This petition is not about whether you support or oppose East West Rail. It is about whether taxpayers and communities affected by it should be allowed to see the evidence behind a major public investment.

East West Rail has been the subject of multiple public consultations, yet the public has not been given the full economic case for the Bedford–Cambridge section (CS3). Consultation without access to the costs, benefits, risks and value-for-money evidence is not meaningful scrutiny. People are being asked for their views without being given the information needed to judge the proposal properly.

My recent Freedom of Information request confirmed that a Strategic Outline Business Case for CS3 was produced in 2019 but never finalised. The Department for Transport says it has continued to evolve as part of the Outline Business Case, which is still in development and is not expected to go to the Department for agreement until early 2027. The request also produced no CS3-specific Benefit-Cost Ratio or Value-for-Money assessment.

This matters because transparency is not an optional extra. The Government's own Lovegrove Review recognised the importance of greater transparency in major infrastructure projects in building public trust. The FOI response itself acknowledges that disclosure is being withheld to preserve a "safe space" for live policy discussions.

But there must also be a space for public scrutiny - and that scrutiny needs to happen before major decisions are effectively settled, not afterwards.

No responsible business would ask investors to commit billions of pounds while withholding the underlying business case. Here, the investors are taxpayers. At a time when public finances are under enormous pressure - with competing demands from defence, prisons, the NHS and other essential services - £2.5 billion of public funding already committed to East West Rail deserves to be supported by a business case that can withstand public examination. The previously published Benefits Cost Ratio of just 0.3 for the wider scheme makes that scrutiny particularly important.

You may support East West Rail. You may oppose it. Or you may simply believe that government should be transparent about how it spends our money.

Whatever your view of the railway, taxpayers deserve to see the evidence. We are asking the Government (the DfT and/or East West Rail Company)  to publish the Strategic Outline Business Case for CS3 now, while there is still time for meaningful public scrutiny.