• AS you blearily try to enjoy a holiday with your equally grumpy family this festive season, after another sleepless night listening to banging and grinding of works down in the Camden Cutting railway approach to Euston station, remember it didn’t have to be this way.

A firm that cared about local people would have listened to our pleas, over a year ago, to install noise insulation for any residents with a right to it, even if the strict legal trigger levels would only be exceeded later.

That is quite apart from the Camden HS2 Association of Residents’ Groups for Engagement (CHARGE) legal arguments that HS2 is obliged, under the code of construction practice, to install the noise insulation as soon as possible. It is not clear whether HS2’s senior environmental manager or someone else is ultimately to blame. But it is clear that in the last year of feeble action by HS2 – despite repeated pressure from CHARGE – out of over 1,000 homes in Camden definitely entitled to noise insulation, no more than three have so far received it.

We have probably 15 more years of this project, and this is not a good start.

JOHN MYERS
For and on behalf of CHARGE
chargegroup.org