Peaceful Friday morning protest outside Essex County Hall

County Council set to break “no incineration pledge” for Essex this Friday, 24th April 2009

Residents and councillors organise peaceful protest on steps of County Hall

Essex County Council is to consider a planning application for a regional waste site and 360,000 tonne per annum waste incinerator sited at the former Rivenhall WW2 airfield this Friday (24th April) with an officer recommendation of approval.

Residents and councillors will be holding a peaceful protest on the steps of County Hall starting at 9am on Friday, ahead of the meeting that starts at 10am.

Over 800 representations were received by the council, overwhelmingly objections – from residents, landowners, parish councils, wildlife, countryside and amenity organisations and the district council.

If the application is passed, it would be a blatant breach of the promise made by Lord Hanningfield, Leader of Essex County Council, that there would be “no incineration without a referendum” in Essex (direct quote from Lords Hansard), a pledge he repeated in signed letters to residents.

The waste site would be one of the largest in Europe, importing wastes from all over Eastern Region and London. Around 1.3 million tonnes of waste a year would be trucked in and out of the site, with over 400 HGVs a day adding to the congestion on the A120 and connecting roads.

The development would destroy or disturb an area documented as an important wildlife habitat, home to 5 species of bats, around 70 species of birds as well as many other species such as brown hares, which the County Council has pledged to protect. Mature woodland would be felled, good quality agricultural land developed and historic WW2 structures that have survived until now bulldozed or sold for scrap.

The incinerator would operate 24/7, burning around 1,000 tonnes of wastes a day, raising local air pollution. Emissions would include gases and particulates. The Environment Agency has stated that the proposed chimney height of 35 metres is “not generally considered to be acceptable” and have strongly indicated a higher chimney would be needed, raising further concerns about landscape impact.

At the last stage of consultation on the application, the developer announced that he may turn the entire site over to commercial and industrial wastes from Eastern Region and London, yet had consulted with the public on the basis that the site would deal mostly with household wastes from Essex. Braintree District Council has strongly objected to this late change in particular, calling for a further planning application, which the County Council has turned down.

There is widespread concern, including from councillors of all parties, that the County Council has a vested interest in the site. The council has admitted in writing that whilst the planning application has been under consideration, the council has at the same time been in active commercial negotiations with the developer.

For all these reasons and more, there is a strong call being made to the Secretary of State for an independent public planning inquiry. Already hundreds of letters have been sent to GO-East calling for an inquiry, with hundreds more names due to be sent on a petition and a further letter signed by district and county councillors of all parties.

To request that the decision be called-in for a public inquiry, please write to: Miss Janna Tweed, Government Office for the East of England (Go-East), Planning Casework Team,  Eastbrook,  Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2DF and/or e-mail: Janna.Tweed@goeast.gsi.gov.uk

Cllr. James Abbott, one of the co-ordinators of the Stop the Incinerator Campaign said:

When several years ago we first raised the alarm that an incinerator was being planned for the airfield, the applicants and the county council accused us of misleading the public and scaremongering. When we uncovered using Freedom of Information Act requests that the council and developer had been in discussions about an incinerator since at least March 2006, the council denied any incinerator was planned. Similarly, time and again concerns about the increases in size of the plant, its catchment and the types of waste it would take have been denied. The public have been comprehensively misled by those in a position of trust.

The waste site has grown every time a new version of it has been published, and its catchment has grown larger and larger. We were told at first it would only treat waste from north Essex, with no burning. Then we were told only Essex waste would be treated and that it was “a recycling and composting plant”. Still, the developer uses this description, even with an industrial plant and incinerator added. Its a bit like calling the Titanic a sailing yacht.

The County Council is awarding planning consents in line with its own Waste PFI bid to Government. The Rivenhall site, twinned with the Basildon plant is in the PFI – the same as in this planning application. The council has failed to separate its functions as a planning authority and a waste disposal authority as required to do. They have even used excuses of commercial confidentiality to refuse to release documents requested about the site, despite claiming that the Rivenhall application was merely a “private planning application” that they had nothing to do with.

We will continue to fight these plans every inch of the way. A public inquiry is absolutely essential, and might restore some of the shattered trust in the way in which this process has been conducted to date.

Here is a reminder from Paula Whitney, Co-ordinator of Colchester & NE Essex Friends of the Earthof some of this long campaign over thirteen years since the draft Essex Waste Plan came out in 1996:

• We held our first of thirteen conferences in June 1998 called ‘Is Waste a Burning Issue?’ with Keith Collins and Alan Watson – of consultants ‘Ecologika’ – as key speakers for recycling and against incineration. Eight LibDem councillors attended, including CBC Cllr Ken Jones, also the leader of the county LibDems. They went away and reversed their previous support for incineration. By November that year the county Labour group had also changed their policy and strongly opposed incineration.

• After a big rally we held outside County Hall and a conference in March 1999, the Conservatives caved in and a month later signed the ‘Working Together’ policy with the district councils to achieve 60% recycling and composting by 2007. This was included in the Waste Plan.

• Three trials were set up to test the feasibility of 60% recycling. The Mersea area trial was the most successful, reaching 60% by 2002, with weekly kerbside collections of everything including garden waste and plastic bottles, separated at the kerbside using separate recycling boxes and bags and suitable vehicles. Colchester already collected paper, card, cans and separated colours of glass with the special ‘Fame’ flatback vehicle with metal stillages. The trial had 82% participation and 98% public satisfaction.

• The district councils had employed Ecologika to run detailed waste analyses and draw up detailed recycling strategies for the district councils, all but one of whom joined together as the Waste Consortium and commissioned Ecologika to fight the county council at the 1999/2000 Essex Waste Plan inquiry. Unfortunately the inspector left incineration in the waste plan, although he took out some of the identified waste sites.

• Colchester’s LibDem MP Bob Russell hosted our ‘No Incineration for Essex’ first Parliamentary meeting at Westminster, with speakers from across the UK. There was crossparty support and an anti-incineration rally outside Westminster with groups from all over the UK.

• The Conservatives were elected in a landslide victory in 2001 on a vociferous anti-incineration campaign and manifesto. As James Abbott says below, Lord Hanningfield on many occasions pledged there would be no incineration and that if it was proposed there would be a referendum.

• At their first three meetings the county council Conservatives alone approved the Waste Plan including incineration, saying they were legally required to include it. This was not true and ‘an unprecedented number’ of letters, including from seven district councils, were received by Michael Meacher’s office asking the Government to call the decision in. These were passed to the GoEast office to deal with, where Geoff Gardner, ECC’s officer and author of the Waste Plan, rejected this bid, acting as GoEast’s advisor.

• Three individuals (two councillors and me) took ECC to the High Court in March 2002 and proved there is no such legal requirement. You must have a plan for dealing with waste but it does not have to include incineration. However, Judge Sullivan decided the new Conservative councillors knew they could include or exclude incineration when they rubberstamped the Waste Plan so he considered it was valid and refused to dislodge it.

• We had to raise £28,000 to cover the costs of the challenge which was raised with individual and group donations from across the UK, including £2000 from each of the three individuals, with many individual donations from £5 to £2000.

• The opposition Labour and LibDem groups put a motion to full council following the High Court decision, to amend the Waste Plan to exclude incineration, but the huge majority of ruling Conservatives threw out the motion.

• In June 2002 Colchester FoE had launched the Zero Waste Charter at Westminster, hosted by the LibDem national waste spokesperson MP Sue Doughty. We held a colourful rally with other UK anti-incineration groups in front of Westminster, including our red Incinerator dragon. The first councils in the UK to formally adopt the Zero Waste Charter were Braintree’s Labour council and the LibDem Chelmsford council.

• At the end of 2002 the Essex War on Waste public consultation offered six MBT and incineration options. We drew up alternative ‘Option 7′ with councillors, which supported the Zero Waste Charter, and we held stalls in the main towns offering all the options. Option 7 was recognised and counted by the consultant running the Essex WoW consultation. 69% of formal responses supported Option 7 and 76% opposed all six official options. Braintree council and twelve out of fifteen parish councils formally supported Option 7.

• Since then these two councils and all Essex districts were taken over by Conservative administrations which support the county’s waste plans. By December 2005 ECC had lodged their bid to Defra for PFI funding. However, the rules for PFI changed in early 2006 which required ‘broad public support’ for PFI bids, and for all the district councils to support the bid.

• In May 2007, just after the major district council elections, the Outline Business Case for the PFI waste bid was released. It showed that the proposed MBT plants at Basildon and Rivenhall Airfield would shred and dry black bag waste and produce fuel pellets to burn in an incinerator. The incinerator was placed ‘for modelling purposes’ at Rivenhall Airfield, but it could be on any of the identified sites including Stanway, or Sandon at Chelmsford.

• So ECC required all the district councils to formally support the PFI bid by July 2007, which they did. They also had to try to get public support with their widely condemned new trick consultation in February 2008. It was decorated with green fields and butterflies, and managed to elicit public support for incineration of the MBT residues in the woolly description as ‘fuel for energy’.

• Colchester opposition councillors pledged to oppose the waste strategy and PFI bid in July 2007 when it was agreed by Colchester’s Tory council. They joined various demos we held around Colchester. In May 2008 the Conservatives lost five seats, with waste being one of the issues. The new coalition administration immediately formally opposed the Essex waste strategy and adopted Option 7 in its place. They later formally reversed the previous Conservative’s support for the PFI bid.

• ECC has lost years and years over this whole process because of the continuing dogged opposition at every stage. They are at one of the last application stages for PFI now before they offer the contracts in the EU journals. Many people have objected to the latest PFI application including through their MPs Angela Smith for Basildon and Bob Russell for Stanway at Colchester. We have pointed out that the PFI bid does not have ‘broad public support’ and one council has opposed it.