10 out of 10 Shropshire Councillors voted to refuse Veolia’s proposal for a 90,000 tonne per annum mass burn incinerator in North Shrewsbury at last night’s (1st September 2010) strategic planning committee meeting.

Veolia’s planning application was treated as a departure from the Waste Local Plan – as the plan specifically rules out mass burn incinerators. Other grounds for refusal included the public’s reasonable concerns about possible adverse health impacts associated with waste incineration, and Veolia’s poor choice of location. The site under consideration is so near to the historic battlefield that, even taking Veolia’s proposed mitigations, it was felt that the visual impact of a waste incinerator would have been unacceptable as it would have ruined the view and spoiled the atmosphere.

Veolia has said that they are contractually obliged to appeal this decision, so once campaigners have celebrated this victory they will be turning their attention to the forthcoming public inquiry.

According to a report from the BBC sixteen public speakers presented arguments for and against the development. Amongst the fifteen who spoke against Veolia’s proposals, Miriam Walton represented Safe Waste in Shropshire (SWiS). In three short minutes Miriam dismantled both Veolia’s case and the (former) Planning Officer’s report. She offered a safe and viable alternative that would see Shropshire manage their discarded materials more sustainably, and less expensively.

Regarding the proposed incinerator, Miriam explained:

We don’t need it. The council doesn’t need to borrow all those millions of pounds and the council tax payer wouldn’t need to pay it all back with interest. The Council needs to save money, here’s how: Just don’t build it!

Waste is actually falling, not rising…Shropshire recycling is already nearly 50%; some UK councils are already recycling more than 60%. San Francisco aims for Zero Waste within the decade. Shropshire needs to take these as models rather than strangle good initiatives like the Ludlow Anaerobic Digester.

Having successfully exercised her right as a local tax payer to access substantial portions of Veolia’s waste contract, using the Audit Commission Act, Miriam had the evidence to explain how the council would have been obliged to pay for the incineration of 90,000 tonnes per annum whether or not such quantities of residual waste even existed!

She asked members of Shropshire’s Strategic Planning Committee to consider the PFI deals that are already proving a problem elsewhere, posing the question:

Why hang this millstone (of debt and financial liability) round our children’s necks for this unnecessary and dangerous facility?

And noted that:

About a quarter of what’s burned would be landfilled anyway, some of it so toxic it would need to be trucked to special dumps well away from Shropshire. Now that’s NIMBY for you!

SWiS has already submitted a response to the outgoing Planning Officer’s Report highlighting the facts that:
1. No weight should be given to the Regional Spatial Strategy’s outdated waste projections, as more accurate data is available and should be relied upon for this important decision.
2. The Planning Authority is legally obliged to give priority consideration to alternative processes which do not produce persistent organic pollutants (POPs), regardless of the Officer’s failure to address this matter.
3. Information supplied by the applicant supports refusal on Climate Change and Energy Efficiency grounds.
4. The Planning Officer’s report contains numerous misleading and unsupported statements, and is inaccurate to the point where it cannot be safely relied upon to inform the Committee.
5. Potentially adverse in-combination effects have not been properly ruled out, meaning that the granting of planning permission could have been a costly mistake for the Planning Authority.

The No Burners in Shropshire (NOBIS) group, who describe themselves as “a task force set up to oppose the building of an incinerator at Battlefield, Shrewsbury” also presented evidence to the Committee. NOBIS pointed to the outline planning permission for the Battlefield Food Enterprise Park which restricted the height of buildings to 12 metres in order “to protect the character and appearance of the edge of this rural area” noting how the Council’s own Landscape Officer’s concerns that Veolia had underestimated the proposed incinerator’s adverse visual impact whilst Veolia had overstated the likely mitigation of the proposed on-site and off-site planting.

Similarly, Nick Hall drew the Committee’s attention to the proposal’s unacceptable impact on the character and setting of a historic settlement (the site of the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury) because of its scale, mass and height (contrary to adopted SABC Local Plan Policies GP2 and HE3, HE7 and HE13).

Karine Swanson spoke for and on behalf of Balfours LLP and their clients, the Trustees of the Sundorne Estate, whose land holding is located to the immediate north east of the application site. She made the point that Veolia’s statement that their proposed incinerator would have been “smaller than others operated by the applicant” was irrelevant:

So what?! The proper question is whether the building ‘fits’ in this location. It does not. This [would have been] the largest building in Shropshire dwarfing the surrounding buildings and incongruous in the historic town’s setting…It is not enough to say there will be tight controls to protect the Food Enterprise Centre which lies immediately to the north and west of the site. The question is whether these two uses of land should be adjacent to each other. Which food producer/processor wants an address next to an incinerator? Which supermarket will buy its products?

Ms Swanson also said that:

The Committee should not treat as a material consideration the contractual obligations entered into by another arm of the Council to deal with Shropshire’s waste. One bad decision should not be relied upon to justify another.

Witnesses reported how the dramatic meeting heard some very strong and competent speeches of opposition from campaigners and opposing councillors from various parties, and how the local MP, Daniel Kawcynski, came close to being ejected for objecting to the biased summing-up of the Assistant Director – Strategy and Development.

The 15-minute summing up by Veolia’s John Collis was described as “weak, lame, lazy and arrogant”.

In an ironic twist, the motion to refuse on the grounds of health fears, visual amenity and departure from Waste Local Plan was proposed by a Councillor who had been brought in to the Planning Committee at the last minute to replace a Councillor who had been accused of predetermination by Shropshire Council’s Head of Legal Services.

According to Councillor Alan Mosely, who opposed the plans, the unanimous result was:

a wonderful reaction by the planners [who had] taken a rational view of it. They have listened to the clear views of residents throughout Shrewsbury and also throughout Shropshire. I think the various pressure groups and various residents groups will continue to fight this tooth and nail and if there is an appeal and an inquiry, then we’ll have another set piece as we’ve seen today.

UKWIN Coordinator Shlomo Dowen has pledged to continue to support campaigners who will now need to learn the procedures associated with planning appeals.

There is plenty more work ahead, including producing statements of case, negotiating statements of common ground, submitting evidence and formulating cross examination questions. Veolia’s case in especially weak on several fronts. Veolia have failed to demonstrate a need for a facility of this size. Their application also shows they are vulnerable on Climate Change grounds due the the inefficiency of their electricity-only incinerator. And of course the explicit prohibition of mass burn incinerators will help consign Veolia’s proposals to the growing list of failed waste applications – not least the December 2009 decision of nearby Telford & Wrekin Council to refuse permission for a 62,000 tonnes per annum incinerator, in part because of incinerator over-capacity in the West Midlands.