BORDERLINE MADNESS
Residents on opposite sides of the Welsh border fear they are being
W
HEN the people in this village fancy a drink with their mates they might need to cross into a different country to do it.
While they’re there, they may chat about the fact that they have to pay around £6,000 per year more for their children’s university fees, or that their elderly parents don’t get the free drugs for diabetes that those across the border too.
This is what it’s been like for the residents of Tutshill, as well as those in the neighbouring villages of Sedbury and Beachley, for quite a few years now.
They have a Welsh postcode, Welsh GPs and Welsh Water coming from their their taps.
In fact, this ribbon of settlements running along the River Wye in theForest of Dean is generally considered a suburb of the Welsh town of Chepstow. But ask customers in the Village Inn in Sedbury who they wanted to win the Rugby World Cup and you’d get an emphatic answer from most of them: England.
They might debate with their neighbours the merits of tuition fees or the long-standing claims that NHS Wales waiting lists are much longer. But the residents of all three villages and the neighbouring market town of Chepstow are united over one thing.
There is a widespread belief that developers are taking advantage of the cross-border issues and the abolition of the Severn Bridge tolls to build more homes than the local infrastructure can cope with.
Since news broke that the tolls were being scrapped, house prices in the area have gone up by around 20% and they are being snapped up in record time.
A new planning application for a 185-home estate on Tutshill is the latest headache for residents who say the main road running between Gloucestershire and Wales, the A48, simply cannot cope with the number of homes being built along its length.
Go into Chepstow at rush hour and you will see traffic from the Forest of Dean backing up from the traffic lights in the middle of town.
Once past this pinchpoint, commuters have to crawl up the residential Hardwick Hill to a busy roundabout to reach the old Severn Bridge and the rest of the motorway network.
At the moment the traffic is even worse because the old Wye bridge is closed for gas works in the town centre so even local traffic has to travel over the newer bridge.
Like many others residents Sue Dutson believes developers have been land-banking farming land along the A48 knowing that the Severn tolls were about to be abolished.
“It’s just blatant what they do,” she told Gloucestershire Live, referring to planning battles across the country.
“They have been sitting on the land waiting for the tolls to go and now look what’s happening,” she said.
“On the Chepstow side they are building hundreds of houses on the Mabey site and there are flats going up all along the river. We are trapped in the middle. Chepstow is absolutely gridlocked already and is meant to be one of the worst towns on the country for air pollution so how can they can keep putting more traffic on the roads?”
She’s right about the pollution. A few years ago, the World Health Organisation included Chepstow in a list of places exceeding the limits for fine-particle air pollution levels. According to the report, Chepstow was number six on the list, higher than London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol.
Transition Chepstow co-ordinator Tim Melville, 55, used to live on the town’s Hardwick Hill, right next to the A48 and one of the worst recorded areas for pollution, but says he was forced to move because of his daughter’s severe asthma.
One report has estimated that more than 24,000 cars a day used the A48 through Chepstow and around 80% of them were commuters heading from Gloucestershire to Wales or Bristol.
Another says 1,400 homes in total are planned for the Chepstow and Severnside areas of Monmouthshire, with a further 1,800 homes expected in Lydney.
“It’s crackers,” said retired Primrose Hill headmaster David Richards when asked about the latest application for another 185 homes.
“They are still building the Barratts and the Bellway developments, so there’s no way we can have 185 more houses. There’s all this all this extra housing along the A48 and every morning the traffic is backing up.
“I’ve heard there’s about £100,000 difference between the average home here and the average home in Bristol. There’s £60,000 difference between here and Lydney.
“Is it any wonder people want to move? It’s a lovely place to live but it just doesn’t have the infrastructure or the services to cope. But nobody listens to us.”
Like many, he described public transport as “dire”. Stagecoach recently made unpopular changes to the bus services and there are frequent complaints about the trains running between Gloucester and Cardiff being cancelled, forcing commuters onto the roads.
And it could get worse. Both the Forest of Dean District Council and
Monmouthshire County Council are desperate to find enough land for thousands more houses they will need to build over the coming decades to meet government targets.
Most people expect hundreds more houses to be built when the army moves out of Beachley Barracks in around 2027.
Recently, both Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire councils shared the £33,839 cost of a report into the viability of a £100m bypass, but taking it to the next stage would require more detailed investigations costing £1.2m.
Although Monmouthshire and the Welsh Government have agreed to pay one third each, Gloucestershire council says it is not a priority scheme and so far the UK Government has not
agreed to put its hands in its pockets for the in-depth report recommended by the Welsh Transport Appraisal Guidance (WelTag) system.
However, the initial report says congestion is “hampering the future growth and development” of Monmouthshire and southwest Gloucestershire. As well as a bypass, it also suggests dramatically increasing the number of direct train services to Bristol from Lydney to help ease congestion.
Founder of the Chepstow and Sedbury Bypass Action Group, Monmouthshire county councillor Jez Becker wasn’t surprised and says Chepstow’s congestion problem can no longer just be seen in isolation because it is caused by and impacts on people living on both sides of the border.
He says it’s not sustainable for Gloucestershire to dump everything on Chepstow without any thought about how the town will cope.
But Gloucestershire 2050, a partnership of public sector organisations and business chiefs, appears to be looking at another solution: a road and rail bridge crossing the River Severn between Sharpness and Lydney in the Forest of Dean by 2050 is one of their “six big ideas” and could stop the thousands of cars heading down the A48.
“The road at Chepstow is at breaking point and the weight of opinion appears to be that the area cannot cope with any more houses until the infrastructure is improved,” Forest of Dean councillor Nick Evans told Gloucestershire Live.
“Abolishing the tolls has made the area more attractive to people from Bristol, but we need the infrastructure to stop the area coming to a standstill and make the most of any economic benefits that this will bring.”
The bypass would pass through the area represented by Monmouthshire councillor and former mayor Armand Watts, who says the building projects are turning Chepstow and the surrounding area in a massive car park on the English-Welsh border.
On the English side, many are convinced that when the Welsh Government changed the traffic light system at Tesco in 2010 it was rigged so most of the standing traffic would be on the English side of the bridge.
Gerald Barrett has lived in the area for most of his 50-odd years and says working people like him are fed up of taking 40 minutes to get through Chepstow to get to work.
“The road system cannot cope with what’s here now, never mind when there’s more houses,” he said. “I drive it every day and the traffic is always backed up. I was told it was because they changed the sequence of the traffic lights at Tesco so that the traffic backs up on the English side of the river to try and cut the air pollution in Chepstow.
“We get the worst of both worlds. Even though we have a Welsh postcode we pay the Forest of Dean council tax, which is dearer than Monmouthshire, and we have Welsh Water which is more expensive than Severn Trent.”
Daughter Olivia Bushell, who runs the Village Inn pub, said: “It’s like a no man’s land. They keep building houses but not the infrastructure like roads, schools and surgeries to go with it.”
Tutshill butcher Andrew Jones says he has noticed a lot of visitors and househunters from the other side of the Severn since the tolls were abolished and it is quicker to get to his shop from Chepstow than get back again along the A48.
“From my point of view more houses means more customers, but they have got to get the infrastructure right first,” said the butcher, who misses the traffic at 5.30am but hears all about it from customers and his daughter who lives in Cinderford.
“It’s a really serious issue and when the old bridge shuts it really affects our trade. It cuts us off from Chepstow because our customers know that it takes them five minutes to get here but 40 minutes to get home afterwards because of the traffic flow.”
Customer Jerry Beresford who has lived there for 18 years, said: “It’s crazy. The schools are full, you can’t get an appointment at the doctor and there is too much traffic.”
But one resident, who did not want to be identified, said she disagreed with the people objecting to the developments, even though they inconvenienced her personally.
“I love the environment, but you have to give people homes so they can contribute to society. If we have to lose some fields and have to sit in traffic for 10 minutes longer, so be it,” she said.
“They built 200 houses on the fields where I used to play as a child, but we needed homes and back then that was considered an achievement.”
However, most seem to agree with Richard Huws, who has written to complain about the latest planning application and summed up the feelings of many when he said: “About 20 years ago there was a plan for around 2,000 new homes on this side of the river which was quite rightly quashed.
“Currently we seem to be suffering death by a thousand cuts with new estates being added piecemeal.
“Both Tutshill/Sedbury and Chepstow suffer from what might be called ‘border syndrome’, being located in remote corners of their respective counties where it is easy to feel forgotten by the authorities.
“Not only do we have two different highway and planning authorities, but also two different countries.
“The impression is that there is no effective joined up planning taking place between the two. On both sides of the river we are being failed in so many areas: by politicians local and national, by highways and planning authorities and by developers whose only concern is profit. Please stop. Our roads cannot take any more.”
But Gloucestershire councillor for Sedbury, Patrick Molyneux, denies the villages are being ignored. He recently produced a report for Tidenham Parish Council assuring the villagers that there are school places in the system to accommodate children from the developments in the pipeline. He said the bypass was not seen as an immediate priority for capital funding because the business case was not strong enough.
The Welsh Government said: “The traffic signals... have not been optimised to improve air quality but operate on a system that continually adjusts the green signal time required for each approach by assessing the number of vehicles approaching the signals and the impact of queuing on the overall operation of the junction.
“The A48 is within the Chepstow Air Quality Management Area and we are working with the council to help identify measures that could reduce pollution along the route.”
A Monmouthshire council spokesperson said: “Monmouthshire
County Council is working with Gloucestershire County Council and other partners, including Welsh Government and Highways England, on a transport strategy for Chepstow. We are currently planning to conduct a feasibility study to build upon an initial assessment which was carried out earlier this year. This will look at options for improving transport within the area including air pollution and traffic congestion.”
And Gloucestershire County Council said it was “committed to continue working with our partners, including Monmouthshire County Council, to develop a plan to alleviate congestion and any forecast increase in travel demand in the Chepstow and Sedbury areas”.