West Cumbria Mining gets the go-ahead
Great news for West Cumbria as the government announces that the West Cumbria Mining application, unanimously approved earlier this week by councillors of all parties on Cumbria County Council's Development Control committee and ratified again yesterday, will not be called in.
This means that the development of a mine to extract metallurgical coal for the steel industry can go ahead, providing 500 badly needed jobs in Copeland.
This is about getting coking coal which is needed to produce steel locally in Britain rather than strip-mining it in the USA and shipping it over the Atlantic. This is NOT about coal to burn for energy, and indeed, because the coal will be sourced locally rather than carried a significant proportion of the way round the world, it will have a LOWER carbon footprint.
If Lib/Dem MP Tim Farron, who tried to get the mine "called in" and stopped, does not understand this then he doesn't listen to his own local Lib/Dem county councillors, including the chairman of the committee, who all voted for the application and could have explained to him why it should go ahead.
Copeland's Conservative MP Trudy Harrison said
“Coking coal is essential for the steel industry and this has been rightly recognised.”
POSTSCRIPT 3RD NOVEMBER
I want to add to the above post that when the County Council's development control committee discussed the West Cumbria Mining application on Thursday 31st October and ratified their decision to support the grant of planning permission for the mine, they did so on the following basis:
1) That there would be an addendum to the original wording in respect of the Section 106 agreement adding an obligation on West Cumbria Mining to pay for improvements to the St Bees Road/Mirehouse Road junction.
2) The conditions under which planning permission should be granted from the original committee report (there were a hundred of them) still stand.
The report to the committee meeting on 31st October, which anyone can read on the County Council website here, proposes that the original planning condition stand, with the following additional text about the road junction:
"We have also taken the opportunity to propose adding an obligation to the S106 Agreement for a financial contribution to the Council to ensure that works to the access with the junction with the public highway and necessary improvements to the Mirehouse Road / St Bees Road junction are carried out.
The works are necessary to ensure the safe access and egress to the site and at the Mirehouse Road / St Bees Road junction and this has been agreed with West Cumbria Mining."
This was agreed by the committee on Thursday.
Comments
If by "clearing those pesky conditions" you mean meeting them, that's fine. If you or anyone else imagine that the conditions are going to be dropped or ignored, forget it.
Those conditions - a hundred of them - were agreed by the committee and as I understand it, by West Cumbria Mining, who certainly didn't object to them at the meeting, for very good reasons. Those conditions are necessary to protect the environment enjoyed by my constituents.
The committee discussed the planning application again on 31st October and ratified their decision to approve the application, including the original conditions, with an addendum clarifying the junction improvements required under the Section 106 agreement at the St Bees Road, Mirehouse Road junction. The published report says that the required work on this junction was agreed with West Cumbria Mining.
As for the decisions on fracking and the decision to lift the direction on CCC, both were related to the dissolving of parliament and the upcoming election as you know. It would be interesting to read why the Government kept the latter, which I only picked up on after the meeting brief was published the week before, in place for so long if the balance in favour is so clear cut.
I specifically asked at the meeting which originally approved the application that the implementation of the conditions should come back to the committee so that there would be transparency on the enforcement of the conditions and to ensure that it is taken seriously.
If you want to be cynical you can accuse any government or opposition party of taking any decision or adopting any policy because there is an election coming up - it is impossible to prove or disprove such statements.
However, the fact that you can make the same such allegation about two different decisions does not prove that those decisions are related in any other way.
As for fracking, it was banned on the same day that new scientific evidence was published indicating that it is much more difficult than had previously been thought to safely predict the earthquake risk from fracking.
I think the evidence for the lifting of the WCM decision directive would convince even the most open minded constituent that Mrs Harrison felt justifiably concerned that it's existence had become widely known after the officer's report. Sufficiently concerned to have it lifted in time for her doorstep campaign I'd say.
I approved it for publication as soon as I noticed it.
New thread on this issue today (25th May)