23 December 2020
Campaigners have issued a legal claim in their fight
to halt the major A303 road project that would carve deep cuttings to a
tunnel within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site (WHS).
Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SSWHS) has
applied for judicial review of Transport Secretary Grant Shapps’ decision
to grant development consent to the eight-mile project that includes a
two-mile tunnel past Stonehenge, with cuttings and tunnel entrances within
the WHS.
A pre-action letter sent by Leigh Day
solicitors on behalf of SSWHS did not receive a satisfactory response, and
so a claim for judicial review was filed on December 22 before the December
24 deadline.
Permission for the A303 scheme was granted against the
advice of a five-person panel of expert inspectors, the Examining Authority
(ExA), who said the hugely controversial project would permanently harm the
integrity of the WHS and seriously harm its authenticity. It will be argued
that the scheme is contrary to the Wiltshire Core Strategy and the
requirements of the World Heritage Convention.
The Stonehenge site, together with Avebury, was
declared by UNESCO to be a WHS of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) in 1986
on account of the sheer size of their megaliths, the sophistication of
their concentric plans and their complexes of Neolithic and Bronze Age
sites and monuments.
The prehistoric monuments and sites preserved within
the WHS form landscapes without parallel, says UNESCO.
SSWHS says Mr Shapps’ decision to allow the road
tunnel to be built alongside the site, with the tunnel entrance within, is
unlawful. It makes its case on the following grounds:
·
Harm to each heritage asset
within the road project should have been weighed in the balance, instead of
considering the “historic environment” as a whole
·
The advice provided by Historic
England did not provide the evidential basis for the Secretary of State’s
conclusion of “less than substantial harm” to any of the assets impacted by
the project. His disagreeing with the advice of the ExA was therefore
unlawful
·
The Secretary of State allowed
purported “heritage benefits” to be weighed against heritage harm, before
deciding whether that overall harm was “substantial” or “less than
substantial”, which was unlawful under the NPS: the primary policy test
that the Secretary of State must use when making decisions for nationally
significant infrastructure projects. The Secretary of State also
double-counted what he considered to be the “heritage benefits”
·
The Secretary of State failed to
consider whether a grant of development consent (which would, even on his
own conclusions, cause harm to the OUV of the WHS) would amount to a breach
of international obligations under the World Heritage Convention
·
The Secretary of State left out
of account mandatory material considerations: the breach of various local
policies; the impact of his finding of heritage harm which undermined the
business case for the proposal and the existence of at least one
alternative, namely a longer tunnel with less impact on the heritage assets
Tom Holland, president of the Stonehenge Alliance
whose supporters set up SSWHS to take forward the legal action, said:
“Bearing in
mind the weight of opposition to the Government’s plans for a highly
intrusive road scheme through the Stonehenge landscape, it is hard to
believe that the Transport Secretary has given them the green
light. The Planning Inspectorate, after a painstaking, six-month investigation,
advised against them. So too, appalled by the damage the Government’s
plans would inflict on a World Heritage Site, did UNESCO. How the public
feel can be gauged by the fact that over £46,000 has been raised to take
the Government to court over the plans in only a few weeks. Let us hope
that the law can come to the rescue of a landscape that ranks as our most
precious and sacred.”
Leigh Day solicitor Rowan Smith said:
“Our client strongly believes that the Secretary of
State’s approach to assessing the harm caused by this road scheme to the
heritage assets in the Stonehenge area was unlawful, because he
underestimated the overall impact by averaging it out and offsetting the
purported benefits before appreciating the true extent of the damage. Our
client will argue that, in doing so, the Secretary of State failed to
follow national policy and breached international law under the World
Heritage Convention.”
Campaigners are fundraising for
their legal action and by December 22 had raised £46,746.
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