• THANK you for your report on my judicial review case, and that the judge had ruled on June 5 in favour of HS2 Ltd and against me, (HS2 wins tunnel case, June 12). I have now applied for permission to appeal.

This is on the grounds that Mr Justice Jay accepted that HS2 Ltd and their contractors had calculated the “Three Tunnels” design could be made safe even though their figures had not been made available to my side or to the court.

I must thank everyone who has supported me financially and morally this far; whatever the final outcome, I feel confident my case will have brought to the design of HS2 some of the scrutiny that was so absent from the hybrid bill procedure.

HS2 Ltd is wholly owned by the Department for Transport and, if he had had no prior knowledge of HS2 Ltd, one can understand that Mr Justice Jay was inclined to grant them the benefit of the doubt. But people in the Euston area who have been dealing with HS2 Ltd since at least 2013 may, together with me, feel very differently.

As reported last week, a spokesperson for HS2 Ltd had told the CNJ that the possibility of the Park Village East retaining wall collapsing was ”entirely remote and implausible”.

But this was not the position of HS2 Ltd’s counsel at the hearing, and in his judgment the judge himself accepted that my expert witness, Colin Elliff, had identified a real danger: “the risk that Mr Elliff has identified is plain and obvious”.

At the hearing, counsel for HS2 Ltd had argued that, even though the Three Tunnels design is now four years old, they and their contractors would still be able to design out this risk at the current “detailed design” stage.

The danger the proposed works pose to the retaining wall is also identified in documents handed over to me following the disclosure order of Mrs Justice Lang issued on April 28.

In particular, a Risk Register of April 2019 covering the Three Tunnels design, at entry ETW-006, under the headings “Hazard description” and “Risk description”, includes the following: Location / construction of cavern / dive under tunnelling works give rise to unacceptable ground movement||Collapse of existing brick retaining wall, failure of services and structural damage to listed buildings and interruption of WCML services (Lines E & X). The entry then lists mitigation measures to lessen the risk.

It seems to me very likely that, within a short time and with luck, before my case reaches the appeal court, the government will announce that it accepts that the Three Tunnels design is not safe and instead follow the advice of the Oakervee Report, that a new design should be developed which would ‘avoid the complicated HS2 approach to Euston station and minimise risk’.

HERO GRANGER-TAYLOR
Park Village East, NW1