An incinerator plan for St Dennis in Cornwall has been thrown out by the High Court, after being given the nod by Minister for the Promotion of Rubbish and Overdevelopment, Eric Pickles.
The incinerator was part of a waste contract (PFI, inevitably) drawn up between Cornwall County Council and SITA UK in 2006. It would burn 240,000 tonnes of rubbish each year.
Council had originally refused the application, by SITA UK, by a vote of twenty to one in March 2009. Controversy then erupted when the Council Leader was caught lobbying the Secretary of State (Mr Pickles again) to grant the appeal and allow the incinerator to be built. This after Cllr Alec Robertson had attended public meetings, assuring voters that the Council would robustly defend its refusal.
What changed? An election. The Conservatives took over the running of Cornwall County Council in June 2009. Despite having publicly voted against the plan when in opposition, the Conservative group now appeared desperate for it to go through. The Council stood to lose too much money, and the Tories found themselves responsible (in the loosest sense of the word).
Eric Pickles, it seems, responded to the pleas of impending poverty from his fellow Tories, and granted the appeal. The campaigners then went to the High Court, where Mr Justice Collins announced his decision: the Secretary of State had not acted properly in allowing the appeal. The application should not go ahead.
Specifically, he had failed to take into account a requirement of the EU Habitats Directive to assess the impacts on special areas of conservation at Breney Common and Goss and Tregoss Moors.
It may seem like bureaucratic pedantry but it illustrates how these things tend to work: had Pickles not wanted the scheme to go ahead, a directive, regulation or precedent could have been found to justify stopping it – here was one that would have done the job. Indeed, campaigners had presented the evidence of the missing habitat impact assessment at the appeal. But Pickles almost certainly did want the scheme to go ahead – the evidence was ignored and the application given the nod. So the campaigners were forced to trek on to the High Court with the same evidence, where it was taken notice of.
Had they not done so, the incinerator would have gone ahead: a Council or Government can often rely on simply outspending campaigners in a legal battle.
The moral of the story? Incinerators are not a safe bet. The fact that the Council has an enormous amount of money riding on a waste strategy does not make it any more likely that they will get a planning application through. The better idea is to have a good strategy with public support to start with. Councils all over the UK are learning this the hard way – we can add Cornwall to the roll call: Derby, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, East Lothian, Staffordshire…
And an incinerator agreed by the Lib Dems before losing power? Sounds familiar.
