Meeting Highways England

Attended two meetings at County Hall today.

One of them was between county councillors representing Copeland and Highways England to discuss various road issues, and particularly the Moresby Viaduct issue and the proposed Whitehaven Relief Road for the A595.

We kept up the pressure for the Moresby Viaduct issue to be addressed as soon as is consistent with getting a sound, sustainable solution which does not prejudice, or ideally should actually help, with the need for the Relief Road and decent highways access to new developments which Copeland Borough Council wants to build in the area.

With regard to the Relief Road, highways England expects to be able to publish a response to the consultation soon and no later than this summer. We should get confirmation in the Autumn statement whether the Relief Road has been included in "RIS2," the programme of major road works to be completed between 2022 and 2027.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Moresby Viaduct - I understood that Highways England had decided that unless the embankment deteriorates to such a degree that it is obviously unsafe no action will be taken, which is standard practise - do nothing until you have to.
11:38 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
You understand wrong.

They are working on a scheme to deal with it before it becomes unsafe.

Councillors are pressing them to make sure they don't leave it too late.
8:41 am
Chris Whiteside said…
Of course if you were willing to sign your name we could establish who told you what, when and where and clarify the situation.
8:44 am
Anonymous said…
Put the minutes of the meetings with Highways England in the public domain.
12:16 am
Chris Whiteside said…
It was an informal meeting. We did not take minutes.

I would expect however that there will be a report of the meeting to the next Highways Working Group, and the minutes of that meeting will be published with the papers for the Copeland Local Committee.

There is a degree of irony here - the person who put in the above anonymous, repeat, anonymous post asking for more transparency appears to have something of a lack of self-awareness.

My posts on social media are all under my real name, I am open about the offices I hold, the party I am a member of and the area I represent, I list on this blog all the major meetings I attend with links to the web pages where agendas, minutes and papers for those meetings can be found, and I report on many of the other meetings I go to such as the one described above.

And yet I'm being told to provide more transparency by someone who has not revealed whether he or she is one of my constituents or even lives in Cumbria, whether he or she holds or has stood for public office, what party he or she is a member of (if any) or even his or her name.

To repeat a piece of advice which has the very highest authority, take the plank out of your own eye before you offer to take a speck out of mine.
10:04 am
Chris Whiteside said…
The Chairman of the local committee, Councillor Keith Hitchen, has indeed now asked for a report on the meeting with Highways England to be given at the next Highways Working Group.

There will be formal minutes taken of that meeting which will come into the public domain when they are published with the agenda for the following meeting of the Copeland Local Committee of CCC.
10:07 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more