Costly Plymouth road project sparks council row

City growth vs. disruption

The leader of Plymouth City Council claims opposition councillors are “stirring up anger by  misinformation” over the Manadon Interchange scheme and says he will ask for an investigation by the council’s monitoring officer if it doesn’t stop.

Cllr Tudor Evans made the comment at a council cabinet meeting after asking officers if they had any sense of the scale of acquisitions of land and property that would be needed to enable the £156-million project to go ahead.

The Conservative group on the council has raised concerns that the road widening and improvement scheme could cause “years of disruption” and will amount to “a waste of money”. 

Cabinet members agreed on Monday to put £12 million of development funding into the capital programme to progress the scheme which includes working on the final design and a planning application and refining the buildings and land that need to be acquired.

Consent for these purchases will be the subject of a separate decision at a later stage.

Service director for strategic planning and infrastructure Paul Barnard said they would seek to “minimise, in the design, the actual impact of the proposal on people’s properties”.

“We want to get to a point whereby we have a secured negotiated solution as opposed to necessarily resorting to compulsory purchase order powers that we have to implement infrastructure. This would be a last resort,” he said.

“I can assure the cabinet there is money in the budget for the necessary land acquisitions,”

Cllr Evans (Lab, Ham) said: “I need to get this out in the open as some political opponents have been trying to inflate the amount of disruption there will be to local property.”

He claimed they had put social media posts out to this effect.

“The sooner that we can stop those councillors creating blight on property every time they make a post the better. The next time it happens I will ask the monitoring officer to conduct an investigation. The job of a councillor is not to stir up anger by misinformation.”

Cabinet member for strategic planning and transport, Cllr John Stephens (Lab, Plymstock Dunstone) said the conduct of officers with residents who may be affected had been carried out “in a sensitive way”.

“Mistruths undermine officers and put the cat amongst the pigeons when the cat does not need to be there,” he said.

The Manadon Interchange scheme, proposed to relieve a pinchpoint in Plymouth’s travel to work network,  is anticipated to start in the winter of 2028.

The council says without additional capacity in that location, existing and future growth of the city will be constrained.

According to the authority it will provide critical new infrastructure for new homes including the Woolwell urban extension, £140 million of investment at Derriford Hospital and £4.4 billion investment at Devonport plus create better links to the north of the city.

The scheme includes cycling and walking provision and priority bus lanes and is part of a plan to reduce carbon emissions.