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07
Mar
Anti-Gateway campaign group poses questions for council to answer
The group set up to campaign against the Harrogate Station Gateway scheme has challenged North Yorkshire Council to provide answers over recent public statements which have sparked new concerns.
Get Away, whose supporters include landlords, tenants and town-centre retailers, has raised the queries after Cllr Keane Duncan told a full council meeting last week that the Gateway work can begin, even though it is subject to a High Court legal challenge.
Get Away launched the legal action last month, claiming that the scheme's Traffic Regulation Orders were illegal, due to what it considered to be the council’s failure to consider the wider impacts of the proposal or to consult fully with the public.
Cllr Duncan, who is the council’s executive member for highways, dismissed these claims as “spurious at best”, and wants work to start “at the earliest opportunity” on those parts of the scheme which fall outside the legal action, including improvements to Station Parade, to One Arch (the pedestrian tunnel just down from the bus station) and to the traffic signals.
But Get Away spokesman Steven Baines said:
The improvements that Cllr Duncan initially wants to move forward are good for the town, but not with the additional baggage and cost that comes from the wider Gateway project.
We are all for developments that are good for the town, but spending millions on an unwanted project, where many businesses fear they will not survive the construction phase, is not a price worth paying.
David Waddington, of Hornbeam Park Developments Limited, said that starting construction before the money was "in the bank" was a "big gamble", which risked "recklessly wasting taxpayer funds". He said:
There are elements within the overall Gateway scheme that we support, such as new traffic-light sequencing to improve traffic flows in the town, but we are not talking about a pick-and-mix counter where we can take what we like and leave what we don’t on the shelf.
This is public money being spent in a way that isn’t in the interest of the public.
In a press release, Get Away has posed the following questions:
- If construction work starts on the One Arch, Station Parade and the traffic lights ahead of a court ruling on Station Gateway, can you guarantee this will not land local ratepayers with additional costs if the Gateway project fails?
- Has funding been approved and received by North Yorkshire Council for the elements of the project which are outside of the legal challenge, or assurances given that it will be forthcoming regardless of this court action?
- Given that several years have passed since this scheme was first proposed, what will be the true cost of the project now, and will local ratepayers be expected to pay the shortfall?
- Above all, does the council think it’s democratic or fair to push forward with multi-million-pound plans when Harrogate residents and businesses haven’t been given visibility of the proposals and are very much still in the dark?
Cllr Duncan has previously criticised Get Away’s tactics, saying that the purpose of its legal challenge was simply to block the whole Gateway project. Last week, he said:
It’s really important, I think, that we see this project through to secure the £12 million of investment and to deliver vital improvements in Harrogate. But most importantly to defend the democratic decision we have taken and the protect the democratic process that we are all part of.
But Mr Baines said:
Cllr Duncan talks about protecting the democratic process, but where is the democracy of ignoring objections of the local business community who will be most impacted by this project and pressing on regardless with a gamble which could cost them dearly?
The Get Away campaign remains committed to fighting for a genuinely consultative approach to town centre improvements – one that works with businesses and residents rather than steamrolling over them. As it stands, we still don’t know what we are getting.
A recent Get Away survey of almost 200 local businesses in Harrogate revealed that 91% opposed the scheme.
The Get Away campaign has also written to both Simon Lightwood MP, the minister for Local Transport at the Department for Transport, and Tom Gordon, the MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, to highlight its concerns.
The Stray Ferret has contacted North Yorkshire Council for comment.
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