Friends of the Earth Birmingham Action Briefing Aug 98/Sep 98

BNRR Update: One year on...

As we approach the anniversary, July 28th, of the now famous U turn by John Prescott and the Labour Party’s decision on the BNRR the campaign goes from strength to strength.

Towards the end of the July we should hear the Judges ruling over the first of two court cases. This will or will not allow the public to see the concession agreement between MEL (Midlands Expressway Ltd) and the government. Depending on the verdict there will probably be appeals by one of the parties. This will probably lead to a further delay of the scheme.

We have heard that the start date for construction is now estimated by MEL for sometime in the year 2000. This is year later than January 1999 date announced at their 'green light' press conference held on July 28th 1997. Since that date they have been seeing red both in terms of the road going ahead and increasingly bad media attention.

A parliamentary question from Dr Tony Wright (Lab Cannock Chase) established that @£20 million was to be paid to MEL to help them widen the M42 along the section were the two roads are essentially the same. This information had never been published before and highlights the potential problems with such a secretive concession agreement. How much more public money are MEL going to get their hands on?

So we have recently heard that not only public money was going into the scheme but also a sister project in the U.S of A is facing bankruptcy!!

We have also managed to expose the fact that independent research at the time considered MEL’s bid to be full of holes. They argue 'that was then' and since then they have done their homework. Surely 'homework' should have been done beforehand not upon winning a ‘tender’ process?

This has all added up to loads of media interest along with another potential £600M plus to widen the M6 in Staffordshire to four lanes between Cannock and Knutsford. Would we need to widen the M6 without the BNRR? What happens when the BNRR hits the three lane bottleneck that physically and financially would be very difficult to widen? Furthermore, given that the treasury has fixed the public spending round for three years is this the best value we can get for our hard earned government’s dosh? (OUR hard earned dosh that the government spends on our behalf -Ed)

Time and time again we hear that not investing in large roads is better value for money and spreads the gain more evenly rather than putting large amounts of money into one scheme or another.

There have been more and more public meetings as people want to find out what is going on with the campaign. A support group has been set up in Erdington while packed halls in Mere Green and Water Orton have endorsed the campaign against the road and are in the process of setting up groups to fight the road.

Recent developments along the corridor have highlighted the sheer scale of development threat along the corridor. The future Chair of the forthcoming West Midlands Regional Development Agency, Alex Stephenson, has announced that 1 000 jobs at Longbridge will be moved to Hams Hall which was shortly followed by speculative housing whispers around Water Orton to cope with the success of Hams Hall.

This is not about new jobs and desperately needed habitable space but moving jobs and people around the region at the expense of our environment. If this is a taster of things to come from the RDA then all we can expect is roads, sheds and ticky tacky houses as their vision of the region!!

Link to main BNRR Web Page