Cost of busway fencing nearly doubles to £12.5m

The cost to install fencing across a busway network on which three people have died has nearly doubled.

Cambridgeshire County Council has been putting up fencing along the 16-mile (26km) busway, which links Cambridge, Huntingdon and St Ives, after it was fined £6m in the wake of the deaths.

The original budget for the fencing was £6.5m, but a report to the council's highways committee on Tuesday said the project was now forecast to hit £12.5m.

The committee was told the work on the section between Cambridge station and Trumpington needed to be done quickly, and the fencing was of a "higher specification".

The busway opened in 2011 and much of the route involves a modified bus being guided along a track.

The council was fined after being prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) following the deaths of Jennifer Taylor, Steve Moir and Kathleen Pitts, who were killed on the busway between 2015 and 2021.

Jamie Cooke, the council's transport director, told Tuesday's meeting that while the HSE had not instructed the local authority to install fencing, it did require the council to "perform a thorough and very detailed risk assessment".

"The fencing really from our perspective was the only practical measure that could prevent that," he said.

"If we were not to put the fencing in place, there's an argument that we may not be able to continue to operate the busway."

After being question by Liberal Democrat councillor Ros Hathorn on the increase in the cost, Cooke said: "The shared-use track is clearly very popular across the busway but even more so with the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and Addenbrooke's Hospital."

He said it was "very important to get that fencing installed quickly, and as we began that process it became clear that because of the amount of people using the shared-use track the fencing had to be of a higher specification... so it cost a little bit more to deliver than we first anticipated."

Labour member Alex Bulat said: "The question that anyone looking at this, without knowing the ins and outs, is how did we underestimate [it] so badly in this situation?"

Cooke said the original estimate was based around a "three or four-bar wooden fence for the busway", but after the risk assessment "it became apparent that would not be suitable".

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