Help get us off the road to climate chaos and biodiversity breakdown

Rishi Sunak and his Government are not treating climate change and the nature crisis with the urgency required. Help us halt the construction of the £1billion A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet ‘improvement’, part of the supposedly cancelled (and much hated) Oxford-Cambridge Expressway. If they can get away with it here, they will do it all over the country. 

Stopping the A428 could help rewrite the rules for assessing all new road schemes and stop climate change and nature from being sidelined in future decisions.

And with the Government threatening to clamp down on legal challenges this could be one of the last opportunities to do this.

Fantasy economics

Rishi Sunak and his ministers keep mentioning speeding up road building to drive economic growth. Yet just like the mini-budget which has wreaked so much havoc in the economy, more roads will wreck our environment. They also make no sense economically. Many road schemes are low value for money or cost more than they will ever generate in benefits. The A428 is a very expensive and inefficient way of stimulating the economy.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

Climate Crisis - making it worse

The A428 is one of the biggest carbon emitting schemes in the Government’s roads programme (RIS2). It will drive up emissions across the region. It will make it harder for England’s Economic Heartland (the regional transport body) to meet its target of reaching net-zero by 2040 and reducing car traffic by 5% by 2030. It will also undermine local action to tackle climate change by using up a substantial proportion of local carbon budgets.

Clockwise from top left: Badger, Skylark, Otter, Hobby

Stop the attack on nature

There is huge concern about the Government’s proposals to speed up roadbuilding and sweep away environmental protections. Yet when this road was given the go-ahead, the current rules to protect the environment were effectively sidelined and ignored, resulting in a biodiversity net LOSS for hedgerows. If they are allowed to get away with this now, it will only embolden them to strip away even more protections in the future.

The road will destroy large lengths of hedgerow, while also affecting species such as otters, bats, barn owls, badgers, hobbies, red kites and skylarks.

Failure to improve cycling

The area this road will pass through is fairly flat and ideal for cycling. Nearby Cambridge has one of the highest levels of cycling in the UK. Yet National Highways has done the bare minimum for cycling that it can get away with. For example, it could have created a cycle superhighway, using the old road, to connect the growing communities of St Neots and Cambourne. This would help reduce traffic and emissions along this corridor and give people real choice in how they travel. Given current fuel costs, it would help those suffering from the cost of living crisis.

Undermining new rail links

This road would run parallel to a potential new East-West rail link. Its huge overcapacity will undermine the railway and make it less viable. The £1billion for this road could be spent in a better way to give people real choice of how they travel, instead of creating more jams.

No need for a road this big

The road is a new dual carriageway which will run close to the old A428. It represents a trebling of road capacity for much of its length, an expansion that is totally unwarranted and will increase traffic on the surrounding road network. 

Given that we need to reduce traffic to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough, it’s madness to be building roads which increase it.

The Government seems to believe that there is no contradiction between its Transport Decarbonisation Plan's recognition of the need to use our cars less and building more roads!

Who we are

We are the only national environmental organisation that is actively challenging damaging new roads on climate grounds. Despite our small size, we have previously taken legal action against the Government’s roads programme (RIS2) and successfully forced it to review its national roads policy.

How we’re doing this

Our solicitors are Leigh Day, who we’ve used for our previous legal challenges, and our barristers specialise in climate and nature cases. They have kindly agreed to work for us at a hugely discounted rate. Our initial target is to help cover the advice we’ve received to date, but we’re likely to need to raise £35,000, which might rise if we have to appeal. This is to cover lawyers’ costs, court fees and the risk of having to pay some of the DfT’s costs if we lose.

Any surplus funds will be used to cover our wider costs for this case or any potential appeal, and to support our roads campaigning including helping grassroots road campaigns.

What’s next?

We’ve filed our claim with the High Court. The Department for Transport will now file a defence and the court will then decide whether to grant us permission to proceed. If they grant permission, we will then have a full court hearing to discuss the merits of our case.

Thank you for reading this – please consider helping with a donation.