Letter: LRAG Has Morphed from a Cross-community Group into a Pressure Group

Published on: 14 Nov, 2024
Updated on: 14 Nov, 2024

From George Potter

Lib Dem county (Guildford East) and borough (Burpham) councillor

I’m old enough to remember when the London Road Action Group, which Terry Newman chairs, was established to ensure a robust public consultation process and to ensure that questions about the scheme were answered properly.

Its original terms of reference, in fact, required it remain neutral and not take a stance either way as to whether or not the scheme should go ahead.

Unfortunately, over the past two years, it has morphed into a group of people determined to oppose the London Road scheme on any and every spurious grounds they can contrive, constantly moving the goalposts by finding a new objection the moment a previous one was put to bed.

This transformation was solidified when Mr Newman decided that, despite my having been a member of the committee from the beginning, and obtained £1,300 funding for it, I would no longer be included on committee email threads simply because I disagreed with the approach being taken under his leadership.

This decision prompted the Burpham Community Association’s representative (who happens to be of a very different political persuasion to me) to resign from the group in protest at their local county councillor being silently excluded.

So LRAG, which started as a cross-community forum to scrutinise the proposals, has instead transformed itself into a pressure group determined to oppose the scheme regardless of what the evidence might say (as their recent missives have indicated), and purports to speak on behalf of residents doing so, even after the community association which represents the majority of Burpham residents has withdrawn due to unhappiness with the direction being taken.

Extract from grant funding application

I don’t object to Mr Newman having an opinion, or to him making that opinion known and lobbying for it, and I don’t even object to him making political accusations against me for having the temerity to want an important decision to be scrutinised properly and thoroughly, but I do object to him presenting himself as a representative of the community rather than as what he actually is, namely a representative of a pressure group, with a particular point of view, which happily took taxpayers money to fund it’s “neutral” goals and then promptly purged anyone within its ranks who wanted to keep an open mind on the London Road scheme.

Everyone is free to have an opinion on this scheme, but the majority of Burpham residents (in the public consultation, 50 per cent were for it and only 30 per cent against) support the scheme, and the independent safety audit, which LRAG demanded, has given the scheme a clean bill of health, as has Active Travel England. It is a demonstrable fact that this scheme would be a major improvement in safety for pedestrians (never mind the benefit to cyclists).

Before such a scheme is thrown out completely, with no alternatives put forward, leaving us with a dangerous status quo, I want that decision to be scrutinised and considered thoroughly and properly.

And I am quite comfortable that in so doing I am standing up for the silent majority of Burpham residents instead of the noisy minority which Mr Newman and his rump LRAG colleagues have put so much effort into stirring up with active misinformation about what is actually being proposed in the revised scheme (which possibly led to, for instance, one public speaker at the Cabinet meeting talking endlessly about floating bus stops, even though proposals for floating bus stops were removed from the scheme as long ago as March 2023).