Incinerators

Debate between Andrew Jones and Nigel Adams

Tuesday 26th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for securing this very important debate on a subject that is exercising the mind of many of my constituents in Selby and Ainsty, and constituents from across the whole of North Yorkshire. Let me take this opportunity to remind my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) that there is only one county that can be called “God’s own”, and that is Yorkshire.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recently announced that as part of the comprehensive spending review, it reviewed the amount of private finance initiative grant that the Government need to put into local government-funded waste-treatment infrastructure. It concluded that some projects will not go ahead. However, thousands of concerned North Yorkshire residents will be disappointed that the North Yorkshire and city of York waste PFI project at Allerton Park is one of the 11 projects that will retain its provisional allocation of PFI credits. Will the Minister be kind enough to let me know why the Allerton Park project is one of those schemes to escape the CSR axe and on what grounds the decisions on what scheme to keep or scrap were made? Furthermore, will the Minister tell me and my concerned constituents, thousands of whom have signed a petition against the proposal, whether he believes that North Yorkshire county council is using public money wisely by signing up the public purse to a 25 to 30-year PFI project, with an initial cost to the taxpayer of £65 million, especially during such straitened times?

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

Let me add my concerns to the debate about Allerton Park. The financial case for the proposal at Allerton Park is deeply flawed. The proposed incinerator will require 300,000 tonnes of waste a year, yet the household waste generated across North Yorkshire will not reach that level. That means that the incinerator will have to take commercial waste; there is nothing wrong with that, but it means that the risk will be with the local taxpayer, and the gain will be with the incinerator operators.

[Nigel Adams]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Many local residents and I believe that the PFI project is flawed because it relies on forecasts of increasing waste volumes, low recycling and rising landfill tax over the next 25 to 30 years. To the best of my knowledge, the Minister’s Department does not know what the level of landfill tax is likely to be in five years’ time, let alone in 25 years’ time. North Yorkshire’s figures potentially overestimate domestic waste volumes and underestimate increases in recycling. The result is that the intended incinerator capacity is likely to be almost twice the necessary amount, so the project cost savings may very well not be realised, and that potentially means a bad deal for taxpayers.