Malpas's Cheshire Wildlife Trust believes the impact on wildlife and wild places is being severely underestimated by the company behind the latest High Speed rail lines.

The trust says HS2 Ltd's level of proposed mitigation and compensation falls well below expectation if the government is to keep environmental promises .

The Hybrid Bill required to construct Phase 2a of HS2 – the 36-mile route from the West Midlands to Crewe expected to be operational in 2027 – had its Second Reading in the House of Commons yesterday on January 30.

The Trust believes the Environmental Statement – published in July 2017 to accompany the Hybrid Bill documents – is incomplete and offers an inaccurate picture of the likely impacts. This is a repetition of the inadequacies of the statement produced for Phase 1 and is a cause for grave concern. If the Environmental Statement is inaccurate it has repercussions for the mitigation measures and funding. Phase 2a of HS2 affects important wildlife sites and, based on the information provided in the environmental statement, the proposed compensatory habitat is insufficient to address the damage.

“Our main concerns relate to the highly misleading manner in which residual impacts have been inaccurately portrayed or omitted," said Rachel Giles, from Cheshire Wildlife Trust. "This is partly due to a failure to acknowledge incomplete/missing data and the gross inaccuracies in the calculated areas of impacted habitats. This failure to either acknowledge or address these regional scale impacts will result in a loss of the majority of a 100 hectare area of the Meres and Mosses Nature Improvement Area designated in 2012 to ‘create joined up and resilient ecological networks at a landscape scale"

“We are now calling on HS2 Ltd to up their game and do the right thing and commit to creating more high value wildlife habitat close to the new railway – just as they said they would.”