The second “Stakeholders’ Forum” was held on Monday evening. Some old ground was covered, but a few new matters emerged which I’ve summarised here:

• It was confirmed that there will be temporary car parking for affected residents at the JR and Churchill hospitals. Temporary visitors’ permits will also be issued on request to any resident while access to their property is blocked. You can already apply for these. Old Road residents who park in Stapleton Road will be able to use the Churchill car park.
• Vital Energi are still taking legal advice over the City’s requirement for the street works to have planning permission. The suspension of work is voluntary on their part. They met with City planners as early as August 2013, when they say that Michael Crofton-Briggs, then Head of City Development and the City’s chief planning officer but now retired, told them they needed permission for the above-ground works within the hospital sites, but not for the roadworks.
• Highfield Residents will be pressing for a full traffic management plan covering the relevant road closures. They want to see traffic calming measures in Lime Walk, which will take the brunt of the diverted traffic, and a full assessment of the impact on cyclists and people on foot as well as motor vehicles, with measures to mitigate the disruption and increased risk to all road users. Vital said they will raise this with the County, but residents and councillors are expecting to include it in their representations under the planning appplication.
• There was support for the idea of producing a letter to staff and patients at the Churchill telling them about the road closures and asking them to consider alternative ways of getting to the hospital rather than driving.
• A sub-group to deal specifically with access issues in Latimer Road as the work progresses will be set up.
• The detailed engineering drawings showing the roadworks and how access problems will be dealt with will be included as part of the “letter drop” to all affected properties.

You can read the Trust’s notes of the meeting here.

The planning application for the pipeline roadworks (ref 16/00101/FUL) went online on Wednesday. The deadline for submitting comments is 12 February. As I write, none have been posted.

Work on the rest of the project continues. Here the Trust reports on the installation of some of the new equipment to replace the old boilers at the JR.

Another planning application, this time for a temporary car park in the JR, has been submitted but is not yet online.

I have added a link to Vital’s civil engineering conractors CPC Civils to the Energy Project links page.

After last week’s burst of activity and then non-activity, this week has been quieter as action shifted away from the streets and into the offices.

On Monday 11 January the planning application was received by the City’s planning department. It will be checked and then put on the Council’s website, at which point it will be open for public consultation over a three week period. As I write, the application is not yet available.

On Wednesday 13th the Hospital Trust’s Board met and their Chair, Dame Fiona Caldicott, gave an apology on behalf of the Trust for the Trust’s failure to communicate with local people. Oxford Mail reporter Joe Gammie was at the meeting and wrote

OUH chairman Dame Fiona Caldicott admitted the trust should have listened and spoken to neighbours earlier about the Hospital Energy Project. She told a meeting of the board of directors yesterday that it had not been handled well.

Dame Fiona added: “We are aware of the huge difficulty and consternation experienced by residents about our energy project. This has not been handled as well as we could have done given we didn’t start to address the concerns of the residents early enough. I want to make an apology to the residents from the board and to assure them we will liaise as much as we can.”

The full article is here. Dame Fiona’s words don’t seem to have been added to the Trust’s website yet.

On Thursday 14th Vital Energi’s Project Development Director issued a statement. The full text is on the LibDem Councillors’ website. He says at one point

“District heating is an emerging technology and has differing requirements from utilities and statutory undertakers which is not well understood in relation to these applications to Heat Networks; planning permission requirements are not always evident.”

Meanwhile the work goes on within the JR grounds.

There’s been so much happening with the Heatpipe Project this week it’s hard to keep up. I can’t claim to have the full story, but here’s what I do know so far.

Work was due to start on All Saints’ Road on Monday 4 January, but apart from some signs and cones appearing nothing happened.

By Tuesday, fencing had been erected and digging begun.

However, the same day the City’s newly-appointed Head of Planning & Regulatory Services Patsy Dell wrote to Vital Energi saying that in the City Council’s view the work to lay the heatpipes and other services needed planning permission. Her letter is here. The key sentence says “The s50 licences copied to us do not absolve a developer or contractor from the need to obtain planning permission.”

This is a reference to the licences granted by the County Council’s Highways Department for the work to be carried out in the various public roads. You may remember that the County’s Chief Legal Officer defended the granting of the licences in a letter published last week while at the same time acknowledging and apologising for the lack of communication with the public by the officers responsible. The County’s actions are now being investigated by the County Council’s Performance Scrutiny Committee, chaired by Labour Councillor Liz Brighouse who represents Churchill & Lye Valley Division. Liz is quoted in the Oxford Mail as saying, “We want people to be confident that the right processes were adopted and will be looking into this within the next six weeks.” One of the questions to be addressed is why there was no public information given between the original licence appplication in January 2014 and the eventual announcement in November 2015.

Then on Wednesday evening (6 Jan) news broke that contractors Vital Energi had suspended operations.

Headington residents concerned about hospital pipeline work – Nothing happening on All Saints Road. @TheOxfordMail pic.twitter.com/5wE3hhqWNT

— Sophie Mogridge (@OxMailSophieM) January 7, 2016

Prompted by an email from Ruth Wilkinson, the County wrote to Vital on Thursday saying in effect “start work again on Friday or fill in the holes, clear the site, and start again when you’re ready”. Later in the day the Trust’s Head of Estates Mark Neal was quoted in the Oxford Mail saying, “[The Trust] has been informed by partner contractors Vital Energi that they have decided to temporarily suspend work on the energy pipeline, while they clarify their planning requirements. The public road, where initial digging has taken place, is being reinstated with a temporary road surface as requested by Oxfordshire County Council.”

They go on to say that work will continue on the JR and Churchill Hospital sites until the planning situation is resolved.

Sure enough, on Friday the trench was filled in and the roads reopened to traffic.

Temp road surface laid pending planning app. New permanent surface after works will be higher grade. Road now open pic.twitter.com/QgUHL8N3EW

— Ruth Wilkinson (@RuthWilk) January 8, 2016

Residents’ reaction has been fairly low-key. Most of the chat on the e-democracy forum has been around Ruth’s valiant efforts to keep everyone up to date. There certainly hasn’t been any triumphalism or claims of ‘victory’. Similarly on twitter, where comments have ranged from “Just shows the problem with them not applying for permission earlier” to “Well done! You’ve succeeded in delaying a worthwhile project” (I paraphrase).

What lessons should be learned from this whole sorry tale? Each one of the players is equally guilty of failing to take the obvious step of getting local people and their elected representatives on-side before any work started. This applies to the County Council who didn’t even warn their local Councillors; the Hospitals Trust who stubbornly refused to engage with locals when the project first started to draw attention in the summer of 2015 and who, I’m told, didn’t even inform their Media & Communications Team; Vital Energi who while claiming extensive experience of this kind of work didn’t even know enough to check if they needed planning permission; and the shadowy intermediaries the Carbon & Energy Fund who set up the deal and whose experts should have advised the Trust on best procedure.

There will no doubt be investigations and recommendations, more apologies and talk of ‘lessons being learned’. None of which helps get this project – which I and many others have always said should actually be a good news story – completed. The City Council’s officers have said they broadly support the scheme, so let’s hope it can get moving again as soon as possible with the appropriate safeguards to protect the people whose lives will be disrupted.

A last look at the #Headington #trench and the ladder to nowhere pic.twitter.com/ixkSJenqc1

— Howard Stanbury (@Howard_S) January 7, 2016