Incinerators

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I am pleased, Mr Dobbin, to address this subject under your chairmanship. It is a serious one for my constituents, and my focus today is on localism.

I appreciate the Minister making time to respond to the debate. I hope that he will clarify Government policy on incineration and say how it relates to empowering local communities to make decisions about their areas. I am delighted to see that he is to respond to the debate; he successfully held the same position in opposition for a number of years. I am particularly pleased that he visited Middlewich in my constituency when he was shadow Minister responsible for agriculture—I last raised this question with him then—so he knows the town of which I shall be speaking.

I hope that my contribution will be followed by one from my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook). An incinerator has been installed in her constituency, and I hope that what she says will serve to show what can happen to towns once an incinerator has been built.

I am holding a file 2 inches thick, which is full of correspondence from my constituents. They do not want an incinerator 500 metres from Middlewich town. I have received no letters of support for an incinerator there—not one. Most of the letters in this folder are individually written, including one from a seven-year-old boy who lives near where the planned incinerator would be built.

The local council refused planning permission for the incinerator earlier this year. Its decision is now being appealed. The final say lies with the Secretary of State, who will have to make a decision in the near future, so I understand that details of this case cannot be discussed by the Minister today. However, I believe that we should discuss the principles.

I hope that the Minister will agree that a local community should be able to decide on its identity. Middlewich is a friendly, small market town with a population of approximately 13,000, and it has tremendous community spirit. It has a rich past as a Roman settlement, and it is a former salt-mining community. It has a good selection of independent shops, pubs and cafés. The Trent and Mersey canal goes right through the town. The strong local community has worked hard to develop a vibrant tourist industry, including an annual boat and folk festival that attracts some 20,000 visitors.

Community life in Middlewich involves the whole community, as well as churches, schools and local organisations. For example, the British Legion and the rotary club, among others, will soon hold a weekend-long charity beer festival. Only two weeks ago, it seemed that the whole town had dressed up in period costume for a world war two event. The community of Middlewich remains strong in its ability to attract visitors, and it is a pleasant place to live, work and bring up a family.

Constituents have told me that more than 7,000 people signed a petition against the planned incinerator. That is more than half of the Middlewich population. I understand that no fewer than 3,300 letters of objection were sent to the council about the original planning application. When the planning committee refused the application earlier this year, hundreds of people from the Middlewich area attended at the civic hall. There was standing room only. I was glad to witness the fact that it was the unanimous decision of local councillors on the Cheshire East planning committee to reject the planning application.

In addition to the overwhelming desire of local people not to see the plan proceed, there are many other reasons why it was right that the planning application should have been rejected. The site is inappropriate. It is not identified as a preferred site in the Cheshire replacement waste local plan. At a public inquiry, only six sites in Cheshire were deemed suitable for thermal treatment, and Middlewich is not one of them. I understand that the nearest resident lives approximately 150 metres from the proposed site. As one resident has written, the site

“is too close to the town, schools, residential areas and farmland.”

Middlewich people work hard to make the town pleasant for visitors and residents, including through the various festivals that take place throughout the year, with people putting up bunting and flags and making their town attractive. All that would be dwarfed by the proposed construction of this enormous incinerator, which would have a smoke stack almost as tall as a football field is long. It would dominate the town and the surrounding countryside.

Traffic flow into and out of Middlewich is already bad. To feed the hunger of the planned incinerator, waste would have to be imported to the local area to be burned. That would affect local roads by increasing the already great congestion. The traffic flow through Middlewich is already heavy at daily peak times, and long tailbacks occur.

I am informed that the applicant’s estimate of the number of trips that would be generated if the incinerator was built is another 156 or so two-way movements of heavy vehicles along the A54 each day. However, as the source of the waste processed has not yet been fully identified—most of it, if not all, will come from outside Middlewich—any definitive statement by the applicant about the impact of traffic must be unsound. One thing is for sure: it would considerably exacerbate already serious daily traffic problems. Hon. Members may recall film footage of the traffic gridlock that occurred last winter during the severe bad weather; then, lorries had to travel through and to Middlewich for additional salt from the nearby British Salt depot.

Building an incinerator near Middlewich town centre would also be detrimental to employment. Far from the new development being a positive contribution to increased local employment, the plans could prove highly unfavourable to local employment prospects. The planned plant might create up to 50 jobs, but it could jeopardise many more. Future employers could be deterred from locating their premises in the vicinity of a waste incinerator for a variety of reasons. That applies particularly to the retail, food, leisure and service sectors.

Such community matters are not the only important factors, however; just as important are the principles of environmental safety and sustainability. Cheshire has a cluster of planned incinerators. Two are still to be determined; one is at Lostock in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans)

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Dobbin (in the Chair)]

Order. This is a half-hour debate, and interventions should be short.

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes my points for me. If the four planned incinerators in Cheshire go ahead, there will be over-provision. There is no need for a further facility at Middlewich. That was confirmed in the original planning refusal, which stated that there would be an over-provision of waste facilities. It undermines the sustainability principle, which is that waste should be disposed of at an appropriate nearby location and should not be transported long distances.

My constituents are also concerned about the environmental and health implications of multiple incinerators in relatively close proximity to one another. Until a better scientific understanding is gained and the public can be reassured about such implications, my constituents feel that the precautionary principle should be applied.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I do not want to go into the details of the incineration in Middlewich, but it is important to understand why we incinerate or combust. This country continues to put more waste into landfill than any other country in Europe, which is a disgrace. There is a large landfill tip in Warrington that causes as much distress for residents as incinerators—I prefer to call them combined heat and power plants. Of course it is wrong to put such things in the wrong place, and we should be cognisant of local planning considerations. We also need to understand that landfill is, environmentally, the worst of all options, and it cannot be right that we continue to have more landfill than any other country in Europe.

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Indeed, that is why the Middlewich residents are so offended; in November 2007, approval was given for a new landfill site, which is to be positioned less than half a mile away from the proposed new incinerator.

Let me touch on a further problem relating to the Government’s climate change and energy policy. Even if one recognises that waste management needs to be properly framed within a national strategy, there is a good argument to say that the planned incinerator in my constituency would fall foul of important efficiency criteria in the EU waste framework directive of 2008. I am not always fond of the EU, but the directive highlights the importance of efficiency in incineration for the purposes of creating energy and heat. It requires that incinerators be labelled as “recovering” energy from waste only if they have a burn and energy creation efficiency of some 65%. If they do not reach that criterion, they are to be considered a disposal facility. In other words, they would be on a par with landfills.

I am reliably informed that the normal efficiency of incinerators in the UK is about 25%, and that the efficiency of the one in Middlewich, according to the company that wants to build it, would be, at best, 26%. It is interesting to note that one of the original reasons for refusing the initial application was that the applicant had not shown that it had made adequate provision for

“means of grid connection for the recovery and export of energy for the facility.”

Let us not delude ourselves: in the waste hierarchy, a low efficiency rating is on a par with landfill. That is not sustainable and should not be considered environmentally friendly. The Sustainable Development Commission has recommended that only high-efficiency energy from waste plants—namely energy from plants that produce a 65% return on burning waste—should receive Government support, and I agree with it.

Furthermore, the principle that the Government are promoting, whereby local communities should decide how best to deal with their own waste, does not seem to apply either to the process of appealing to the national level, or to the logic of the use of large-scale imported incineration. In reference to an application made by Covanta in the Mid Bedfordshire constituency, the Prime Minister recently said that it is right that

“decisions should be made locally. We want to make sure that all the latest technology for alternatives to incineration is considered, so that we can make sure that we are using the best ways to achieve a green approach.”—[Official Report, 30 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 851.]

There is clearly consensus on this issue in the coalition.

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said:

“We support modern energy generation from waste where local communities want it and where it makes good environmental sense.”——[Official Report, 1 July 2010; Vol. 512, c. 977.]

I emphasise the words

“where local communities want it”.

That is the principle to which we should adhere. Local people should decide about such matters. We can talk about national policies, but there is one overriding factor that distant decision-makers ignore at their peril: the people of Middlewich do not want the incinerator, and Middlewich is their home.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—