Dear Mr Pickles....
UGc picture for Lynn News
LAWYER and campaigner John Martin writes an open letter to local government minister Eric Pickles,
inviting him to ‘call in’ the incinerator planning application
It entitles you to take out of the hands of a local authority any planning application that comes before it, and decide yourself whether planning permission should be granted.
And there is no statutory right of appeal against what you choose to do. Of course, it would not be appropriate for you to use this power of call-in, as it is termed, widely or indiscriminately.
In fact, Government guidance tells us that you will only exercise it if planning issues of more than local importance are involved.
In the past months, you will have received any number of requests asking you to call-in the planning application for a waste incinerator at King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
A great many differing reasons for those requests will have been stated. I don’t want to analyse those reasons in this letter, valid though many of them are. I just want to remind you of a decision that you made some time ago in a case that bears so many similarities.
In 2009, you called-in a planning application to build a waste incinerator at Rainworth, Nottinghamshire. It was intended to burn 180k tonnes of domestic waste a year, and the project had attracted enormous opposition.
A waste PFI contract had previously been signed by the local authority. The resulting local inquiry sat for 22 days. The inspector’s report ran to 280 pages. He recommended refusal of planning permission. You agreed with that recommendation. The waste incinerator was therefore never built. Let us look at the reasons why you called-in this planning application in the first place.
Your principal concern was that the Rainworth proposals potentially conflicted with national planning policies on important matters.
You cited particularly policies set out in the Government’s Planning Policy Statements 1 and 10, which deal respectively with sustainable development and sustainable waste management. You also questioned whether the appraisal of alternative sites was sufficiently robust.
Well, major objections already made to the King’s Lynn proposals seem to be remarkably similar. It is argued that these proposals fail to reflect the proximity principle in Planning Policy Statement 1, and because of the likely levels of residual waste available are also contrary to policies set out in Planning Policy Statement 10 encouraging the use of other means of dealing with waste that are higher up the waste hierarchy.
Finally, the robustness of the alternative sites appraisal has been questioned. So, Mr Pickles, please be prepared at the appropriate time to call-in the King’s Lynn planning application also.
And if consistency in planning decision-making, which has always been viewed as necessary to maintain public confidence in the planning system, is not high on your list of priorities let me finally throw this thought onto the table.
It may take you out of the safe confines of Government guidance on the use of your call in power, but that power is nevertheless yours exclusively to exercise.
Imagine a local authority that has gone through lengthy negotiations to put in place a £670 million waste PFI contract for the construction (and operation over a period of 25 years) of a waste incinerator. It has spent large sums of council taxpayers’ money on land acquisition and professional fees.
Central government then gives it
£169 million to help out. The local authority enters into the contract, and as part of its obligations it agrees to pay compensation of up to £20.3 million to the other party if planning permission for the waste incinerator is not forthcoming.
The other party then applies for planning permission. The local authority itself determines the application and, unsurprisingly, grants permission.
The expression “judge in its own cause” is immediately the headline in the local newspaper. What credit does that bring?
Yours, John Martin
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Weather for King's Lynn
Thursday 24 May 2012
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