Stacked on a table in the draughty village library in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, amid tomes on medieval history, African geography and Snowy Fun with Peppa Pig, is a pile of documents nearly 2ft high. They had arrived that morning, lugged off a lorry by a burly delivery man, along with a USB stick containing 2,000 megabytes of extra files. Villagers, huddled around the table with highlighters, notepads and furrowed brows, have been frantically poring over it all ever since.
“What is that supposed to be?” says a frowning Councillor Nick Rose, folding his arms. “There isn’t a key on any of the maps.” He gestures to a grey blob next to a slightly darker grey blob, through which a grey dotted line runs.
“I think that’s meant to be a tunnel,” proclaims Marilyn Fletcher, leaning over the vast sea of paper. “Or is it a fence? We’re really going to have to learn how to read this.”
They have until January 24 to do just that – not only getting to grips with the reams of documents in front of them, but formulating challenges to what they propose. For this is the legislation setting out the Government’s plans for HS2, its high-speed rail line between London and Birmingham. When it went before Parliament on Monday, it was declared the biggest Bill in the institution’s history, with supporting material stretching to 49,814 pages and weighing up to a ton – the equivalent of a small car.
Campaigners have branded it “the worst Christmas present ever”, claiming it is an attempt by the Government and HS2 Ltd, the agency developing the project, to prevent activists from finding the time or manpower to object to its plans. At the Woodland Trust, which has compared the task to reading 40 copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, they’ve been forced to hire a new staff member to get through the 22 million words contained in the Bill and its accompanying environmental statement.
Mercifully, communities that will be affected by HS2 don’t have to wade through the whole lot: only locally relevant documents are being sent in hard copy to 250 libraries, village halls and parish offices from Oxfordshire to Yorkshire. The full Bill is available online. Yet in Great Missenden, where “No 2 HS2” and “Save the Chilterns” placards are tacked to every lamp post, this still means 16 books of around 200 pages each, bulging with complex maps, drawings and aerial photographs.
“I cannot believe there’s so much,” gasps Emma Crane, a mother-of-two from nearby South Heath. “It shows how little they think of us. The process is supposed to be transparent and open, but they can’t seriously expect us to plough through all this.”
Shirley Judges, who has lived in the village for nearly 40 years, worries that the area will be “trashed” when HS2 comes to town. “This is a peaceful, rural place,” she says. “The fields have been here for centuries; the roads are ancient holloways [sunken country lanes]. Building a train track through them is a violation of the Chilterns’ natural beauty.”
The size of the crowd gathered round this little library table, almost buckling under the weight of paper, is testament to the strength of feeling in this area. The problem, they say, is not only that the Bill is so lengthy, but much of it is difficult to understand.
“The message seems to be that we don’t matter,” says Dr Simon Hook, a local campaigner, peering through his reading glasses at a “veritable photomontage” of how the village might look, post-HS2, in 2041. There is an orange patch next to Sheepcotts Cottage, a thick black line through No Man’s Wood and a jagged cross along Chalk Lane. “It’s nonsense before you even start.”
The Department for Transport staunchly rejects criticisms of the legislation, insisting that the public has already had more than a year’s worth of consultation on its plans. “The size of the environmental statement demonstrates just how thorough we have been and the huge amount of work that has gone into it,” a spokesman insists. “It is fully searchable online, enabling people to review the section relevant to them.”
But opponents say this misses the point. “Of course people are going to want to read more than just the bits that apply directly to them,” says Ralph Smith, a barrister for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). “To get the full picture, you’ve got to have an overview of the whole thing.” The CPRE has warned that the consultation’s short timescale (now down to 57 days) may breach the UN’s Aarhus Convention, which requires there be sufficient time for the public to participate in environmental decision-making – and it plans to lodge a complaint on this basis.
Others say that simply making the Bill available online doesn’t mean it is accessible. “Some of the document files we are expected to read are over 860 megabytes,” complains Steve Rodrick, chief officer of the Chilterns Conservation Board. “That is the entire hard drive memory for an older computer. Even for those with decent broadband, that would take several hours to download.”
Anyone wanting hard copies of their own can order them – but at a cost. The price list, ranging from £7.30 for a noise report to £571 for an area plan, itself numbers 16 pages.
Down the road, in his hilltop house overlooking the market town of Wendover, Roger Waller is dreading the arrival of his local copy of the Bill. “It’s going to take up eight metres of shelving in the library,” he explains. “It’s a logistical nightmare. How do you process it when it’s so big you couldn’t even lift it?”
Elsewhere, others are also growing more worried by the day. In Boddington, south Northamptonshire, Peter Deeley, chairman of the local action group, describes the legislation as “ludicrous”. “It will take a person 16.6 hours per day, without any breaks, 55 days to read the whole thing,” he says.
The leafy kitchen garden outside Anthony Bianco’s 14th-century house in Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, is also under threat from HS2. The local parish clerk is, he says, “filled with horror at the thought of people turning up at her door to read the Bill. It’s a voluntary body, only open to limited hours – and doesn’t have access to eight shelves’ worth of paper.”
A few miles away, in Kenilworth, Joe Rukin despairs that reading the bill is “simply too big a task. For my area alone, there are 1,500-odd pages to read: 357 for every mile of train track.”
It’s enough to put most people off. But in Great Missenden, they reckon that’s the Government’s plan; and they refuse to be deterred. Their little team is bristling with expertise – an engineer, a biological researcher, a chartered accountant – and the next step is drawing up a reading rota over the festive period, so they can scour the Bill and its environmental statement for points to challenge.
“The next couple of weeks are going to be mayhem,” admits Marilyn Fletcher, who has lived round the corner from the library for nearly 20 years. “My two children are coming home for the holidays and it really puts the pressure on. I don’t want to spend all my time here, but what choice do we have?”
It’s getting dark outside and, as I leave, she’s still leafing through pages of maps, occasionally glancing up in dread at the towering stack of documents still to go. “It’s not much fun,” she says with a shrug, “and it’s certainly not how I imagined I’d be spending my Christmas.”
