Submit your views to the Paving Bill Committee

With thanks to Chris Eaglen, who made this comment here.  We thought it was important enough to repeat.

Please send written evidence to scrutiny@parliament.uk explaining what your community is suffering due to lack of money and jobs and over taxation of pensioners and the young workers. scrutiny@parliament are consulting on the High Speed Rail Preparation Bill and there is a committee of 16 MPs including Mr Burns who can read directly why you consider HS2 Route 3 phase 1 to be too expensive and destructive to communities.

You have one week to submit your Parish, Local Council, neighbourhood or personal situations where indulgent spending on HS2 is diverting funding from more essential requirements please. The address is: Telephone: 020 7219 8387, Email: scrutiny@parliament.uk Fax: 020 7219 8381, Post: Michelle Edney, Senior Executive Officer, Scrutiny Unit, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA.

Please let the committee know what you think before the 18th July 2013. Now is the time to make your situation known before the bill is finalised please.

[Editor: the committee will be considering evidence on 18th July, so ideally send it a couple of days before (eg by Tuesday).]

There are more details on how to submit on the Parliament website here.

There is a lot more information about the bill, including the Bill itself, explanatory notes, amendments and transcripts of witness sessions available here.

Written evidence to the committee already published is here.

A number of questions at the oral evidence sessions centred around whether communities and organisations were finding that HS2 Ltd listened to them and were engaging with those communities. There were also questions as to whether the witnesses thought HS2 Ltd were competent (important if they are about to presented with a blank cheque book funded by the taxpayer!). Another major line of questioning was around the costs of HS2.