Waste Management Sites

Elsie Blundell Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Elsie Blundell (Heywood and Middleton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Fleetwood (Lorraine Beavers) for securing the debate.

As parliamentarians, each of us recognises the necessity of waste facilities and the function that they perform, but local communities should not have to tolerate the conditions that residents of mine in Heywood have been forced to put up with in recent years. Due to the prevailing wind direction in my part of the world, my constituents continue to endure appalling odours emitted from the Valencia Waste Management site on Pilsworth Road. The landfill there opened over 50 years ago. As it has gradually filled, it has become increasingly unbearable for local residents, which has led to the creation of the Heywood Against Landfill group. I take this opportunity to commend them for their enduring activism. The site also hosts a recycling centre, which I understand is also contributing significantly to the current issues.

Heywood Against Landfill has made it clear to Valencia, as have I, that the operation of the site has driven so many nearby to the point of utter dismay, with stark implications for their quality of life. Windows had to remain shut, people could not put washing out to dry, and many even began to question the elevated number of respiratory illnesses in the town. Heywood Against Landfill rightly urged members of the public to raise their concerns with the Environment Agency and lobbied for action to be taken. We eventually ensured that the site was closed while remedial action was taken. That lasted about 18 months, demonstrating the scale of what local people had been forced to deal with.

In my view, it would be legitimate to say—as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Fleetwood—that working-class communities such as mine are disproportionately bearing the brunt of these impacts. Despite the supposed remedial action that has been taken and the supposed monitoring of the site by the Environment Agency, this is something that my constituents are having to contend with yet again—truly, it is groundhog day for people in Heywood.

Following the site’s reopening, the odour from it continued to affect the wellbeing of local people. The tireless campaign group met with Valencia on 1 June, but the company continues to say that no breaches are taking place.

[Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an important speech and representing her constituents very well. I want, perhaps unusually, to put on record an example of good practice by a waste management company. In my constituency, the community engagement team at Viridor, led by Karen Peer, do excellent work with local schools and the community to make sure that they are aware of what is happening. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should see that kind of practice across the country?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Blundell]

I absolutely agree, and I would like to see more of that, not least in my constituency.

The Environment Agency countenanced the site’s reopening, and it was adamant that it had the means to monitor the air quality and odour levels, yet less than a year down the line, we are back where we started, and my constituents, like many represented here today, are suffering the consequences of the agency’s inability to address the core problems. That is because we do not have the means to handle nuisance concerns around recycling in the same way that we do for landfill. In such situations, lived experience matters. The executives of Valencia would not live anywhere near one of these sites themselves, but our constituents are expected to suck it up and put up with entirely unacceptable conditions.

Heywood Against Landfill has now designed an online odour complaint reporting log, which sends each instance directly to the Environment Agency. That is great, but the group would rather not spend its valuable time doing that. The group’s efforts will highlight once again the scale of the issue in Heywood, but it remains clear that there needs to be enforcement action to match the level of ongoing outrage.

I understand that the waste strategy is due for review in this Parliament. From speaking with local residents, it is clear that they are desperate for the strategy to give greater consideration to the impact of poorly managed sites that also take recycling. They want legislation to safeguard local people. In many cases, there seems to be no way of scrutinising the operations of these sites, as other hon. Members have said, with much of the so-called enforcement action being toothless and ineffective.

What consideration has been given to delivering a bold and transformative waste strategy that protects people in Heywood from living in such conditions—specifically one that factors in poorly performing sites that handle recycling waste? What assessment has been made of the effectiveness of the Environment Agency? I appreciate the point made about successive Conservative Governments cutting its funding and staff, but what consideration has been given to strengthening penalties for the executives of waste operators that pay no mind to the communities in which they function? What consideration has been given to making community engagement mandatory for operators such as Valencia, and the implementation of robust standards in this respect?

The people of Heywood should not have to put up with this any longer, and they should not have had to put up with it in the first place. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Fleetwood is right: working-class communities shoulder the burden of regulators lacking the will or the means to engage with the lived experience of those affected by this sort of behaviour by operators. I hope that the Minister can offer some clarity on these points, and will make it clear to residents in Heywood that they are not without a voice, that the Government are listening, and that living in these conditions should not be a collateral consequence that those in power seem all too willing to accept.

Planning, the Green Belt and Rural Affairs

Elsie Blundell Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Elsie Blundell (Heywood and Middleton North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to make my maiden speech during this debate. I am so proud to represent Heywood and Middleton North. It is a new constituency, comprising part of Rochdale and most of the former Heywood and Middleton seat, both in Greater Manchester.

People from my constituency have long shaped our parliamentary democracy. Heywood is the birthplace of Peter Heywood, famous for apprehending Guy Fawkes in the cellar beneath Parliament in 1605. Middleton, too, has a famous son in Sam Bamford, the radical social reformer who led a contingent of weavers from Middleton into Manchester in 1819. Their peaceful protest for political representation ended in massacre at St Peter’s Field.

Spotland, in the Rochdale part of my constituency, is home to a stone road widely known as Cotton Famine Road. It is a monument to the cotton workers who lived there in the 1860s, and who bravely sided with the Union cause during the American civil war. It was a selfless act, especially as the Union side at that time was preventing goods from leaving Confederate ports. This resulted in a shortage of cotton supplies—a cotton famine—and caused unemployment, poverty and hardship across Lancashire, but support for President Lincoln and his pledge to end the slave trade held firm.

The workers’ campaign was supported by Rochdale statesman and radical John Bright, of whom a sculpture can be found in the Lower Waiting Hall of Westminster Palace. Bright was a lifelong campaigner against slavery and is especially well known for his role in abolishing the corn laws, alongside another great parliamentarian, Richard Cobden, who—with apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh)—I will claim as a predecessor, as large parts of what was his constituency now fall under Heywood and Middleton North boundaries.

The history of the area I represent, then, is strongly linked to many political and social reforms in this country and around the world, and to ideals and values that we hold close to this day: that there is no place for violence in our politics; that the circumstances a person is born into must not prevent them from participating in our democracy; and that—as those cotton workers knew in the 1860s—we should be compassionate to all people regardless of race, class or any other distinction.

Alongside Heywood, Middleton and Spotland, I have the privilege of representing the former mill town of Castleton, with its proud history of manufacturing and engineering, and the fantastic villages of Bamford and Norden.

My constituency was also home to renowned architect Edgar Wood, who is widely recognised as the most advanced English architect of his time. More recently, Heywood was the birthplace of Ian Simpson—one half of SimpsonHaugh & Partners—whose buildings, such as Beetham Tower and One Blackfriars, compel people to look up to the skylines in both Manchester and London.

To this day, it is the people of Heywood and Middleton North who continue to make the place great, and I would like to use this speech to pay tribute to some of them. They include retail workers such as Robert and Brenda Bell from Heywood, who are also proud trade unionists, for whom the employment rights Bill, set out in the King’s Speech, will create extra rights to work flexibly and make parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal day-one rights. This Government will also ban zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire.

Then there are the many volunteers, including the Pullen family, who run the 1st Heywood Scouts Group; Howard Bowden and Simon Bennett, who do excellent work through the Friends of Jubilee Park group and St Edmund’s church; and Pete Knowles and his group of volunteers at Stoney Hill community wildlife area, who protect and promote our beautiful meadows and woodlands and make sure that children in a relatively urban area can access nature too. People like these make my constituency great, and I will do everything that I can to support them.

I would like to pay tribute to my predecessors. Chris Clarkson has represented the people of Heywood and Middleton for the past four and a half years. I know that many Members of this House valued his good humour and enjoyed working alongside him, including on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.

Liz McInnes was the MP for Heywood and Middleton between 2014 and 2019, and served in two shadow ministerial roles. Liz worked incredibly hard in both of those positions and was a fierce advocate for her constituents on many issues, including the NHS, in which she had previously worked.

For the past seven years, I have enjoyed a career in transport planning. I am incredibly pleased by the measures set out in the King’s Speech to accelerate infrastructure delivery and to improve our transport network. Unfortunately, many people in my constituency do not have access to the opportunities and jobs they need, as Heywood and Middleton—despite their location in the great, modern city region of Greater Manchester—are two of the largest towns in the north-west of England not to be served by a rail station or Metrolink tram stop. As one former shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, argued in a recent paper, there has been too little transport investment in low-productivity areas such as mine. We need to improve transport connectivity throughout city regions like Greater Manchester because good transport infrastructure allows for more frequent interaction between people and creates larger pools of workers for businesses.

Earlier this month, we received promising news from the Greater Manchester combined authority of a re-commitment to the linking of Middleton into Greater Manchester’s Metrolink network and of progress on plans for Heywood’s tram-train connection. In future, that will form part of the city region’s integrated transport network, which Greater Manchester must carry on delivering at pace, to boost productivity, pay, jobs and living standards in Heywood and Middleton North.

Finally, when it comes to devolution for our city region the job is well under way, but we must be mindful of the fact that it is not yet finished. I look forward to supporting our new Government, because I know that, through the English devolution Bill and other measures, they will put power back into the hands of working people and money back into their pockets. They will strive to ensure that powerful forces are not able to disenfranchise those people again. Throughout history, my constituents have had too much experience of that.

I thank right hon. and hon. Members for their attention, and I thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to make my first contribution.