Harrogate Council strongly opposes Allerton Park Incinerator

17 February 2012

Harrogate Borough Council’s planning committee met on Tuesday 14 February 2012 and  decided to ‘strongly oppose’ plans to build the waste incinerator at Allerton Park.

The plans being proposed are to build a £250m waste processing facility near Allerton Park that would process black bag waste for the whole of North Yorkshire.

The main access would be from the A1/ A168 and the facility would produce 24 mega watts of electricity or enough to power 40,000 homes. Up to 80% of the waste would be incinerated. The power from the incinerator would be converted to electricity rather than using a CHP (combined heat and power) system as there is no adjacent industry to utilize a CHP plant.

Waste would be transported from all corners of the county, including additional vehicles coming through Harrogate from the Skipton/ Craven area.

The technology and lack of recycling at the proposed facility has been widely criticised. It would also effectively lock the county into that level of recycling for 25 years, although there would be more recycling at source.

Harrogate Council is a consultee on the planning application, with the final say being made by North Yorkshire County Council in July 2012.

Not a single member of the planning committee spoke in favour of the scheme; it was roundly criticised on financial, planning, environmental, heritage, landscape and health grounds. Several speakers expressed the view that the planning application should be called in by the Secretary of State and determined at an independent inquiry, among them North Yorkshire County Councillor John Watson, who also put a strongly worded case against the scheme on financial grounds.

Councillors voted 14 for, none against and one abstention to respond as a local stakeholder to North Yorkshire County Council that they raise strong objections to the planning application citing the following:

  • Contrary to Harrogate Borough Council’s core strategies and local plan policy
  • Adverse impact on Allerton Park both the buildings and the grounds
  • Mass and scale of the proposals
  • Concerns over highway issues
  • Adverse impact on the countryside
  • Need for an incinerator not been proven
  • Concern over toxic fumes
  • Information in the planning application is inadequate

At the planning meeting, Councillor Richard Cooper criticized the application in a number of areas including  for the lack of financial case and the a need for that facility that has not been proven.

Steve Wright NYWAG Chairman said: 

The importance of this decision to our campaign cannot be overstated: everyone involved in supporting campaign and especially those from the local parish councils and NYWAG members, who worked immensely hard to prepare the very detailed case against the application and who spoke at today’s meetings, deserve great credit for their efforts.

AmeyCespa are the main applicants for the facility and although not in attendance at the meeting provided a quote following the outcome.

Bill Jarvis, project director with AmeyCespa said:

Our proposals for Allerton Waste Recovery Park were recognised by Harrogate Borough Council’s officers as being in line with policy and meeting the community’s waste needs. It’s therefore surprising that individual councillors chose not to follow this expert advice.

A number of inaccurate comments and assumptions continue to be made about the proposals, including during the Harrogate Borough Council meeting, and we will continue to correct and address these during the current, ongoing planning process.

Allerton Waste Recovery Park is a major development, designed and sized to deal with North Yorkshire and York’s waste and to deliver cost savings to the authorities and taxpayers. Our proposals follow a rigorous, legal and competitive procurement process that considered a wide variety of waste management options. Through many tiers of scrutiny and consultation, we have also been able to evidence that Allerton Waste Recovery Park provides a cost effective, environmentally sound, technologically advanced and efficient solution for the management of waste for the North Yorkshire and City of York communities, contrary to opposing arguments.

 

5 Comments

  1. Huge RESPECT to the HBC councillors for being independent and true representatives to their electorate rather than being lambs to the NYCC, YCC and AmeyCespa propaganda and mis-information machine that is so clearly demonstrated by the comments made by Bill Jarvis, project director of AmeyCespa.
    It really is about time Mr Jarvis and the officers of NYCC put their hands up and admit the errors of their ways, there is NO harm in admission of errors before huge sums (£100’s millions) are spent BUT there certainly will be HARM if they persist in pursuing this outdated, oversized, overpriced project to the detriment of every resident living and visiting North Yorkshire.
    yours
    jon West

  2. Interesting that AmeyCespa think there were “inaccurate assumptions” made at a meeting which they chose not even to be present. The HBC decision in the face of YCC and NYCC propaganda is the best for constituents, who will otherwise be faced with picking up the financial and environmental bill for an ill-advised, hideously expensive white elephant

  3. We should all stand up in Yorkshire and make it known that the style of reckless expenditure the Yorkshire City Council and North Yorkshire County Council has proposed for the Incineration of Waste in the area cannot be justified. When this proposal was first lauded in front of invitees to consider bidding for the proposal there were three companies present that proposed a complete alternative of turning the waste into ethanol. They were never ever going to be considered for that plant because even though it would have been costed at barely a quarter of the current proposition the Consultants and Advisors had already made their minds up that incineration was the proposed outcome. Now 5 years later the outcome of the planning rebuff and the objections of the public – the Council Tax Payers and financiers to the project – have spoken up and roundly stopped the project.

    Now we hear that at South Milford (which is barely 15 miles or so south of York City) Mytum and Selby has proposed developing the John Smiths Old Maltings Site into a Bioethanol plant – it has been given the name the Maltings Organic Treatment Facility – and it has Full Planning Permission whereby it is allowed to convert the residual waste from the area and make the transportation fuel Ethanol which can be blended with petrol. This proposal has been gathering momentum recently following a delay in closing financing which was the consequence of the current banking crisis when the original financing bank went bankrupt. Now we hear that there are a group of well-healed investors willing to place the capital cost up (the £80 Million) to make this happen.

    For local activists who have garnered support against the Allerton Incineration plant the size of the Maltings Organic Facility is identical to that proposed by York City Council and North Yorkshire County Council.

    Furthermore it is also understood that Mytum and Selby have also set out a bigger plan to develop a second facility in Goole to do the same procedures with the same company in partnership to make Biobutanol for transport uses. That plant will be treating we hear over 700,000 tonnes of residual waste per year and will make around up to 150 Million litres of biofuels in a proposed cost of less than £120/130 million.

    As Mytum and Selby are a local company and has this initiative and drive to innovate what is it about them that is different? Well as it is also reported elsewhere when they were doing their research they went around Europe looking at the best solution for treating waste and their conclusion was that making ethanol was by far the best potential as it reduced the quantity of waste being left to near zero and that even then that final 5% could be used as a filler in concrete.

    I have looked at their web site and came across their planning document from 2009 and it is one that is totally enclosed and contained in water – no chimneys, no smoke, no emissions to the atmosphere. Indeed their proposal followed a document which was widely published in the Chemical Engineers institute in 2008 which showed what the proposal was all about. Now I read that the Company working with them has started work on similar schemes in Holland Malta VietNam the Arabian Gulf in the USA and Canada as well as in Argentina and Israel. Why? Simply because this is the best proposal on offer to provide a real cost effective and environmentally acceptable solution to our waste problems. It is better than all the current choices around and it is being rolled out in a big way from the EU throughout the World.

    Why then don’t we in Yorkshire go this route? We do not need the Allerton Incineration plant as Mytum and Selby’s initiative make that proposal redundant. And the site is just down the road from York off the A1 at barely 16 miles away. This proposal at Allerton (for York City and North Yorkshire County Council) as well as for Leeds City Council is a nonsense. We have a solution with Mytum and Selby who are a traditional local Yorkshire Company and they have a proposal with a UK company for the technology that is irrefutably the best. It has no emissions to the atmosphere, no smells, no chimneys and is totally contained in water.

    Our Councillors and Councils stop this nonsense and let’s send the waste to South Milford down the road to this facility. We would save at least £300 Million straight away in avoiding the Allerton shambles.

  4. DEar Author: Isn’t this whole saga a nonsense?

    The absolute issue is that there is a plant already about and that is the Mytum and Selby Recycling plant at South Milford which has got planning approval and can take all the waste from York City and North Yorks CCs immediately from 2013. This is being built at private costs (NO COUNCIL TAX PAYERS’ MONEY IS INVOLVED) and it is so close that running vehicles along the A1 to the site is not an issue.

    I went to look at the relationship between Allerton and South Milford and there is no competition. These Councils – our Councils – should drop this proposed issue in Allerton now as they are wasting Our Hard Earned money on a foolish proposal.

  5. Whay is it that we here in Southern Europe are so far ahead of you in the UK. We are having built 2 (two) bioetanol plants in Malta and a further 40 (fourty) all using waste products. Now I hear that the company is going to build even more plants in Tunisia Egypt and the Gulf. This is the same company you are talking about in Milford. We cannot afford them in this part of the world so why then are you?

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