East West Rail: community involvement 'extremely important' - but CEO says it can't spend 'endless amounts of money' on public events

East West Rail’s chief executive has said community involvement is “extremely important” but it can’t spend “endless amounts of money” holding events.

Beth West, East West Rail’s chief executive officer, was speaking in Westminster this morning (March 6) at the Transport Committee.

The committee was scrutinising the East West Rail project as part of its strategic transport objectives inquiry.

Committee member, Jack Brereton, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, said the National Audit Office (NAO) investigation into the East West Rail project found that communication with communities was “not good enough”.

“What have you done to improve that communication?” he asked Ms West.

Ms West replied: “This is something that is extremely important. To give you an example of what we’ve been doing, we’ve set up 15 local representative groups across the region. We meet on a regular basis, so we’ve had over 90 meetings with [the representative groups] last year.

“After we had our route update announcement we had 21 drop in events across the route, they were attended by 2,300 people. So that was an opportunity for people to come in and ask us questions and have a greater understanding of the route.

“We have to balance though our budget, we can’t spend endless amounts of money in terms of having these events so we are trying to strike a balance [in] how we are engaging with the community, which is very, very, important.

“And I think what’s most important is we are listening to what those responses are,” she said.

Ms West added that the East West Rail statutory consultation this summer will include community events as well.

“Again, we will be recording responses from the public, we will be receiving formal consultation responses from the public,” she said.

“And then we will have our second planned statutory consultation next year which again is another opportunity [to respond]. So [there’ll be] two opportunities for the public to respond through the consultation process,” she said.

Committee chair, Iain Stewart, the Conservative MP for Milton Keynes South, asked: “The consultation that’s coming up, are the other route options that have been put forward by the mayor of Bedford and others still under consideration, or has a decision been made purely on the preferred route?”

Ms West said: “So we looked at the routes that Bedford has looked at as part of the recommendation we made for the route update announcement that was given last year in May. And we looked very thoroughly at those different options.

“We will of course look at the report that Bedford Borough Council has undertaken. We have looked at that, and in our first review we have seen that this is very much like the routes that we have analysed thus far. But of course, we will look at that in more detail to make sure that there is no new information that we haven’t already looked at.

“But the statutory consultation that we are going forward with in June will be based on the route update that we provided last May.”