This is based on a comment on one of the Stop HS2 articles, and the recommendations are useful:
Five actions to challenge the planned HS2 Route3 Phase 1, priorities and programme:
1. The Current ES Reponses need to be submitted to HS2PhaseOneBillES@dialoguebydesign.com by 27th February. Ensure you state where you are not clear on land take/impacts.
2. Request your MP to ask questions about the HS2 Route and and other priorities, and changes. Remind him/her of the May elections this year and next and your vote and any self interest bias.
3. Submit to the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee at the House of Commons your facts and opinion about the way HS2 has not addressed avoidance sufficiently and has not provided and may not have clear descriptions of the impact on specific location. Instead it has divided the different phases of impacts between the Environmental Statement and Hybrid Bill documentation to avoid having the responses from communities and people of the immediate area. It has not been specific on the land that will be lost or what will happen to local flooding.
4. Prepare your petitioning to require mitigations not in the current plans sufficiently clearly and to ask for changes and for local betterments including new roads and lanes and request delays on advanced works to the latest start dates.
5. Support any retrospective planning judicial review case to demonstrate where HS2 and Statutory Bodies have presented confusion in the Environmental Statement and the Hybrid Bill documentation with works information and HS2 route details have been mislead or not been sufficiently specific and where your comments have been disregarded by HS2 or the answer has been unacceptable.
Please end in examples under the EASC remit summarised in the article and in this comment please. If done before the 27th February copy the EASC submission also to the HS2 ES Response also:
Dear Chair of the EASC and the Independent Assessor for the Hybrid Bill,
Submission of this evidence to both the EASC and the ES Response procedures.
There are two matters which are troubling residents:
1. How was road safety badly addressed by HS2 as illustrated in the example of the dangerous A41 and the entrance to the 9 homes and farm in the attached document. Why did HS2 detail after public consultation poor layouts for haul roads for example by the Drive in yellow, instead of coming from the old road and crossing to the Street as shown in pink to the main route.
Why did HS2 decide to put the satellite compound for the viaduct on the north side of the River and not the south side. These are within the EASC remit included below.
2. Why are the homes outside the safguarding zone being unnecessarily blighted. There has been poor over planning for the roads and access across farms demonstrating poor envirnonmental protection.
3. The EASC and IA both require real examples to improve details as planning appeals and public inquiries aim and an achieve. Will the Hybrid Bill process permit a further legal challenge after granting of powers when passed to revisit these important issues to local people but collectively to many please.
Environmental Audit Committee inquiry will examine:
The extent to which specific route-wide environmental impacts are adequately reflected and addressed in the Environmental Statement — specifically including: agriculture, forestry and soils; air quality; climate; ecology; and water resources and flood risk; and excluding Chilterns-specific matters; community and cultural heritage; landscape and visual aspect; noise/vibration; traffic and transport; and waste and material resources.
The overarching systems and processes which will guide how environmental considerations are taken into account in the detailed routing of the track and the use of local environmental protection measures (but not examining the route itself)I
HS2 project creating unnecessary blight and danger and failing to protect properly
1: HS2 safeguarded zones are out of date.
They follow the old designs in the draft ES but not the new designs in the ES in the hybrid bill.
Road infrastructure realignments, work compounds and many other severe impacts are not in a safeguarded zone, let alone being surrounded by a zone to a reasonable distance.
As a result many home owners that are severely impacted by the line and road realignments, to name but a few, are not included in a safeguarded zone, and as such are not able to issue a blight notice.
2: HS2 safeguarded zones are arbitrary at best and in many cases appear to be designed to slip around or past significantly impacted properties.
“Your question about safeguarding areas. It is even worse than you think. We were right in the middle of the safeguarding area all the way through both consultation periods and when the rules fro blight changed we issued a blight notice. With just two days to go before the end of the consultation and after all the road shows the plans were changed! This put us surrounded by the safeguarding area BUT not part of it. As said the new road has been swerved around the house (literally) and the orignal 60 metres around the line has been necked in just to get past our house! Our blight notice was then turned down.We had asked HS2 a list of questions about ‘safeguarding’ our property and access but we received a letter to say they could not answer yet BUT they could still turn down blight.
I understand the problems and heartache with the current flooding but it is a bit galling that so much is made of living with the problems of losing your house for a few weeks. We have been living with it for more than 3 years now.”