HS2 denied permission for chamber in Aylesbury Vale

Buckinghamshire Council has turned down High Speed Two Limited’s application to build a spring chamber in Wendover.

On Wednesday, councillors voted with ‘heavy hearts’ by eight to one to refuse permission – against officers’ recommendations – after the plans were called into the strategic sites committee.

The underground chamber is designed to mitigate the impact of HS2 works on groundwater flows in the area.

Residents were concerned by the large volume of proposed construction traffic for the works including down the narrow Dobbins Lane.

HS2 then scaled back the volume of traffic and the hours HGVs would operate.

But councillors also opposed HS2’s planned upgrades and extension of a farmer’s access track and used the ‘harm’ this would cause as their basis of their refusal.

Conservative Cllr Patrick Fealey said: “Yet we have got this hugely overengineered proposal to put the track in and build the track up.”

Fellow Tory Cllr Ashley Bond said the proposed works were effectively ‘a hole with a drain’, which could be ‘done with a tractor’, while his Tory colleague Cllr Frank Mahon said HS2 had ‘once again failed to listen to residents’.

After the meeting, Liberal Democrat candidate for Wendover, Halton and Stoke Mandeville Seb Berry told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “This is a really great result for Wendover residents, but this proposal should never have reached the formal planning application stage.”