenge Aliens were putting forward during his interviews, you can read it here on our sister blog for the Stonehenge Traffic Action Group. The key message seems to be that they want to persuade UNESCO to put pressure on the government to abandon plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge.  Indeed, Dan Snow was, apparently, pushing the line that he would prefer to leave the A303 in its current undualed state past Stonehenge rather than put it into a tunnel that might at least remove a view of the road from a large part of the WHS and achieve one of UNESCO's aims for the WHS.

Part of the problem when talking to the Stonehenge Aliens is that they can't seem to come up with a collective story about what they actually want.  Some want to remove the A303 entirely from the WHS landscape, others want to ban a tunnel at all costs for fear it would: alter the water table, cause Stonehenge to sink into the ground/fall over, attract aliens, cause Salisbury Cathedral to flood, add to global warming and increase the cost of cheese.  Please delete or add to these scare stories as appropriate.  A few of them seem to support the idea of a dual-carriageway tunnel, providing it starts and ends outside the WHS.  However, few of the latter have thought through their argument.  Whilst the present WHS has clear boundaries, some leeway should be given to the possibility of further, related,  archaeological discoveries beyond the present confines of the WHS; particularly between the two geographical features that define the sitelines to the east and the west - Beacon Hill on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border and Little Down, west of Yarnbury Castle where Salisbury Plain falls away towards Deptford - we'll come back to this a bit later.

 Living in Winterbourne Stoke, the NIMBY in me says that I too would prefer to remove the A303 from the landscape - either by routing it miles to the north, or stuffing it into a very long tunnel that goes under the village and Stonehenge.  Unfortunately, many in the Stonehenge Alliance are so fixated on preserving the past, that they cannot entertain the needs of the present or the future.  Nor can may of them contemplate the need for pragmatism and compromise - nor cost.  Whilst the Chancellor might have announced that austerity was over in yesterday's budget, he didn't mean he had a bottomless purse to improve the A303.

It's perhaps worth raising a few key points here.  First, the Stonehenge Alliance are objecting to a plan that doesn't yet exist in any real detail.  All we know so far is that the government have set aside £1.3 billion for a tunnel, which they suggest would be a minimum of 2.8km (1.8 miles) long.  That sounds a lot of money, but when you consider the Lærdal Tunnel in Norway, currently the World's longest road tunnel at 24.5km , cost only £150 million between 1995 and 2000 - then £1.3 billion might buy a bit more than 2.9 km of tunnel!

Second, UNESCO love tunnels - Fact.  Only two sites in the world have ever lost WHS status.  One in Oman which was de-listed at the request of the Omani government and the second was in Dresden in relation to a site near the River Elbe.  The Dresden authorities wanted to improve the flow of traffic over the Elbe, UNESCO were against a bridge and proposed a tunnel instead, the Dresden authoriies stuck two fingers in the air and built the bridge anyway.  As a consequence, UNESCO finally delisted the WHS in June 2009.  So, the good news is, it's hard to see how UNESCO could possibly favour leaving the current A303 in the WHS, when even a short tunnel could improve the landscape.

Third, if by some chance Stonehenge Alliance kick up enough of a fuss to gain UNESCO attention and overturn UNESCO's preference for hiding obtrusive roads underground, then UNESCO may choose to make the threat of removal of WHS status - it could happen.  The next UK government, sniffing the prospect of a massive cash saving, may be tempted to call UNESCO's bluff and get the Stonehenge WHS de-listed.  A massive own-goal for the Stonehenge Alliance and a slap in the face of STAG and the local population who wish to both improve the current road situation and conserve the WHS.  No doubt the Aliens will point out that the land either side of the A303 is owned by the National Trust and is inviolate.  That is true.  It is equally true that a determined government, even a coalition, could overturn such protection for the greater good of the nation and build an on-line dual carriageway.  Now whilst such a cheap and cheerful option would be very popular to some in the local community and those who travel the route daily from further afield, I would find the prospect horrific.  Whilst I don't believe this is a credible or realistic option, it is possible.  To my mind, it is also the worst possible outcome for the WHS.

Fourth, whilst I and others might share the wish that the A303 could be re-routed outside the WHS (as it is now, now or as it might one day be expanded to be),  that isn't on offer. Period, full-stop.It is NOT on offer.

There is another option which might just achieve everyone's aims.  Indeed, I suggested it to Dan Snow just before his interview with Paul Clifton.  Dan had, quite rightly in my view, expressed the most sensible thing he said all morning.  That was his belief that the Stonehenge WHS had a unique national, indeed global, significance and value and should be protected.  I suggested that we could test this shared view in a very pragmatic way: set up a public subscription, as the Victorians used to do to fund major works.  The international response to the subscription appeal would prove once and for all whether the concept of the Stonehenge WHS had any value at all.  Do people really value their heritage?  If not' let's just proceed as has been proposed.

Of course, let's not forget the fact that last August, Dan Snow and his wife, the heiress Lady Edwina Grosvenor, the second child of the Duke of Westminster, intimated that they don't want any possible inheritance to be a burden to their children and might give it away to charity.  Admirable stuff that.  Now, the Duke of Westminster is pretty high up the UK rich list and has a bob or two, an estimated fortune of about £8.5 billion.  That would buy an awful lot of tunnel - about 17.5 km.  Perhaps the idea of a "Duke of WestminsterGlobal Heritage Tunnel" might be an appealing legacy - especially to someone who made their fortune because of land? 

Going back to my earlier point of a long tunnel that crossed the current and any probable future sitelines of an expanded WHS, then the Duke of Westminster's legacy could easily pay for the 13.5 km of tunnel needed to cross the obvious geographical features and still leave some pocket money for the children and grandchildren.  It's just a suggestion and I wouldn't want the Westminster's to feel under any obligation...

I think, however, it is only fair to leave the last word to the "opposition" - the Stonehenge Alliance...

...as they clearly suggest here. Please contact UNESCO and show your support for dualling the A303 - preferably in a tunnel!  You should also sign up to the STAG campaign!