Villagers’ fury over ash waste ruling
Residents tell of ‘ disbelief’ over council
NORTH YORKSHIRE: Villagers battling plans to allow hundreds of lorries carrying power station ash past their homes are furious that a council based nearly 60 miles away is set to decide on this scheme.
North Yorkshire County Council in Northallerton is also to decide on the planning application by a Zoom meeting.
RESIDENTS BATTLING plans that would see hundreds of lorries transporting millions of tonnes of pulverised power station ash past their homes have voiced exasperation that a council based nearly 60 miles away is set to decide whether to approve the industrial scheme for the next 25 years.
Villagers from Wormersley, Whitley, Great Heck and Cridling Stubbs, near Knottingley, said it was completely unacceptable that Northallerton- based North Yorkshire County Council would later this week set out to decide one of the most controversial planning applications it has dealt with in recent years by a Zoom meeting with very limited, if no public participation.
They said they had been left in disbelief that the authority’s officers had moved to recommend the proposal to extract and export about 23 million tonnes of ash from a 108- hectare area of Gale Common, near the A19.
The site had started taking the ash waste from Ferrybridge and Eggborough power stations in 1963, in the face of a 1,100- signature petition opposing the scheme.
The decision comes as the authority continues to argue the case to retain its boundaries in the formation of a new unitary authority, dismissing claims that it would not understand or be able to focus on important local
issues right across England’s largest county.
The county council’s leadership has said it would devolve some planning decisions to local groups, and that a critical mass of residents is needed for a unitary authority to achieve the best value for taxpayers.
Ahead of the planning meeting, EP UK Investments said the Government had highlighted how there would be a shortage of pulverised fuel ash, which can be used for road construction, creating embankments or in cement and breeze blocks, in the short to medium term if alternatives to domestic direct- use supplies were not identified.
Despite the firm stating the venture would create more than 40 jobs, residents have maintained objections over the scale of the development, road safety, the vibration, noise, dust, emissions and light pollution it would create, the proposed hours of the operation and impact on wildlife that has established itself on the site.
Residents said the firm’s plans would involve more than 250 lorry movements a day, through the village of Whitley, which were intolerable.
In a report to the meeting, the council’s planning officers said: “The extraction of pulverised fuel ash is a mining operation, and very special circumstances do exist because of the potential that the pulverised fuel ash has as a source of secondary aggregate, and that outweighs any potential harm to the Green Belt because of inappropriateness, and any other harm resulting from the proposal.”
They concluded that “on balance” the benefits of using the secondary aggregate outweighed its negative aspects.
Residents said the plans would involve more than 250 lorry movements a day.