Update - West Cumbria mine application approved

Spent much of today at the Development Control committee at County Hall in Kendal where the West Cumbria mine application was being considered.

Four speakers from West Cumbria, plus the applicant, spoke in favour of the proposal: myself, Mayor of Copeland Mike Starkie, Mirehouse community worker Keith Cartner, and David Douglas.
.
There were also a number of "public participation" speakers against the application most of whom did not give much detail about where they live or work. None of the objectors claimed to live or work in Copeland and of those who made any reference to where they are based, none claimed to live in West Cumbria or anywhere nearer to West Cumbria than Lakeland. 

I'd like to congratulate Keith Cartner on a very powerful speech about the needs of the local community in Mirehouse and David Douglas on a very effective demolition of the supposedly "green" argument against a mine to produce coking coal specifically for making steel (which is that the application proposed.)

As David Douglas pointed out, you cannot make wind turbines, cars, buses or trains without steel. the same applies to many other things which a modern economy depends on. To make steel you need coking coal.

While we are using steel there will be a steel industry and it will use coal which must be mined somewhere. At the moment the UK steel industry uses coal mined in the USA using methods which do far more damage to the environment than the new mine proposed for West Cumbria will.

I am pleased to report that the committee voted unanimously to approve the application subject to a planning agreement and a long list of conditions.

Comments

garyb said…
It came as no surprise to me that approval was unanimous, since the hopes of local job opportunities were always going to carry the day. Did the company argue against any of the conditions or was it, as might be expected with cooperative working between applicant and planners, a united front and hence the conditions are as presented in the officer's report? Either way, the local community has had its say. From now on the decisions are in the hands the Environment Agency, the Marine Management Organisation, the Coal Authority and the palaces of Buckingham, Windsor and Westminster.
8:40 am
Chris Whiteside said…
The officers updated the conditions at the meeting, for example to make the controls on the hours trains can run on a Saturday more restrictive, and added one new one on water at the request of UU, taking the number of conditions up to 99 (plus the requirement for a section 106 agreement.)

No, the applicant did not object to any of the conditions. You may well be right that the officers and applicant have worked together to reach agreement on the conditions - that is not necessarily a bad thing provided the officers are not too much of a "soft touch" because if the developer is on board with the conditions there is a better chance that they will be properly implemented.

I should add that in several important areas such as materials and landscaping the impact of the conditions is not yet finalised as the applicants have to produce and agree with the council a plan on how the relevant issue will be addressed before the development starts.

Both myself and Councillor Keith Hitchen raised issues in respect of the conditions and I actually asked that some of the more important ones come back to the committee - this is unusual but not unprecedented in major or complex planning applications and this is about as major and complex as it gets.

The committee did not insist on this but I spoke afterwards to the chairman and senior officer and both were sympathetic and indicated that they might well take up the suggestion.
9:21 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more