West CumbrIa Mining - a note to protesters
A note to all the objectors, of whom the closest live at least an hour's drive away from Copeland and the furthest are at the opposite end of the country, whom have been sending messages to all members of Cumbria County council asking us to call in or reverse the decision to approve the West Cumbria Mining planning application (much of which is in my division,) which will provide more than five hundred badly needed jobs in West Cumbria.
If any of them should happen to be reading this, please note that
1) People in West Cumbria overwhelmingly support the application. The only flak I have taken from any of my constituents wasn't for urging the committee to grant the application, it was in the opposite direction, particularly over the fact that the application took so long to come to committee.
2) This application was not approved at an Overview and Scrutiny committee but at the Development Control and Regulation Committee, whose decisions are not subject to call-in.
3) Accordingly there is no way for councillors to "call in" the decision.
4) This was not an application to mine coal to burn for energy (and if it had been, the objectors would have had a much stronger case.) It was specifically an application to mine metallurgical coal for use as coking coal in the steel industry.
5) Wind Turbines need steel. Tidal barrages need steel. Just about every major project including every form of renewable energy production needs steel. Every ton of new steel produced with present technology will require coking coal to be dug from somewhere.
6) The choice is to mine the coal and make the steel in the UK, or to do one or both elsewhere, in which case you will have an even bigger release of greenhouse gases from shipping materials around the planet and people in this country will not get the jobs.
If any of them should happen to be reading this, please note that
1) People in West Cumbria overwhelmingly support the application. The only flak I have taken from any of my constituents wasn't for urging the committee to grant the application, it was in the opposite direction, particularly over the fact that the application took so long to come to committee.
2) This application was not approved at an Overview and Scrutiny committee but at the Development Control and Regulation Committee, whose decisions are not subject to call-in.
3) Accordingly there is no way for councillors to "call in" the decision.
4) This was not an application to mine coal to burn for energy (and if it had been, the objectors would have had a much stronger case.) It was specifically an application to mine metallurgical coal for use as coking coal in the steel industry.
5) Wind Turbines need steel. Tidal barrages need steel. Just about every major project including every form of renewable energy production needs steel. Every ton of new steel produced with present technology will require coking coal to be dug from somewhere.
6) The choice is to mine the coal and make the steel in the UK, or to do one or both elsewhere, in which case you will have an even bigger release of greenhouse gases from shipping materials around the planet and people in this country will not get the jobs.
Comments
It appears that the call-in campaign is doomed to fail, being a procedurally flawed tactic then. Personally, even if it wasn't flawed, I can't see what the grounds would be since the decision was unanimous and is loaded with so many conditions that nothing can happen in the short or possibly medium term. Specifically, the offshore Environmental Impact Assessment hasn't been submitted yet and neither has an NMO license application. There will have to be another public consultation at some point for these hurdles. The Coal Authority licenses are also conditional on, et al, a feasibility study and land owner agreement, neither of which have received any public scrutiny as far as I can tell. On top of all that (I have commented on this before but without gaining much traction) the funding supply and control chain through Singapore and the Cayman Islands is open to serious questioning in this post Panama/Paradise Papers and Brexit decision making era. That speculative 2014 £15m now looks particularly interesting in this regard.
All in all, there is, sad to say for those hoping for a share of the 500 jobs, still some way to go even if a call-in isn't on the cards. If only they recognise this, the objectors near and far haven't run out of options just yet as I'm sure the WCM Political Adviser recognises.
I suspect however that if you had been talking to people in a pub in Egremont, St Bees or Whitehaven you might have found a great deal more interest in the application and overwhelming support.
The only flak I've taken so far on this is not for supporting the application but because I also support the conditions of which as you rightly say there are a lot: 99 of them plus a section 106 agreement. (Incidentally I have asked if a report on the implementation of these can come back to the committee - this is unusual but not unprecedented and these are too important for an "approve it and forget about it" approach.)
Yes, WCM they have more to do before they can implement anything but I suspect it will start to get going sooner than people might think.
However this usually happens only when a council is going seriously against national policies or its own policies. You can make a case that this applies to West Cumbria Mining but I would not agree with it.
In every actual call-in with which I am familiar, the decision that the relevant council had taken, had indicated it was "minded" to take or was considering, was a far more evident breach of policy.
And in any case where an application was actually called in where I am familiar with the details, someone - the council itself, the government, or protestors - had flagged the case as a possible call-in well before this stage of the game.
Mind you, nobody can ever take for granted what the government will do. One of the best surprising victories I was ever involved in as a planning councillor involved a call-in by he Secretary of State of an application in the Green Belt which the officers were telling us was contrary to Green Belt policy but on which they also advised we had no chance of sustaining a refusal on appeal.
So instead of granting it outright, which we didn't want to do, or refusing it outright, which would certainly have cost us a very expensive appeal that the officers were convinced we would lose, we decided to see if there was any chance that we could get the government to refuse it for us.
We passed a resolution advising the government department, which is now called DCLG, that we were we were "minded" to grant the application but flagged it to them as a serious breach of green belt policy - which it was - that they might wish to call in.
It was a desperate throw which we didn't really expect to work but to our surprise and delight it did. The government not only called the application in but refused it!
Only goes to show - never take a planning decision for granted.