Bath Council Leader’s Email on ‘Opponents’ Went to Opponents

The leader's weekly note to Liberal Democrats also went to every councillor, as the council reviews a £2.35m cycle lane it halted three days into the work.

The leader of Bath and North East Somerset Council emailed his party a warning about political opponents, and the mailing list he copied included all of them, the Bath Echo reported.

Councillor Kevin Guy, the Liberal Democrat leader, wrote that opponents were using a cycle lane scheme in Royal Victoria Park to spread misinformation and attack the administration. "Please don't amplify our opponents' campaigns," he told recipients, according to the Echo. The message also went to local Lib Dem MPs and to Lord Strasburger, whom the paper described as a major party donor, along with a list covering every councillor on the council.

Cabinet member Manda Rigby said the email went to all councillors in error, and she defended its claims as accurate. Green councillor Saskia Heijltjes called the comments disingenuous, saying questions about how public money is spent are not disinformation.

Three days of work on the Bath cycle lane

The scheme is a £2.35m contraflow cycle lane along the one-way 10mph road that loops through the park, part of a 3.7-mile route between Weston and the city centre, according to the BBC. Roadworks began on Oct. 19. Three days later, on Oct. 22, the council revoked the traffic regulation order that permitted it.

The council blamed a "technical and administrative oversight". A nine-page objection from Walk Ride Bath, a campaign group that promotes cycling in the city, never reached the official who made the decision, the Echo reported. The objection, filed during the statutory consultation on the order, focused on personal security and equality concerns about running a cycle path through a park, and asked the council for the evidence behind its decision.

Walk Ride Bath says it supports better cycling infrastructure and did not want to hold the project up. Cycling site road.cc reported that one of its members filed a Freedom of Information request earlier this month asking for the council's response to the objections it had received. The group said it would keep looking into how the objection was missed and how the council came to commit £2.35m.

84% of 261 respondents

The scheme was contested before the paperwork problem. According to the Echo, 84% of the 261 people who responded to a consultation opposed the cycle lane, and almost 3,000 people had signed a petition against it as of Oct. 26. The Bath Bee newsletter puts a petition against the scheme above 4,000 signatures. None of the reports reviewed says whether the two figures count the same petition.

The council says it is reviewing the decision and will consider the missed objection alongside all the others before making a new one. Work on footways and lighting in the park, approved under separate orders, is continuing. In a council statement, Bath's Bicycle Mayor and the chair of Bath Cycling Club said they support the scheme.

"More of this" before the election

Guy's email also told recipients to expect more of the same as the election approaches, the Echo reported, and to rely on official sources of information. None of the reports reviewed gives a date for the fresh decision on the traffic order.