A DESCENDENT of the Rothschild dynasty has slammed plans to run a High Speed railway within a mile of his family’s historic home, Waddesdon Manor, it is reported today.

Lord Rothschild told The Sunday Times: “I have serious concerns about the route which has been selected and its impact on Waddesdon Manor.

“We will carefully watch the progression of the consultation process and its eventual outcome.”

The home, east of Aylesbury, was donated to the National Trust and the paper reports the line will cut through a neighbouring 5,700-acre estate where Lord Rothschild lives.

The paper says this puts him ‘at odds’ with Labour business secretary and friend Lord Mandelson.

It says Rothschild has employed a planning consultant to fight the plan, which would tunnel under old Amersham and cut through land north of Great Missenden.

The Sunday Times reports the route should follow the M1 corridor though engineers in the project believe this would be too expensive and lengthen journey times.

The Government will consult on cutting through the Chilterns later this year.

The report says it is hoped local celebrities including Fern Britton, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Sophie Dahl and Sir David Jason will fight the plan.

Meanwhile, Aylesbury MP David Lidington has reported from a meeting with transport chiefs that he held with Chesham and Amersham MP Cheryl Gillan.

He said: “I can’t say that there was a meeting of minds but I do feel that I now have a somewhat better understanding of their thinking.”

Writing on his blog, Mr Lidington reported that consultation would take place from October to March and bosses said they are ‘trying to engage seriously with local people’.

Yet Mr Lidington said: “I said very directly that I thought that a six month period, including Christmas and the New Year, to look at the entire route from Euston to Staffordshire, would be inadequate for a proper consultation and that they risked adding to public cynicism about the exercise.”

It would be scrutinised by a committee of MPs instead of a planning inquiry with building projected start in 2017, he said.

The MP said it is ‘clear that relatively little detailed work has yet been done’ on the impact on the environment.

A map of ‘noise contours’ will be available at the October consultation – but details such as how noise will be blocked out would be considered by the committee of MPs, he reported.

The Conservative MP said: “Both Cheryl and I made our dissatisfaction with this approach very clear.

“I believe that local people will expect to know very soon exactly what the likely impact on them would be in terms of noise and visual intrusion if this route were to proceed.

“I’m afraid that this part of the conversation reinforced my view that the publication of the route plan was rushed through for political motives before enough detailed work on environmental impact had been carried out.”

He reported that the chief engineer acknowledged ‘trade-offs’ between the impact and benefits and a tunnel all the way under the Chilterns would be ‘prohibitively expensive’.

Mr Lidington said: It seems to me that their reasons for rejecting other Chiltern routes, along the M40 corridor and along the West Coast Main Line were in the end down to the need for a lot more expensive tunnelling (under Wycombe or under stretches of Hertfordshire respectively) if those routes were to be developed.”

He reported that the M1 corridor plan was rejected because there were too many new homes and it would ‘cause serious nuisance to very large numbers of residents’

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