The Grenofen Gateway

My election address 2003 An offensive Lib Dem leaflet (2003) Home page 2003 Election Site Map
The Lib Dem Group at WDBC wholly failed to support my attempts to save Bedford Square and the Lib Dem majority of County Councillors ensured (sadly, I have to admit, with the support of just one of the WDBC Conservatives, who, entirely properly, supports a number of the "green" issues that Lib Dems like to claim for their own when it suits them) that the Partnership Committee let the Grenofen Gateway decision happen in the first place and have resisted all my efforts to get it removed ever since. No matter how much certain Lib Dem councillors have tried to lay those issues off onto the Conservatives, it just wasn't so.
The best that Lib Dem County Councillor Roy Connelly has achieved over Grenofen was to have the layout "tweaked" at a critical point in my campaign to get it removed; the actual effect of that, as he very well knew, was to delay for 3 months my motion to Partnership Committee that had a very good chance of getting the monstrosity removed and the road restored to two-way working. There is little chance of that happening now, because DCC has disbanded the Partnership Committees.

During his County Council election campaign in 2001, Lib Dem candidate Roy Connelly made quite a lot of headway with his allegation that the Grenofen Gateway had been "a Conservative Scheme". As is usual with Lib Dem half-truths, there was just enough truth in it to make it difficult to deal with. Just look at the length of this document.
Roy may well have won the seat because of that misleading propaganda. The reality is that it was a Highways Officer's scheme, was driven through by county councillors when there was a Lib Dem majority at DCC and has only ever been supported by a single Conservative (West Devon) councillor, acting non-politically on a Ward issue without the support of his group.

Here's the whole sorry story

The truth was that two Borough and two County Councillors were on a working group, set up by the WDBC/DCC Partnership Committee to look at issues in the Whitchurch Road. Richard Phillips (Con) and I (Ind) were the two WDBCllrs, Roy Cook and Gretta Madigan (both LibDem) were the County Cllrs.
The original "problem" was the popular allegation of excessive traffic speeds and high proportion of HGV traffic near the Whitchurch Primary School. Two surveys by DCC Highways officers had found that the public allegations were unfounded on both counts: (from memory) median speeds were around 31-32 mph and HGV traffic was less than 1% of the total. Nonetheless, a sustained campaign of "public" letter writing, organised at least in part by the (since departed) Headmaster and governors of Whitchurch Primary School, pressured the Partnership Committee into instructing its officers, contrary to their recommendations, to concoct a scheme to "address" the non-existant "problem", now labelled a "problem of perception".

As a side-issue, the working group was also to examine the junction of Pixon Lane with the A386 at West Bridge, because I had expressed some reservations about the appropriateness of putting a mini-roundabout there. I mention this only because I was subsequently convinced by the highways officers' reasoning that it was the optimum solution for that junction.

The Whitchurch Road scheme to address the "problem of perception" was presented by the lead officer to a meeting from which the two County Councillors were absent. Only Cllr Phillips and I were there. The scheme had three elements:

I saw at once that the Grenofen Gateway was an irrelevant and meddlesome over-reaction and one, moreover, that was likely to cause more problems than it solved. Indeed, as DCC's own officers had shown and reported to committee, there was never a problem in the first place. It was all in the mind.

I reacted accordingly: I reluctantly conceded that, as the Partnership Committee had decided that the "problem of perception" warranted spending money on functionally unnecessary works, the flashing lights at the school would show the noisy claque demanding that "something be done" that their imaginary concerns had had some attention. Furthermore, the urban gateway at Abbey Bridge would be largely cosmetic, and so not create significant additional congestion elsewhere; that was acceptable. I could not swallow the Grenofen Gateway proposal: it was, and remains:

In the outturn, I was absolutely right. Cllr Richard Phillips did not agree with me. As neither Cllr Roy Cook nor Cllr Mrs Gretta Madigan were present, we could only agree as to the lights and the urban gateway. As to the rural gateway proposed for Grenofen, no agreed recommendation could go forward from the working group to the Partnerhip Committee. The lead officer was therefore to sound out the two county councillors by telephone and seek members' views at committee about the Grenofen element.

From my knowledge of the personalities, I guessed that the two county councillors would also be split on the issue. Gretta Madigan would probably like the scheme, Roy Cook probably wouldn't. So I telephoned Roy. When we spoke, he told me that he didn't like the sound of it and couldn't see how it would help. Sadly, when it came to committee (of which I was not a member at that time), he had changed his mind. I can only speculate about why: I suspect that he had been "leaned on" by his Lib Dem colleagues at County, where the LD group had a majority at that time.

That's the whole story of how the Ghastly Gateway came to pass. It was concocted (quite properly) by a County Highways officer in response to political pressure exerted on the authorizing committee. It was supported by a single Conservative West Devon member, whose election material in 1999 included (much to his credit, in my view) the phrase "Not your usual Tory, more Green, really", but driven through the Partnership Committee by the Lib Dem majority of the county councillors. It actually was never a party issue.
So for Roy Connelly to claim, during his election campaign, that the Grenofen Gateway was a Conservative scheme is stretching the truth to the limit.

In fairness, and lest I be accused of exploiting the issue with half-truths similar to those I am accusing the Lib Dem machine of, I must also tell you that two Lib Dem Borough Councillors, Noel Cartwright and Nick Waterhouse, have supported my fight against the Grenofen Gateway. Noel supported me right from the start. Nick and I subsequently drafted jointly a motion for WDBC, which he seconded, calling on the Partnership Committee to restore two-way working at Grenofen, worded in such a way that he could encourage his LD Group to support it. The motion passed at WDBC with only 3 against (2 LD and 1 Con). It was never a formal party political issue at WDBC.

The Moral of the Story ...

is that, when you read election literature that claims credit for achievements or lays blame for mistakes on a party political basis in local elections, beware: it is most unlikely that you are being told the whole truth. The more strident the claim, the more likely it is to have been grossly exaggerated.

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My election address 2003 An offensive Lib Dem leaflet (2003) Home page 2003 Election Site Map
Published as an Internet document by R W Mathew, Willowby, Down Road, Tavistock, Devon


4 May 2003