THE SOUTH WEST relief road opened on Saturday 8th October 2005 after eighteen weeks of enforced closure by the developers, Allison Homes. Their dispute with the highways authority, Lincolnshire County Council, was finally settled and the new 1½-mile stretch of carriageway was soon taking through traffic away from the town centre as it should have been for the previous five months although there will be no inquiry into the delay.

An official opening had been planned and there was talk of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a brass band, a Continental market and a running race to mark the event but these suggestions were eventually scrapped for fear of a boycott by the public and local councillors as a mark of protest over the delay in bringing the new road into use.

Such ceremonial was seen by some as an attempt by Allison Homes, part of the Kier Group, to appease the public who were incensed by the continued closure while traffic piled up in the town centre streets and could even have been prompted by a tragic death in Abbey Road on Monday 12th September 2005 when a fifteen-year-old schoolboy cyclist was killed after being in collision with a tipper lorry. The fatality may have had no connection whatsoever with the relief road but it highlighted the dangers from heavy vehicles using town centre streets, creating fumes, dirt and noise pollution, and a major safety hazard to pedestrians and others who are constantly at risk from passing vehicles.

The dangers on this road were the subject of complaint as early as 1909 but nothing was done then or in subsequent years, and we have now reached a situation where there is insufficient public money to finance such a project because the cost would be prohibitive.

The problem however will not go away. Twenty years ago a bypass was included in Lincolnshire County Council's forward planning but the scheme was abandoned on 19th September 1983 mainly on the grounds that demand was higher elsewhere in the county and that in any case the funding was not available, such a scheme being likely to have cost then as much as £7 million, a figure that escalates as the years progress.

The county council has since acknowledged that Bourne experiences "some congestion" during the morning and evening peak periods and that an appropriately located bypass would relieve it but although design work for such a project has been undertaken, it has not proceeded. The authority's Lincolnshire Transport Plan covering the five-year period from April 2006 is due to be submitted to the government this summer but is unlikely to include a bypass for Bourne, there once again being other more important county road projects in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, the opportunity for a more modest scheme but one no less welcome, a south west relief road, came with the granting of planning permission for the Elsea Park estate which will bring 2,000 new homes to the south of the town over the next decade. The new road was included as part of the planning gain when permission for the estate to go ahead was given in November 1999 by South Kesteven District Council, the cost being fully funded by the developer.

Work began on building the road at a cost of £4 million in 2002 and it will eventually be designated the B1193. By October, almost 770 yards had been completed west of the new roundabout on the A15 south of Elsea Park but there was a hitch and the cause was money. Contractors withdrew as the developers, Allison Homes, negotiated new terms of payment with South Kesteven District Council. The next few months brought a series of stop-start announcements as the negotiations proceeded while the completed stretch of road, already signed and white-lined, stood gated and idle.

The new road during the summer of 2003, gated and unused

In February 2003 the problem was solved when SKDC approved a ten-year £700,000 loan to Allison Homes to cover interest charges on the capital needed to finish the job although it was another 18 months before the legalities of the contract were completed and work was resumed. Contractors were finally back on site in August 2004 with the promise that the new road would be finished early the following year.

During the summer of 2004, The Local newspaper was compiling its own statistics to support the need for a new road system to relieve congestion around the town centre and the results were published on Friday 9th July 2004. Their figures indicated that 43 per cent of the vehicles coming into Bourne along West Street turned south towards Peterborough and 36 per cent passing in the opposite direction turned into West Street. “This implies that the relief road would bring a reduction of at least one third of town centre traffic, welcome news for Bourne’s beleaguered streets”, said their report.

Work continued on the relief road and by October, contractors had started on the roundabout for the connection to the A151 west of Bourne, a few hundred yards south of Stamford Hill. The end was finally in sight.

The opening was announced for February, then March, then April, then May, but none of the targets materialised. Senior highways staff at LCC could give no date with any certainty, nor could officers at SKDC.

In late May, it transpired that a fresh argument had begun, this time with Lincolnshire County Council about the funding by Allison Homes of the next stage of the planning gain, a primary school to provide places for children moving into the estate to help ease classroom space elsewhere in the town.

Concrete obstructions closed the road to all traffic for almost five months while barriers, bollards and warning signs were erected at each end, both south and west.
The relief road for Bourne officially opened on Saturday 8th October 2005 after eighteen weeks of dispute between the developers and Lincolnshire County Council but after spotting a temporary gap in the barriers a few days before I became the first private motorist to drive along the new 1½-mile stretch of carriageway.

Work however continued on the road which was completed in early June, the white lines painted, the signs in place, but the carriageway sealed was off at both ends as discussions continued. The impasse that had now been reached was summed up by our local newspapers on Friday 17th June. The Stamford Mercury reported Martin Chandler, technical director of Allison Homes, as saying: “The road itself is ready” while The Local quoted the county council’s highways manager Brian Thompson as saying: “All we need do is move the bollards and the road could open in ten minutes.”

But it stayed shut and the continued closure soon became the subject of ridicule by the media and has even attracted the notice of regional television news programmes, drawing attention to the situation which was regarded by many as ineptitude at high level. It was also an unfortunate situation for the image of Bourne and it did little for the reputation of Spalding-based house builders Allison Homes while Lincolnshire County Council, the highways authority, was seen to be totally ineffectual.

County councillor Philip Dilks (Deeping St James) told the Stamford Mercury on July 8th: “This is creating unwanted flak for the decision makers at County Hall. The council has become a laughing stock for having a brand new bypass that motorists are being forced to bypass.”

The county council did seem to be the architect of its own misfortune because the Mercury also revealed that the developers were given a veto on the opening of the road and this encouraged them to hold the authority to ransom until discussions on another matter, namely the primary school, were satisfactorily resolved. The farcical nature of the stalemate was effectively described by Paul Andrews, county education spokesman, who said: “The developers have linked the issue of the school with the opening of the road which was never the case. These were two separate agreements. A document could be signed immediately to get the road open but it remains on the table until this situation is sorted out.”

On July 15th, the Stamford Mercury again indicated just how ineffective our local representatives were by quoting county councillor William Webb (Holbeach Rural) who also holds the highways portfolio on the authority. He told the newspaper that discussions had been taking place behind closed doors and added: “I know nothing about this situation and cannot add anything to the debate.”

Councillor Webb is one of 77 elected members on the county council, among them our own representatives, Ian Croft (Bourne Castle) and Mark Horn (Bourne Abbey), who also remain silent on the issue, as did the 56 members of South Kesteven District Council (six of them from Bourne, including the chairman and the leader) which originally negotiated the Section 106 agreement, the legal contract formalising the responsibilities of the developers for providing the road, a planning gain in return for permission to build the controversial 2,000 home Elsea Park estate.

Our two main local newspapers were in a campaigning mood when they appeared on Friday 22nd July, both carrying urgent pleas on their front pages to Allison Homes and Lincolnshire County Council to shelve their differences in the cause of the public good and open the carriageway immediately. “Enough is enough”, wrote editor Lisa Bruen in The Local. “That is the message from the people of Bourne whose new relief road lies dormant while traffic plagues the town."

The newspaper also reported condemnation of the situation from members attending Bourne Town Council’s monthly meeting the previous Tuesday when the mayor, Councillor Judy Smith told colleagues: “We have been treated shabbily and I am disgusted. The road is a total waste of money if it is not being used.” Councillor Shirley Cliffe added her voice to the criticism. “This is absolutely ridiculous”, she said. “We are the laughing stock of South Lincolnshire.” But, added the newspaper, “Allison Homes still refuse to comment on the situation.”

There was similar outrage in the Stamford Mercury which carried a front page editorial under the headline “Open our road”. “It is the road to nowhere”, said the report. “The long-awaited relief road is finished but much to the frustration of residents, they can’t yet get on it.” The newspaper then made a bid for sanity to prevail. “We are calling on council officials and Allison Homes to sort out this mess and get this much-needed road open now.”

Both newspapers urged readers to complain directly to the Chief Executive of Lincolnshire County Council and the Mercury also printed a form making it easier for them to do so and on July 29th, Martin Hill, leader of Lincolnshire County Council, wrote to the Stamford Mercury in an attempt the defuse criticism of his authority. “It is very frustrating from our position, having made money available with the district council to enable the road to be built early, seeing barriers put up to prevent its use", he wrote. "Unfortunately, we have no powers to force the road to be opened until the developers choose to hand the road over and until then it remains their property.”

There were suggestions in various quarters that some physical action might be taken by an impatient public during the weekend of Saturday/Sunday 30th/31st July but nothing happened, no doubt because the obstructions appeared to be impregnable and a close examination indicated that they could only be moved by specialised heavy lifting equipment. The closure was being effected at the Stamford Road or west end by six interlocking concrete blocks, each about eight feet long, three feet high and eighteen inches thick, probably weighing two tonnes and far too heavy for a conventional fork-lift truck. In front of this barrier were two six-foot sections of concrete pipe more usually used for sewers or storm drains, and a three-foot length upright, which was too heavy for anyone to shift. There was also an interlocking wire mesh fence and a few traffic cones. At the other end, in South Road, there were six similar concrete blocks, but one was shifted aside with a concrete drain section in its place and a similar wire fence. The barriers were far too substantial for even the county council to shift without the developer's assistance and this may have indicated a degree of pre-meditation. Any direct action by the people of the town therefore was totally out of the question.

A remarkable initiative to open the road was suggested by the town’s M P, Quentin Davies, in an interview with the Stamford Mercury published on August 5th when he told the newspaper that drastic action was needed to get traffic moving and that the road should be forcibly seized for the benefit of the public. Mr Davies claimed that a compulsory purchase order could be made by the county council which could then take it over for the nominal sum of £1 within a matter of days and so end the current absurdity which was denying traffic the use of a much needed amenity. He added: “If Martians came from outer space and saw the human race had poured so much of its time and resources into building a road they then denied themselves the use of, they would think we were all completely mad. If it is not open by the end of August, I will make increasingly aggressive moves to put an end to this fiasco.”

On the same day, The Local suggested that a serious accident in the town centre the previous week that brought traffic to a standstill could have been avoided. Long queues of waiting vehicles formed in all directions when a JCB and two cars were in collision at the traffic lights and town councillor Mrs Shirley Cliffe told the newspaper: “If the new road had been in use the traffic would not have been so bad. It is ridiculous that it has not been opened and the accident shows why we need it.”

Allison Homes finally broke its silence on Friday 12th August by issuing a Press statement "in response to ambiguous press coverage to clarify its position." The statement read:

Allison Homes took the initiative to construct the road ahead of the intended programme date of 2011 for the benefit of the local community. The road is now complete - six years ahead of schedule – fully funded by Allison. Because this programme has been brought forward, issues relating to the provision of playing fields must be resolved with the County Council before the road can open. Variations to resolve these issues have been agreed in principle with the district council but until such time as the county council responds formally, no progress can be made. Allison Homes has invested £4m in the construction of this road and is providing a raft of other facilities at Elsea Park to benefit the local community. Managing director Mick O’Farrell commented: “Our reason for bringing the programme forward was to make the road available as soon as we possibly could and the ongoing situation since March 2004 has been as frustrating for us as it has for the potential users of the road. Following discussions with the council we are now hopeful that this will be brought to a speedy conclusion."

The statement gave no indication when this might happen. In fact, the Press release was considered to be a most inept example of public relations because the local newspapers had already been published and the weekend was looming and so its contents were not widely exposed until the following week and even then, it told the public nothing they did not know already.

The empty road eventually attracted vandals and signs of wilful damage became evident at several points along its length at the beginning of September. Fires were lit, traffic installations burned down, glass shattered across the carriage with assorted litter, wire fences upturned and thrown into nearby dykes along with drain covers. A yob element congregated there regularly while the detritus of frequent unruly gatherings around the area was evidence of their habits and it took an extra two weeks to remedy the damage before the road could be opened.

The rights and wrongs of the dispute have never been fully explained and there are now calls for an inquiry or, failing that, a full and detailed explanation from Lincolnshire County Council.

REVISED 28th OCTOBER 2005

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