Correspondence with Andrew Gant re county council's role in the Botley Road shambles

31 Abbey Road OX2 0AD
[email protected]
14 January 2025
 
Dear Mr Gant

“NETWORKHELL”: REPORT ON THE IMPACT OF CLOSURE OF BOTLEY ROAD ON OUR COMMUNITY

As you know, the botched Network Rail project at Oxford station has resulted in the seemingly endless closure of Botley Road, Oxford.  As this is the only road connecting West Oxford to the rest of the city, the closure has had serious consequences for the community. Originally, Network Rail said the closure would be only 4 days: it has now been closed for over 600 days and there is still no date for its reopening.

For two years, no one's listened to us, and no one has helped us. When Network Rail announced that it would not reopen the road last October, the umpteenth time they’ve missed their own deadline, we decided to collect statements by local people who’re suffering from the closure and publish them, in an effort to shame authority into action.

The report has now been published, and I enclose a copy. The 32 personal statements of impact, mostly by the elderly and disabled, and by small family businesses, should indeed shame those involved.
You have consistently maintained that the project is nothing to do with the county council, that what is gone wrong is not the county council’s fault in any way, and that there is nothing the county council can do about it.

I believe the facts contradict all of those statements. I set out nine ways in which it appears that the county council has contributed to this disaster:
1)      Failure to act as effective customer:  The main cause of the delay according to Network Rail is the difficulty of widening and deepening the road under the railway bridge. This is not however being done for ‘railway purposes’, but for ‘highway purposes’, concerning the use of buses and improvements in pedestrian and cycling access, and connects with the county council's transport strategy. Who then is really the customer for these changes?  Clearly not Network Rail, charged with railway infrastructure: it must be the county council as highways authority. Yet the county council have always maintained that the project has ‘nothing to do with them’ and been content simply to point the finger at Network Rail. Granted the contract is held by Network Rail, the county council should nevertheless have insisted on acting as the real customer of this element. The lack of an effective customer has been a major element in the project’s failure.
 
2)      Confusion about the requirement: Specifically, the county council allowed the case for the project to proceed on an incorrect basis. Network Rail’s business case is that the clearance under the bridge was so low that the local authority (sic) had to procure specially made buses to fit under it, and that increasing the height would bring savings in procurement and in ‘fleet homogeneity’. This is contradicted by the county council's own statement of the requirement (which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act last year). This stated that the lower buses are of standard construction, that the majority of buses in the county are of low height and that there were no plans for existing bus operators to buy higher buses. However, most bizarrely, the paper went on to say that over the lifetime of the bridge the height of the average person might increase - thus taller buses might be needed for evolutionary reasons!
 
In the report, the managing director of the Oxford Bus Company states that the lower height buses are of standard construction and do not require special procurement, that in any case, lower buses are required on other low bridges on its network, and that  its fleet of new electric buses are also of this lower height, and he therefore saw no urgent need to increase headroom on this bridge.
 
It appears therefore that the lack of an effective customer for the highways aspects of the project may have resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding about the requirements as regards headroom. If this had not occurred, the project might have been easier in engineering terms, thus avoiding the repeated delays in re-opening the road.
 
3)      Lack of accurate information about utilities: A major cause of delay, according to Network Rail, has been that the County Council did not maintain accurate records of what utilities were under the road, by whom owned, and where located. While utilities have a legal right to work on the road to install their pipes and cables, they surely cannot do this work without notifying the highways authority of what they're doing. It is therefore unclear why accurate and comprehensive records were not maintained. If they had been, the project might have preceded more smoothly.
 
4)      A passive view of its role: the county council seems to have taken the view that since Network Rail have legal rights to work on the road for railway purposes, the county council was unable to challenge anything they did, even though part of the work is clearly for highways, not railways, purposes. For example, for two years the council has been saying that it is going to draw up a Section 278 agreement with Network Rail, which I understand is a standard legal requirement before work is done to make permanent changes to the highway. Yet as late as last August, no such agreement had been made, begging the question: what Network Rail have been doing for two years, if not making permanent changes to the highway? The county council also allowed Thames Water to block off one lane of Osney Bridge all last summer, even though Thames Water has said that work could not proceed in the summer because the Environment Agency would not allow it. The blocked lane added to delay yet was for months used only to park the private cars of Thames Water employees. Our protests met with no response.
 
5)      Permitting unsafe road layouts: whatever else goes on, the county council always retains its statutory responsibility for the safety of the highway. Yet it allowed Network Rail to operate the overcrowded passenger tunnel which is now the only direct route into Oxford in an unsafe condition, with poor lighting and an uneven and broken floor. It also allowed the situation to develop where people waiting for westbound buses and passers-by were forced to walk in the road for lack of room. It has allowed piecemeal changes in road layout, bus stops, traffic and pedestrian lights within a very small space which, cumulatively, are viewed by local people as dangerous. It has failed to enforce restrictions effectively, for example, on cars stopping to drop off and pick up passengers at the corners of Mill Street and Abbey Road.
 
 
6)      Failure to take adequate mitigating action: The county council have failed to make adequate arrangements to mitigate the effects of the closure. Local people often comment on the difficulty of getting the county council to take action. For example, seats and shelters at the temporary west-bound bus stops, possible widening of the pavement there, adequate additional bus services from Botley to the city centre and to hospitals for people unable to walk through, and safe access for disabled people to the station and to the city.
 
7)      Failure to consult: The county council declared that it was ready to consult residents of Abbey and Cripley roads on changes in parking, road layout and traffic management in those roads, not only during the project but permanently following construction, but has generally told us, rather than consulted.
 
8)      Refusal to consider help for small businesses: despite bearing some of the  responsibility for the prolonged road closure, the county council has refused even to discuss the issue of financial help  with small business owners, some of whom have been forced out of  business or forced out of Oxford by the closure. The closure has caused significant economic damage to West Oxford, estimated as £20m commercial revenue to date and the loss of at least 100 jobs.
 
9)      Failure to mitigate effects on the city as a whole: The prolonged closure of Botley Road meant that introduction of the new traffic filter scheme for Oxford has been postponed for the best part of two years. As the managing director of the Oxford Bus Company makes clear in his statement, the effect of introducing LTN's without traffic filters has been to force more traffic onto main routes into and out of the city, but without being able to reduce use of private cars. The predictable consequence the bus journey times have risen substantially, due to increased congestion. This is also made it impossible to deploy electric buses as planned. The effect is likely to increase pollution around the main routes, although as the county council have suspended publication of air quality data, it’s impossible to know. It’s also likely to have had an economic effect, as people are less willing to travel into Oxford for shopping, entertainment etc.  The county council should therefore have considered suspending some LTN's until traffic filters can be implemented - but did not do so.

In sum, the evidence shows that while the main responsibility for failure of the project clearly lies with Network Rail, the county council itself bears considerable responsibility in a number of different ways, and ought therefore to accept that responsibility publicly, apologise to the local community, and engage more positively in mitigating measures.

I'm copying this letter and the report to other councillors, and to the media.

Yours
 
 
Julian Le Vay