HRE GROUP PRESS RELEASE: Thursday 25th March 2024
National Highways (NH) has submitted a retrospective planning application after council officers found it had breached permitted development rights to infill a bridge dating from the 1840s.
The skewed masonry arch on Rudgate near Tadcaster was designed by pioneering railway engineer John Cass Birkinshaw for the Church Fenton to Harrogate line, opening in 1847. But the state-owned roads company – which manages 3,100 disused railway bridges, viaducts and tunnels on the Department for Transport’s behalf – buried the structure in hundreds of tonnes of stone and concrete as part of a programme to reduce liabilities.
In a letter to the now-defunct Selby District Council on 6 October 2020, National Highways claimed that Rudgate bridge “represents an ongoing and increasing risk to public safety” and would be infilled under rights known as Class Q, “to prevent an emergency arising”. A contractor arrived on site five months later, with the scheme costing £133K.
By default, Class Q works must be removed within 12 months of their start date and NH’s failure to obtain consent for permanent retention prompted the Council to take enforcement action.
In its Planning Statement, National Highways claims that the bridge was in “poor” condition, but formal engineering reports record it as being “fair”. When it was last inspected two years prior to infilling, the examiner’s only recommendation was to repair a nearby fence.
NH’s engineer decided that “Infilling [was] preferable to repairs” despite the bridge being conservatively assessed to have capacity for 32-tonne vehicles. The lane passing over it is narrow and lightly trafficked, with HGVs discouraged from using it by a sign prohibiting vehicles weighing over 3 tons unladen. The assessment involved a method that is no longer permitted for heavily-skewed arch bridges and a specialist engineer believes that greater capacity would have been shown by more precise calculations.
It has emerged that, to gain access to the site, National Highways’ contractor felled and pruned trees within an area protected by a Tree Preservation Order without authority. The infilling took place in designated Green Belt where, according to the National Planning Policy Framework, development “should not be approved except in very special circumstances”.
“This is what happens when an organisation focused only on its own narrow interests is allowed to act without appropriate scrutiny”, says Graeme Bickerdike, a member of The HRE Group which campaigns to recognise the heritage, ecology and sustainable transport value of legacy railway structures.
“Rudgate was a historic and aesthetically attractive bridge, designed by an engineer who was at the forefront of the railway revolution in the 1840s – supposedly the first articled pupil of Robert Stephenson, with whom he worked on several Yorkshire railways. But National Highways shows no respect for such endeavours. It forced through this liability reduction scheme by misapplying emergency permitted development rights and damaged protected trees in doing so.
“Now, as it seeks approval for its actions, the company is misrepresenting its own engineering evidence. The bridge presented low levels of risk and should have been subject to sympathetic repairs as part of NH’s routine maintenance programme. We cannot keep losing historic assets to the destructive culture of some public bodies.”
Comments on the planning application have to be received by 2 April 2024. They can be submitted through North Yorkshire Council’s planning portal, searching for reference ZG2024/0183/FUL.
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