Kay Jordan's evidence against Crossrail and the Crossrail hole agenda -inviting controlling clique o Tower Hamlets Council over the relevant years

Kay Jordan's evidence against Crossrail and the Crossrail hole agenda -inviting controlling clique o Tower Hamlets Council over the relevant years


11324. MS JORDAN:

It has ticked all the boxes. I want to specifically to talk about round one consultation. This demonstrates what should be done in round one.

I wish to show to you we were deliberately excluded from round one consultation I think simply because, had we done that, we would have been able to say this is not the route of the line. Had we been able to say this is not the route of the line, then they really have not considered our evidence.

Now we are at the 11th hour when we are still told by the Promoters it is impossible, but I wish to show you that I believe that we were deliberately excluded from that process because this is the process that they followed and it is quite true that you will see that they were supposed to talk to people.

In fact in a Cabinet paper, my paper 14, a report to Tower Hamlets Council in October 2002, the local authority were urging CLRL to immediately begin communicating the benefits of Crossrail to local residents and businesses in advance of their local public consultation on detailed impacts, something that never happened, or even the local authority, which I find very surprising, were asking in 2002.

In 2003, they were writing to a resident of old St Patrick's school, who was on the edge of what was originally the worksite of round one, telling him in fact that they were waiting to go out on public consultation but assuring him it would be a much smaller scale of work.

They would be driving in both directions from a site in Hanbury Street, the routes would be used to deliver boxes and lines and at the completion of the works, we will probably have a local route for railway, communications and power cables and telling us that ground conditions for the construction of tunnels east of Hanbury were going to be very difficult. All of this they knew since July 2003, and yet SSBA, you might say, had not an inkling of this until we ran into a neighbour in January 2004. Nobody knew anything about it.
In September 2003 they were talking to people in the east of the borough about route alignments and where the portal would be and quite rightly, just as it said in the consultation document of what they were surely doing, they were negotiating and talking.
I believe I heard earlier on they moved that portal to a better place having discussed it with local people. Yet we were going to have the only and the largest worksite in our midst and not one word was asked from our community. In fact, when the Department for Transport wrote back to the letters in which I said we wanted to extend the period, they wrote back and said that they understood our organisation was previously not known to Crossrail, the Promoters, but that we would now be on a database and informed of future things.
It is true that we were informed of future things. I want to say to them and exactly what I told Mr Stark when I wrote to him, I found it difficult to believe we were not known because on 7 October, less than a week before, in fact, two weeks before the consultation process that they so‑called "took out", I had the land registry people coming to my office asking for details of which properties we owned.
[To be continued]