Fight for fairness as inner-city residents need room to breathe
An independent housing consultant’s passionate call for environmental justice in Cardiff will have a resonance across Wales, says Political editor-at-large Martin Shipton
FOR Tamsin Stirling, communities like Splott in Cardiff, where she has lived for more than 20 years, are having to cope with more than their fair share of environmental degradation.
She’s convinced it’s time for a rethink and has written a blog post in which she argues that public authorities need to think more carefully about the impact of developments on people’s living space.
In it, she states: “The other day I was playing around with a mapping app, drawing circles of various sizes centred on where we live in Splott as part of planning a photography project I’ve been thinking about.
“I then started moving the circle around the city. Immediately evident was the difference in the overall amount and scale of green spaces in different parts of the city. Having lived in Splott for over 20 years, of course I knew this, but, as they say, a picture paints a thousand words. And the issue of people’s access to green space has become so much more important in the last year.
“I then started thinking about the quality of the environment across the city, the concentration of various industries and facilities in certain places that affect certain communities and the broader issue of environmental justice.”
Her part of the city – Splott and Tremorfa – includes a steelworks, the water and waste treatment works for the whole of south-east Wales, an energy-from-waste incinerator, a plethora of light industrial estates with various uses and associated environmental impacts and risks, as well as the very busy roads between
Cardiff Bay and the A48.
One of the city’s two landfill sites is close by.
She stated: “The large industrial and waste sites generate significant traffic, with lorries driving to drop off and/or pick up waste or goods.
“In the case of the energy-fromwaste incinerator, in March 2017 Cardiff council’s planning committee approved an increase in tonnage of waste that the plant can ‘treat’, ie burn, each year and modified the Section 106 [community benefit] requirement that only waste from south-east Wales will be burnt. This meant more traffic to and from the incinerator.
“Analysis in 2020 by the environmental consultancy Eunomia concluded that incineration cannot be considered a ‘green’ or low-carbon source of energy. And that’s before taking into account emissions from all those lorry journeys – let’s hope the lorries are electric.
“The Welsh Government has proposed a moratorium on future development of large-scale energy-fromwaste incinerators. This is positive, but we are stuck with the one in Splott.
“Now there is a proposal for a biomass plant which will burn imported wood to generate energy.
“Apart from the issue as to whether this makes any sense at all in terms of an adequate or appropriate response to the climate crisis, its location is certainly not environmentally just.
“We are in danger of repeating past mistakes – ending up with another allegedly ‘green’ technology that is quickly outdated and does not help the transition to zero carbon. And its location will add to the environmental injustice already faced by the communities of Splott and Tremorfa. I doubt whether such a proposal would even be put forward, let alone approved, in or adjacent to a more affluent part of the city.
“I am sure that some people will write this off as a personal gripe. Well yes, this is personal. Like so many residents of Splott and Tremorfa, I live each day with industrial noise, poor air quality and limited access to quality green space within walking distance.
“And the sense that our community is not treated fairly when compared to other communities across the city.
“It’s my community and there are many great things about it. These include some fantastic communitylevel projects such as Green Squirrel, Railway Gardens, Growing Street Talk and Keep Splott Tidy, all supporting community members to improve our local environment and having a positive impact.
“But decisions like the biomass plant take us in the wrong direction. I would very much like to see things change for our community when it comes to the bigger picture on the environment; let’s get environmental justice on the agenda of those making decisions about our city.”
Splott Labour councillor Ed Stubbs is also deputy chairman of the council’s planning committee.
He said: “Tamsin really captures the challenges we face with regards to air quality. While the measured air quality in Splott is better than that in surrounding areas like Roath, Cathays and Penylan, we must remain vigilant and act to bring it down further.
“As with the rest of Cardiff, the major contributing factor to air pollution here is traffic. If we are to avoid the problems faced by other wards, we must face the uncomfortable fact that we have to make fewer car journeys.
“Like Tamsin, I oppose biomass and that’s why I worked with environmental groups to oppose outline planning permission and would oppose it if they sought full planning permission.
“We regularly meet with Celsa Steel and the community and have got them to invest in improvements to get better air quality.
“We do need more green space. The Victorian urban planners who built Splott were not as green-space conscious as the planners who built Tremorfa with two parks – Tremorfa Park and Splott Park. Tremorfa Park in particular is a great example of a really big park built in a very urban area. I have long considered it one of Cardiff’s best parks and miss being run director to the park run I helped establish as there are very few areas in Cardiff with a big enough park.
“It was later housing clearances that created the space for Moorland Park and that demonstrates the difficulty we face in providing green space in urban areas.
“Following our intervention as councillors, Cardiff council leased land to Green Squirrel for their exciting project on Railway Street and we have subsequently supported their efforts to get funding. With plans to move Willows School to a brownfield site, I look forward to working with the community on more open space.
“The huge investment in sea defences will open up the coastal path more to residents and we look forward to this.
“Myself and ward colleagues love living in Splott. It’s a great place to live and there are exciting things happening here – new schools, new open space planned and, importantly, a great community.”