The Countryside's High Speed problem
Thursday, 12 January 2012
 Countryside Alliance Awards Chief Executive Alice Barnard writes: Most of you will have seen that this week the Government approved plans to build a High Speed Rail line between London and Birmingham (known as HS2). The line - estimated to cost £17 billion in its first phase and won't be operational until 2024 - will carve through some of Britain's most cherished and unspoilt countryside, uprooting several thousand families and ruining many rural communities. For this reason the Countryside Alliance has been strongly opposed to its construction.
In our opposition to HS2 we have partnered with various other organisations - from the campaign groups formed of those who live along the line such as AGAHST and 51M; environmental groups like the Green Party and Woodland Trust; and the economic think-tanks the TaxPayers' Alliance and Adam Smith Institute. Together we have consistently made the point that high speed rail projects are hugely expensive and therefore must offer significant benefits to justify investing this amount of public money.
To this argument the Countryside Alliance adds that we believe that the wildlife and environmental costs of the HS2 project have not been properly evaluated and that, despite people living along the planned route being the most affected, they will gain little or no local benefits. Despite the late Government concessions of extra tunnels in the Chilterns and new noise-reduction measures, we remain dubious as to whether this will make any overall difference to the environmental impact of the rail line, which will still consume huge amounts of energy and damage many important sites for wildlife. Equally these last-minute changes, as with the route north of Birmingham (the so-called 'Y' network to Leeds and Manchester that will cost another £15 billion), have also not been put forward for public consultation and we therefore haven't been able to assess their probable effects.
Perhaps most of all we are concerned about what the HS2 project means for Britain's countryside and the people who live in it. When the Government proposed changes to the planning rules there was a noisy and boisterous backlash from some quarters who worried that the countryside was being "concreted over". Yet the Alliance recognised that the countryside still needed to grow and that, provided local people had the ability to stop a new development if it was not in keeping with their community, the planning system needed overhaul. In the case of HS2 the legitimate concerns of local people have been all-but ignored, and the countryside looks set to suffer greatly from a loud, polluting, destructive train line plotted through an area of outstanding natural beauty, farms and farming land, and people's homes.
We will continue to voice our opposition to this project and urge the Government to reassess the possibility of improving the existing rail network as an alternative.
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