independent Cornish news and comment

No to incinerator

A local MP has contacted hundreds of community organisations across Cornwall, urging them to join his call for a planning inquiry into the proposed waste incinerator at St. Dennis, on the grounds is goes against planning policy.

The planning application from waste management company SITA is currently with Cornwall County Council awaiting decision. If approved, the incinerator would process all of Cornwall’s non-recycled waste, taking the place of the county’s landfill sites. Truro & St Austell MP Matthew Taylor has written to Parish Councils, Churches, Village Halls, and Women’s Institutes and other community organisations across the whole of Cornwall encouraging them to write to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears MP to ‘make themselves heard’ and demands she calls it in for a planning inquiry before final decisions are made. Only the Government can “call in” the application, and is only likely to if there is enough evidence that this is what the public want, and that it contradicts planning policy.

Mr Taylor has already written to the Secretary of State calling for an inquiry to “test thoroughly” the scheme and its alternatives. The MP is pointing out an inquiry is required where a proposal contravenes regional and national policy. Mr Taylor, supported by Cornwall’s other MPs and Restormel Borough Council, believes the single incinerator proposal for Cornwall contravenes planning policy requiring waste to be disposed of as near to its source as possible. The St. Dennis site would require more than 100 lorries every day to transport the waste from across Cornwall in up to 140 mile round trips. This, Mr Taylor says, is a direct contradiction of South-West Spatial Planning Policy, which calls for waste to be treated as “close as possible to where it is derived”.

Commenting, Mr Taylor said:

“I have explained to the Minister Hazel Blears, and the Regional Government Office that communities across Cornwall want the best waste solutions for Cornwall. The question marks over this incinerator are serious ones, and need to be properly resolved one way or the other at the enquiry. People in Cornwall need to let the Minister know that they share this concern.”

Both regional and national policies also stress the need for waste management strategy to look forward “for a fifteen to twenty year period”. Mr Taylor has raised the fact that a growing emphasis on reducing and recycling waste means that there is likely to be less waste in future years. As such, there is a risk such a large incinerator would not run at maximum efficiency, which would lumber Cornwall with a ‘costly white elephant’.