The Council, the Highways Agency and the expression ‘Grid locked’ (December 2011)
We have been trying to unravel a tangled web about the A49 and Herefordshire Council’s spurious ambition to ‘detrunk’ the existing route.
This story of deception is by no means over. In September 2011 Cabinet said that the Highways Agency’s ‘belief’ was that the county would be gridlocked without a relief road. We asked, via a Freedom Of Information request, where does this Highways Agency ‘belief’ appear? The answer was that no record of it could be found. There was speculation, in the Freedom of Information answer, that the source for the suggestion about poor traffic conditions may have been the 2009 Multi-Modal Forecast co-commissioned by the Council and the Highways Agency. This said that the City’s anticipated worsening congestion levels would stem from new housing and employment allocations. Talk of the County being grid locked with, or without these allocations is, quite simply, propaganda.
We call on the Council to come clean about its negotiations with the Highways Agency and publish the Minutes of the meeting Geoff Hughes had in the summer of 2011 with the Regional Director of the Highways Agency regarding the A49.
