On her website, Cheryl Gillan, MP, writes that she has been contacted by the Clerk of the HS2 Select Committee. This was about the visit of new members of committee to some of the affected areas in the Chilterns, in which they missed out several scheduled stops.
The email she was sent says:
In essence, the Committee arranged one community stop, so that the programme would be manageable, although accepting that there would inevitably be some delays. We were only 10-15 minutes behind when leaving Wendover. By the time we were due to go to Bury Farm, however, having spent a long time at Wendover Dean, we were more than an hour later and were running into problems not only around the legality of the driver’s working hours but the means to get two Committee members from the North-West back to their homes at something approaching the right side of midnight.
I do understand why feelings ran high about this, but I hope you can to some extent accept that what occurred was not because of a wish to miss people out, but, quite the contrary, because the Committee spent longer than expected with people in non-scheduled community stops. I should say that the Committee members who attended the visit were most upset not to see everything scheduled, and about the disappointment among those at Bury Farm.
The current intention, depending on feasibility (but I am fairly confident that it should be possible) is for myself and petitioner representatives to film the Bury Park site in the light of the yet to be fully published plans for the revised tunnelling engineering, and to show that to the Committee before the relevant petitions are heard. The filming should be an opportunity to repeat the signposting of where the portal and cutting will be. If that does not prove possible we will look at some other options.
I can well understand the frustration and annoyance felt by those people who had turned out,hoping to engage with the new members of the Parliamentary Committee.
This was certainly the case at Calvert, where the bus paused briefly at the road junction near the Bridge and then, without anyone having ventured out, it departed, leaving the small band of residents distinctly unimpressed.
At Wendover station, however, the bus stopped and the “new boys” were able to alight and listen and exchange with a larger group, while , arriving at the now derelict and boarded up shell of Annie Bailey’s, the party were met in the car park by a crowd of concerned folk, most of whom were urging that the tunnels should be extended, so as to minimise the impact on the A,O,N.B,
It remains to be seen just how much this high speed tour helps in bringing these new Members up to date with “the story so far” and giving them some background to their homework. but at least they should know where these places are and how much they are valued.