You will have heard that the Government has withdrawn £125M of Private Finance Initiative funding from the Allerton Park incinerator. This is a serious blow to North Yorkshire County Council’s plans BUT IT HAS NOT KILLED THE SCHEME – both NYCC and AmeyCespa are trying to replace this funding and whilst the planning approval remains in force, the scheme could still go ahead. So we MUST try to have the planning approval quashed. NYWAG and the Parish Councils Group are supporting the Marton cum Grafton Parish Council application to the High Court for a Judicial Review of the grant of planning permission.

A big “THANK YOU!” to the many individuals and communities who have supported us thus far in raising funds to fight this battle, BUT we have not yet raised all that is needed.

It can take a year for a Judicial Review to come to court, BUT North Yorkshire County Council has said it will ask the High Court to hear the case quickly. So we urgently need your help to raise quickly the final sums. This is because the court may not hear our case unless we can show we have the necessary funds in place.

We have instructed and are working with one of the best QCs in this field. He has experience of winning cases like this. He says we have a good case. We can win this with your support.

We have raised many thousands of pounds so far. We now need a further £20,000 to take the case to a successful conclusion. That is very achievable with your support.

Whilst any donation you can make, or any fund-raising you can undertake, will bring us closer to our target PLEASE remember if we can finally stop this scheme, every North Yorkshire household will benefit by stopping the huge cuts to public services that are already happening to fund this scheme. Just £20 from each of our supporters would mean we can fight the case through the High Court, but PLEASE, if you can afford a little more invest now in this legal action to protect our services, reduce our taxes and protect our environment.

Ways to send money to support the campaign

• Send a cheque made payable to “NYWAG” for as much as you can afford to The Treasurer, Nywag, High Farm Grange, Hopperton HG5 8NX.
• Bank transfer to NYWAG – account no 81280139, sort code 40-12-28
• Paypal – go to www.nywag.org and click one of the “Donate” buttons on the right

County Council Elections 2nd May – Alongside raising funds, we are putting pressure on NYCC candidates in the forthcoming elections. NYWAG is not and never has been a party political organisation. We support any candidate who supports our cause and would encourage you to do the same. Please ask your candidate how they stand on the incinerator issue, so that they know it is important to constituents all over North Yorkshire.

It’s theoretically possible that NYCC and City of York could try to raise the additional finance, but if they did so, the contracts would have to be re-tendered and further Full Council approvals would be needed. This would mean a delay of years, would completely change the financial equations and would almost certainly mean that developments in waste management would make the incinerator even less viable.

Defra’s statement announcing the decision not to fund three incinerator projects that could have benefited from PFI monies was very brief. It basically said Government had concluded there was already sufficient incinerator capacity built or in the pipeline to meet the country’s commitment to reduce waste going to landfill and no further incinerators were needed. It also urged councils to review waste management strategies to make better use of what is a valuable resource: so much the same as we have been telling NYCC for years!

The two councils’ leaders have been expressing their shock and surprise at the decision given the planning application was not called in for determination at a public inquiry. Our take on that is there may well have been discussions going on between Defra, the Treasury and the Communities Department (the last of which makes call-in decisions) to the effect that there was no point in calling it in as PFI funding was to be withdrawn. In those circumstances a call-in would have resulted in an expensive – but pointless – public inquiry since the scheme couldn’t proceed without PFI monies. Also, since the Treasury’s value for money scrutiny of the proposal could only happen once the planning process had been concluded, a public inquiry would have forced a delay of the announcement of withdrawal of PFI funds – and Government needs to tighten its finances now, not in a year or two’s time.

All that said, NYCC’s track record does not suggest common sense prevails in the corridors of County Hall and it is possible the councils may decide to try to raise finance elsewhere. If they were successful, then the incinerator could go ahead as planning consent has been granted. So it remains VITAL that we continue to do our best to over-turn the planning committee’s decision. Since we only have a three month long window in which to challenge the decision, we are continuing our efforts to secure a judicial review.

No doubt more news will merge over coming days and we’ll keep you posted on developments. In the meantime, give yourselves a hearty pat on the back and have a well-deserved glass of something fortifying in celebration of yesterday’s news: there’s no doubt the vigorous campaigning against this crazy scheme has play a pivotal role. Thank you all for your efforts and support so far – we must continue to work together until we know the plan is finally dead and buried.

PS If you’d like more evidence that what we are saying is correct have a listen to Radio 4’s Costing the Earth. It’s half an hour of common sense.

Our main focus now is to apply for permission for a Judicial Review (JR). You don’t just get a review; you have to ask for permission. That means we have to work with the best lawyers to examine whether we have a good case at JR.

As I have said before, if we pursue this through JR we will be up against top lawyers. If we are to win this, we need the best lawyers working for us. That costs money. We are now entering a crucial phase of the campaign.

If our lawyers advise us to go to JR then this will be our very best chance to stop this madness.

We know it’s wrong, they know it’s wrong but they persist with this unnecessary scheme.

Please support us by sending donations to: The Treasurer, NYWAG, High Farm Grange, Hopperton HG5 8NX. Cheques should be made payable to “NYWAG”. Or you can support us via PayPal by clicking on the links in the right hand column..

We will continue to fight this on/from all angles/fronts. Our support is as strong as always and we still have the support of our MPs and Harrogate Borough Council and many local parishes.

Did you know?

• There are currently 31 incinerators in the UK with applications for another 120 but the country is expected to reach overcapacity by 2015.
• Rotterdam has closed an incinerator because it could not get feedstock. There is overcapacity in Europe already.
• The County is desperately short of cash, with cuts to public services – just take a look at the dire state of our roads – yet NYCC wants to squander millions of pounds on this scheme.

Thank you for your support. We will fight on and we will let you know when important things happen.

There will be something in the Yorkshire Post and on Radio York tomorrow.

All your letters will have been considered. If you wrote to Beverley Jones, NPCU or Eric Pickles they will have been noted.

We hoped that this would not happen but it is certainly not the end of the road. It flies completely in the face of democracy. Our arguments about overcapacity and cost still apply. We still have several alternative strategies for stopping this. We need to confirm this over the next few days. We will let you know as soon as possible how we will continue this battle.

We will continue.

The only information we can give you is that:

• They received over 600 letters requesting call-in.
• The Secretary of State’s “target date” for a decision upon whether or not to call in the Allerton Park decision came and went.
• The Secretary of State’s Office have been in contact with NYCC. They have sent something called an “Article 25 Holding Direction”. This, it seems, is a device that enables them to extend the twenty-one day deadline from the date of their acknowledgement of their receipt of the necessary papers from NYCC. In effect, it means that they still haven’t decided and that their decision will be (in their words) “weeks rather than months” after that.

This is similar to what has happened regarding the King’s Lynn incinerator. There, the Planning Committee voted to approve the application in late April this year, the Secretary of State issued a “holding direction” and ultimately let them know in the late summer that he was after all intending to call it in.

We will let you know as soon as we have any more information.

Thanks to all of you who have given such strong support to the campaign over the past (and previous) year. We remain convinced that the proposed incinerator is a monstrous and unnecessary intrusion and a complete waste of council money which could be much better spent on council services. We will continue to make representations to the Secretary of State and to other Government bodies and, with your help, we will fight to make sure that it does not get built.

Also, we are tremendously indebted to the team of fundraisers and helpers who have run the jumble sale and the Christmas Fayre. Thank you to everyone who supported these events and helped to raise nearly £2,000 towards the campaign fund.

We hope you have a lovely peaceful Christmas and let’s hope that the New Year brings us the news we have been hoping for.

As expected NYCC’s planning committee approved the Allerton Park incinerator application today. So likely was it that, as judge, jury and executioner, this would be North Yorkshire County Council’s decision, we wrote most of this newsletter last night! The result was 9 – 2 in favour.

Thanks to everyone who made the effort to come to County Hall today. There was a small chance that we might influence the decision. You have also sent out a strong message to Government that people are strongly against this proposal.

We always knew it would be an uphill struggle with NYCC, given that the council voted in favour of the scheme back in December 2010. That’s why we have consistently campaigned for the application to be called in by the Secretary of State and determined at a public inquiry by an independent planning inspector. We remain confident that the outcome of an independent planning inquiry will be that the application is rejected. And it is also important to note that NYCC still have to prove that the scheme offers “value for money” – something we intend to prove it most certainly does not.

So now the time has come to step up the pressure for call-in. Our local MPs, Harrogate Borough Council, local parish and town councils, NYWAG and many individual objectors have already urged that the application be called in. But we know that the Secretary of State takes into account the weight of opposition in decided whether to order call-in, and that means we are asking for one last big effort to secure an independent public inquiry.

We need as many people as possible to write to the Secretary of State asking for call-in.

There are many, many reasons why the application should be called in but any letter you write does not need to cover them all: the most important thing is that you send a letter or an email urging that ‘the application be called in to Public Inquiry’. Please include Public Inquiry in those words.

Amongst the reasons for call-in are:

• This decision is of regional and national importance;
• NYCC is not impartial: it has a vested interest in the outcome and calls itself the applicant’s ‘partner’;
• The highly technical nature of the project needs a level of expertise greater than NYCC possesses – their Officer’s report states as much with respect to climate change impacts;
• The proposal conflicts with national and EU policies on recycling and carbon emissions;
• The scheme will involve what amounts to state-aid for a private company (the applicant) by subsidizing the cost of treating trade waste via excessively high costs for household waste. This is unacceptable;
• Sustainability is a key test under planning law. AWRP is not a sustainable solution because it does not meet the needs of the present and compromises the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It will destroy valuable material rather than recycle it and expose council tax payers to major financial risks. It will emit substances harmful to man, wildlife and the environment;
• It conflicts with local planning law. Harrogate Borough Council, which would be the planning authority for any industrial development other than a waste plant, is strongly against the application;
• At least two of our MPs are publically opposed to the scheme – Nigel Adams and Andrew Jones – and have requested call-in;
• There’s permanent harm to visual amenity and nationally important local heritage sites caused by siting this industrial building in open countryside. This harm cannot be mitigated.

Letters or emails in your own words from individuals count for more than ones from households, so we would ask that everyone in your home writes to the Secretary of State, no matter how briefly.

The address to write to is:

National Planning Casework Unit, 5 St Philips Place, 
Colmore Row, 
Birmingham 
B3 2PW

The email address to write to is:

bev.jones@communities.gsi.gov.uk, with a copy to npcu@communities.gsi.gov.uk

If you click this link it will setup the email for you to write.

Please ask everyone you know to take a few minutes to write a letter or email as soon as you possible, it really can make a difference.

Call me cynical – but we are not convinced the outcome is anything other than pre-determined, especially since most of the committee has already backed the incinerator solution at the meeting on December 15th 2010.

As yet there is no confirmed venue for the meeting but we are assuming that it will be at County Hall in Northallerton. As soon as we know the venue, we will let you know. Please, please try to attend to show the people making the decision what the people of North Yorkshire think about this dreadful and EXPENSIVE proposal.

We have had a lot of good news recently, including some very positive news for all of us campaigning against the proposals.

• Harrogate Borough Council’s planning committee has again come out whole-heartedly against the planned incinerator – last month members voted unanimously to re-affirm their opposition when they considered supplementary information provided by the applicant, Amey Cespa.
• Two reports commissioned by ourselves and the Parish Councils Group from the highly-respected expert waste consultancy, Eunomia, have been published and are utterly damning of the incinerator proposals. The reports conclude:
  • The proposed plant will be 50% bigger than needed on the day it opens and twice as big as necessary by the end of its life. We’ve said all along it’s too big.
  • Within 13 years of opening, the County Council will be running short of household waste. NYCC think they can make the shortage up with trade waste, but Eunomia say this is a very risky strategy. Penalty clauses mean ratepayers (that’s you and me!!) will foot the bill for any shortfall in the household waste needed to fuel the facility.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from the plant would be at least as bad as those arising from landfilling the waste.
• North Yorkshire County Council’s own County Architect has confirmed the impact on the landscape would be severe and the proposals to mitigate this harm are woefully inadequate (Architect’s report).
• We have also learned that the plant is capable of burning hazardous waste and there would be nothing North Yorkshire County Council or anyone else could do to stop it provided technical permit requirements were met.

The Eunomia reports (Review of Waste Availability and WRATE Analysis) along with a Summary Report have been submitted to NYCC as part of our objections to the scheme, as have detailed responses from the Parish Councils Group and NYWAG to the further submission put in by AmeyCespa.

We remain very positive that the application will get called in by the Secretary of State if NYCC’s planning committee approves it. We’ll then be confronted with making our case at a public inquiry, which will mean considerable expense. So we are continuing our fund-raising efforts and would ask you to support a jumble sale in Green Hammerton on October 20 and other fund-raising events publicised on the website.

More specifically:

“The current submission is therefore unacceptable in landscape terms for the following reasons:

• the development will lead to significant adverse landscape and visual impacts to Allerton Park historic park and garden, to residential properties, footpaths, other sensitive receptors and to the wider landscape context which would be affected by the proposed development, as acknowledged in the assessment
• the submitted landscape mitigation strategy offered does not adequately resolve the identified impacts or lead to a reduction in residual impacts to an acceptable level
• the proposed Landscape Management Strategy and Landscape and Cultural Heritage Fund is not sufficiently developed and targeted to demonstrate that improvement works can be identified, prioritised and delivered to offset residual adverse effects

To read the full report please click here.

You can also see a full list of all the objections submitted here.

You should send your objection to allertonwaste@northyorks.gov.uk with a copy to Shaun.Robson@northyorks.gov.uk.
The planning reference is NY/2011/0328/ENV.

Community Involvement

The NPPF changes the context of the AWRP planning application. The NPPF is intended to allow planning to “include, people and communities” and make it less remote from ordinary people like ourselves. It deplores decisions taken by “remote bodies”.
This challenges NYCC’s presumption that it should decide the AWRP application. We think it should either be decided locally by Harrogate Borough Council or, failing that, at a Public Inquiry where local views can be fully aired.

Sustainability

“At the heart of the National Planning Policy Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development.” – meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Crucially, AWRP does not meet sustainability criteria. The 25 year contract will fundamentally compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs and lead to the destruction of valuable resources that could have been reused or recycled so virgin resources would have to be exploited. The incinerator dominates the facility in cost and treatment volumes and, once built, cannot be reduced in size. Its high cost forces the operator to run it at full capacity even where there is no need within the county to do so.

The NPPF identifies “three dimensions to sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. Use natural resources prudently, minimise waste and pollution, and mitigate and adapt to climate change including moving to a low carbon economy” The proposed AWRP would do none of these things.

The scheme relies on significant Trade Waste being collected by Local Authorities in the County. This is outside the original purpose of the scheme and is anti-competitive; it will put existing local businesses out of business, in favour of a Spanish-owned multi-national. This is not sustainable economically.

NYCC (and hence future generations of its residents) would be committed to the costs of decommissioning the plant and re-instatement of the site. These costs are not known, another nail in the coffin of the idea that this scheme represents Value for Money.

The NPPF states “Sustainable means ensuring that better lives for ourselves don’t mean worse lives for future generations.” This scheme doesn’t even ensure better lives for ourselves because of: excessive cost; inferior recycling capability; increased greenhouse gas generation from increased waste transport distances and waste disposal; serious and unavoidable damage to the local landscape, and; increased risk of pollution from the incineration element. All of these unnecessary outcomes would be worse for future generations.

Locking Out Better Options

The NPPF states “We must respond to the changes that new technologies offer us.” This application fails this test because the proposed technology is out of date and does not offer the best solution to maximising recycling or good value for money. It also locks us out of exploiting newer, cheaper and cleaner options for a generation.

Transport

The NPPF states that all developments which generate significant amounts of movement should be required to provide a Travel Plan. AWRP will result in a significant increase in the distances waste will be transported and an increase in vehicle movements on the dangerous A59/A168 junction yet the planning application does not include a Transport Statement. The AWRP fails to provide such a plan and therefore cannot be approved.

Minerals

The NPPF states that Minerals are essential to support sustainable economic growth and our quality of life. Mineral Extraction is an important contributor to the NYCC rural economy and reinstatement requires landfill. AWRP and NYCC have not quantified the impact of trying to eliminate landfill on this important rural North Yorkshire industry.

NYCC has ample scope for landfill and modern landfill strategies coupled with enhanced recycling and recovery provides a viable alternative, both in the short-term and in the long-term. Don’t let AWRP kill off this opportunity.

Mitigation

The majority (about £1 million) of the proposed mitigation will be spent on features and buildings which are not accessible to the majority of the population of North Yorkshire.

The remainder of the proposals are simply an unachievable wish list. They are unachievable because AWRP do not own the land on which they would like mitigation to take place – e.g. they are suggesting banks of trees to obscure the view of the incinerator. Even when fully grown, these trees would not be big enough to hide the development.

Waste Volumes

The projections of waste volumes that were used to justify the original plan for an incinerator have changed dramatically. Now NYCC say there is a need to incinerate a lot of trade waste to bolster the supply for the incinerator.

This country is already nearing overcapacity for incinerators. Too many incinerators will be competing for too little waste. That means the price will drop. That will blow the financial projections apart. It’s just not needed.

Last Call for the Bike Ride

If you’d like to join our group of cyclists on Saturday September 8th you’ll have a great day out and raise funds for the campaign. Whixley to Filey Sponsored Bike Ride – 57 miles, start at Whixley church 8.30am. There will be a support vehicle. Back roads all the way. If you can’t get sponsorship, please give a donation of £25.