Not much has been happening in public while the planning application works its way through the process.

More information has been requested by the City’s planning department about the contractors’ construction traffic management scheme. A full three week consultation period will re-start once this information is supplied.

There have been more apologies for the failure of consultation, this time from the County. Their Performance Scrutiny Committe meets on Thursday 18 February, when they will review how they handled the heatpipe project. You can read the report to the Committee here.

The local liaison group will be meeting the Trust and Vital this Thursday, when we should hear the latest developments, if any.

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.