Shropshire Council’s cabinet member for highways has conceded that the Environment Agency (EA) did not state that the risk to Shrewsbury’s water supply from a new road would be ‘minimal’, as he had claimed.
In October the authority granted planning permission for its own plan to build the Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, despite concerns that the project could risk significant and ‘irreversible’ contamination to Severn Trent Water’s public water supply borehole for Shrewsbury and large parts of Shropshire.
In November, the council’s cabinet member for highways, Dan Morris, told Highways: ‘The Environment Agency has stated that any risk to the drinking water for the town would be minimal and we will be taking extraordinary steps to avoid this minimal risk.’
This was untrue. Not only did the EA repeatedly tell the council that it was seriously concerned about the risk of contamination, but it also wrote to it after the meeting to complain that its views had been misrepresented.
In particular, the EA told the council it did not agree with its approach of granting planning permission and seeking to mitigate risks through conditions, re-iterating that it did not believe that the existing environmental impact assessment (EIA) had been sufficient.
In a letter to the council in July, EA planning specialist Mike Davies wrote: ‘If you as Shropshire Council are content with the standard of the EIA submission/assessment and are minded to manage risk by conditions to be submitted later that is a matter for you to decide.
'We are not sufficiently reassured at this stage based on matters that need more detail and advise that the EIA needs to be robust, and risks/mitigation fully explored. We would not advise you to grant planning permission, subject to planning conditions, at this time.’
Highways asked the council to provide evidence that the EA had said that any risk to the drinking water for the town would be ‘minimal’, but it failed to do so.
However, Jamie Russell, a campaigner against the road, put down a question challenging the claim.
Although the EA directly opposed the council's approach, Cllr Morris replied that its views were taken into account in a review of responses from statutory consultees, after which the council made its own assessment that the risk could be ‘proactively managed to a minimal level’.
He added: ‘Even if the EA didn’t say those precise words, the implication from what was said by all parties is fully in accordance with the assessment of the situation’.
Mr Russell told Highways that it was ‘regrettable that, given the opportunity to correct the public record, Cllr Morris chose instead to double down on his misrepresentation of the Environment Agency's position’.
He said: ‘The Environment Agency has repeatedly made it quite clear that it believes there is a "significant risk" of contamination of Shrewsbury's drinking water supply as a result of the council's reckless decision to route the relief road through a SPZ1 groundwater source.
‘Any contamination, whether during construction of the road or its usage, has the potential to be irreversible. If the 70,000 people who live in Shrewsbury permanently lost access to their drinking water overnight, this would be catastrophic both in terms of public health and financial cost.’
