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Tuesday 30 October 2018

More Bl....y Meetings...

In October 2013, when I started this blog, I posted up "A303 Meetings B..... Meetings".   Back then, the meetings were to attract the attention of village residents, anyone coming from anywhere in the world who needed to use the A303 past Stonehenge, Government, MP's, National Trust, Highways Agency (old title) and anyone else that would listen to my rantings of Rat Running through our village of Shrewton because......"The A303 is no longer fit for purpose" and needs to be "stashed away"....under ground! 

Well here we are in October 2018 and I'm still attending b....y meetings, and the A303 around Stonehenge is "still not fit for purpose"!!
However, we are making progress and the meetings now have taken a different tack and I would say, are more positive toward the project to fix the "not fit for purpose" road.
We now attend a "by monthly" meeting called the Highways England Forum and this is very interesting if you happen to be as sad about the project as I am.   In preparation for the last Forum held at the Holiday Inn last Thursday the 25th, I had even boned up on the term D C O!!!    What on earth is a D-C-O I hear you ask?.....well perhaps not, but it's an acronym for "Development Consent Order" and you can find out all about it if you go to: 
https://highwaysengland.co.uk/projects/a303-stonehenge-amesbury-and-berwick-down/ 
but to save you time, I've copied the important bit here.....

"Progress report

We've submitted our application for development consent for the scheme to the Planning Inspectorate. The application will appear on the Planning Inspectorate’s website.
Non-statutory consultation on the scheme took place between 12 January and 5 March 2017, followed by statutory consultation between 8 February and 23 April 2018, and supplementary consultation between 17 July and 14 August 2018.
We'd like to thank all who have participated. The responses have played a major part in shaping the scheme submitted for development consent.

What’s next

The A303 improvement past Stonehenge is classified as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) and will be considered under the Planning Act 2008. Under the Act, applicants apply for a Development Consent Order (DCO) from the Secretary of State for Transport.
We submitted the DCO application to the Planning Inspectorate on 18 October 2018. The Inspectorate will decide whether to accept the application within 28 days of submission. Following acceptance, the Inspectorate will undertake a detailed examination of the application, in which stakeholders and the public can participate, before making a recommendation to the Secretary of State.   More details can be found on the Planning Inspectorate’s website."
Of course, the thorn in everyone's side who want something done to alleviate the traffic in our village of Shrewton, while the A303 remains unfit for purpose, is an outfit (charity) called Stonehenge Alliance: www.stonehengealliance.org.uk    They're worried that Stonehenge will loose it's UNESCO World Heritage status if the road is put into a tunnel or at least one that's too short in their eyes......So what if it does, as I said in a previous posting some years back, the city of Dresden in Germany, lost their status in June 2009 because they built a waldschlosschenbrucke.....(large bridge to you and me)..... to alleviate traffic crossing the River Elbe and Dresden's tourism has not suffered as a result.   People from all over the world will continue to visit Stonehenge whether it has status or not because the average tourist probably don't have a clue who or what UNESCO are and just want the Stonehenge experience.

So! as we said, the DCO was submitted on 18th October and when the Planning Inspectorate make their decision in approximately 3 week's time, when hopefully, the project will be accepted for the pre examination stage.   There are a further 5 stages it must go through before the final decision by the Secretary of State.  If you're as sad as me about this project, you can find out everything about the project and watch a video here:  https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/application-process/the-process/