Campaigners against the proposed North West Relief Road (NWRR) have called for a ‘level playing field’ after the authority’s 11-member Northern Planning Committee approved the controversial proposal by six votes to five following a four-hour meeting on Tuesday.

The meeting heard the case for the road presented by council staff and consultants and from villagers living on the ‘rat runs’ north of the town. The damaging impacts of the road were presented by five members of the public, town councillors and organisations such as Better Shrewsbury Transport, Sustainable Transport Shropshire and representatives for Morris Leisure, owners of the Oxon Caravan Park.

However, the Environment Agency, the statutory authority responsible for protecting water supplies and the water environment, which has consistently expressed significant concerns about the risks that the road poses to the public water supply borehole at Shelton, has not responded to the Officer’s report and was not represented at the meeting.

Daniel Kawcynski, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham and Shropshire Council have been strongly critical of the Environment Agency’s position, but the agency has been defended by Rebecca Pow MP (Minister for Environmental Quality and Resilience) in a letter dated 12 Sept 2023.

In making its decision, the Northern Planning Committee needed to assess the balance between the claimed benefits and the damaging impacts of the scheme. To do this they needed to rely on the report by Planning Officer Mike Davies which recommended approval of the controversial scheme. That report has been strongly criticised in an open letter issued by local campaign group Better Shrewsbury Transport (BeST) to members of the committee in the lead up to the meeting.

Speaking on behalf of Better Shrewsbury Transport (BeST), Mike Streetly says:

“Shropshire Council is both the Applicant and the Local Planning Authority and needs to have a very strong internal wall to ensure that these are kept entirely separate. The fact that Mark Barrow, Executive Director for Place at Shropshire Council, has executive responsibility for delivery of the NWRR but is also ultimately in charge of the planning system gives a clue as to how strong that separation is in reality. The officer’s report is clearly biased towards the Applicant and this was obvious in the officer’s presentation on Tuesday when he repeatedly referred to ‘we’ instead of ‘the Applicant’.”

Streetly continues “This was clearly not a level playing field: there were many strong points put against the road in the meeting and these were brushed aside by council officers, consultants and Conservative councillors without being properly addressed. The only way in which these things will be properly weighed up is in a court or a Public Inquiry and we will be exploring both of those options in the coming days.”

Claims that there wasn’t a level playing field have also been put by Ludlow Liberal Democrat Councillor Andy Boddington. Writing in a blog post on Wednesday in which he discusses emails from Mark Barrow that have recently been exposed by a Freedom of Information request, he says:

“It is extraordinary that an officer [Mark Barrow] was planning to brief an MP on issuing supporting messages for a project that will be decided on the advice of officers in his directorate. By the phrase “our councillors”, Barrow seems to be suggesting that some of the committee councillors, undoubtedly all Conservatives, had made up their mind about the NWRR before the planning committee. These councillors were surely predetermined. The very idea of senior officers and the Shrewsbury & Atcham MP regarding some councillors as ‘their councillors’ makes me shudder.

“After the information in the freedom of information request and the widely reported intervention by the Chief Monitoring Officer, I struggle to reach any other conclusion than Shropshire Council’s actions in recent weeks look like it was attempting to subvert the independence of the planning committee and councillors. That is unacceptable.”

Summarising the current position, Mike Streetly says:

“We need to be absolutely clear what happened on Tuesday was not approval of the scheme, as has subsequently been claimed by Shropshire Council, but rather a decision to move into a process of trying to agree planning conditions and legal agreements with landowners. The actual decision will be taken by the committee once those are ready and that will take weeks or potentially months.”