Fresh legal challenge against Stonehenge road tunnel

A fresh legal battle against the Transport Secretary's approval of a controversial road project near Stonehenge has been launched.

Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site are challenging Mark Harper's decision to allow eight miles of improvement works on the single-carriageway A303 to be built.

The £1.7bn scheme includes a two-mile tunnel near the site.

The group had previously blocked the scheme when they successfully appealed to the High Court in July 2021, citing environmental concerns about the Unesco World Heritage Site.

One of the group's three directors, John Adams, said they had "no choice but to launch a second legal challenge in the face of such belligerence."

"The Government appears both blind and deaf to concerns about the damage it will perpetrate on this historic and much-loved landscape," Mr Adams said.

Mr Adams, who's also chair of the Stonehenge Alliance, accused the government of ignoring Unesco's concerns, claiming "it seems hell bent on bulldozing this scheme through before it gets thrown out of Government."

The President of the Stonehenge Alliance, historian Tom Holland, also said a further legal challenge is necessary to halt a development that, if allowed to go ahead, will permanently and irreversibly desecrate the Stonehenge landscape."

Rowan Smith, a Leigh Day solicitor who's representing the campaigners, said they are "shocked that the Government appears not to have learnt from its mistakes and has repeated the decision to grant development consent for the Stonehenge road scheme."

"Again, the decision appears to have been made on an unlawful basis," Mr Smith argued, adding the campaigners " will argue that the failure to reopen the public examination a second time round was unfair and also a breach of human rights."

"We hope the court will grant our client permission for a full hearing."

The Stonehenge site was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1986 due to the size of the megaliths, the sophistication of their design, and the complexes of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites and monuments.

Highways England say the two-mile tunnel will remove the sight and sound of traffic passing the site, and cut down journey times on a major congestion hotspot during holiday seasons.

The Department for Transport declined to comment when approached by the Press Association.