I HAD a very loud lol (laugh out loud) when I read the letter from Gideon Amos about a proposed new railway station for Wellington ('Station bid', Postbag, August 22) and his claim that former Lib Dem MP Jeremy Browne helped to get the idea off the ground while the Conservatives have done nothing.

As I personally conceived and founded this campaign back in March, 2009, I can tell your readers that Mr Amos is talking nonsense. Nothing new there, I hear many of you say!

Jeremy Browne did nothing to support my campaign - in fact, in his eight years as the local MP there was nothing, absolutely zilch, that he achieved to the benefit of this constituency, apart from deciding to step down when he saw the public reaction to the Lib Dem’s lies over student tuition fees.

Mr Amos now owes me an apology, please, unless he can come up with some evidence to back his claim, in which case can he please forward it to the Wellington Town Council offices for me to read.

As his knowledge of local history is so poor, I can tell Mr Amos that no Lib Dem did anything other than criticise the Wellington Railway Station campaign as something which was pie in the sky.

The Lib Dems did this purely because the campaign was adopted by the then Conservative Parliamentary candidate Mark Formosa, with whom I worked closely at the time. They were spiteful and vindictive - to myself, as well as to Mr Formosa - just because it was not their idea.

To his great credit, Mr Formosa recognised the huge community benefit arising from a new railway station and rather than just try to make Party politics out of it for himself, he persuaded Wellington Town Council to get on board with the campaign and so it became a cross-Party initiative.

Together, they persuaded Network Rail to include the project in its strategic plans and the old Deane council to include it in its core strategy planning framework.

It is worth pointing out that a new station had been included in the County Council’s 2006-2011 transport strategy but nothing was ever done to promote it - and which party was running the county council then, yes, it was the Lib Dems!


READ MORE: LETTER: 'Nonsense: Tories didn't do all the work on Wellington station plan'


Mr Amos complains bitterly that the LEP has not provided any funding for a railway station in Wellington, and he blames the Conservatives for that, too.

But what would the LEP be funding? There is not yet a design for a station, or a site secured for it, because there is still much groundwork to be done, and until we reach that point, it is premature to ask the LEP for funding.

What I can tell readers, however, is that after I was elected as a Conservative councillor to Wellington Town Council in 2015, it was myself who put forward the proposal that the council earmark £10,000 towards the necessary feasibility studies to help move the railway station project forward.

The money is available to the Metro Group - set up by the former Deane council together with Somerset and Devon County Councils and Mid Devon District Council - which has been commissioning the various studies needed to inform the decisions that will have to be taken.

So, the suggestion by our current Conservative MP Rebecca Pow that it is the Conservatives who have done all the work to promote a new railway station for Wellington (County Gazette, August 15th) is absolutely spot on.

JOHN THORNE
Councillor for Wellington Town Council, North ward and Somerset County Council, Blackdown and Neroche division
c/o Wellington Town Council