County council faces £3.5m bill after unlawful road closure for 20 years

A council could be forced to pay up to £3.5m to reinstate a road it had illegally blocked for more than 20 years, the North-West Evening Mail has reported.

Cumbria County Council blocked the Cocken Tunnel, which ran under a slag bank to the coast, in 1989.

But Anita and Geoff Sharpe of Ormsgill Farm, Barrow, who campaigned to have the road re-opened, found that the correct procedure had not been followed and took the local authority to court.

According to the paper, the council’s legal team admitted at a hearing at Furness Magistrates’ Court that it had illegally closed the road. A path was built over the slag-bank for walkers and horses, but was not viable for vehicles.

Under s. 137 of the Highways Act 1980 it is an offence for anyone “wilfully to obstruct the free passage along a highway”, the paper reported.

Mary Claydon said: “It is accepted that the tunnel is a byway open to all traffic and it’s accepted that the county council illegally struck it off. That was the engineering works that took place when the slag-banks were being developed.”

Sharpe told the court: “We understand to open the tunnel would cost a great deal of money, we are told £3.5m, but we have always tried to compromise. We want to maintain our access to the seashore.”

Claydon warned that the engineering involved in re-opening the road would wipe out the capital spend for Barrow for the next two to three years.

She applied for a three-month adjournment to allow the county council and other agencies to establish a view whether there is a sensible alternative that would satisfy the Sharpes.

An attempt by the council to obtain planning permission for the realignment that is currently there had been turned down on environmental grounds.

However, the presiding magistrate only allowed an adjournment of four weeks, the North-West Evening Mail reported.