West Cumbria Mining

The 188 page committee report on the West Cumbria Mining planning application which is coming to the CCC development control committee on Tuesday 19th March 2019 has now been published and can be read on the County Council website here.

I will be attending the meeting as one of the two local members in whose divisions the application is located (it covers a vast area.)

Council officers are recommending that the application be approved, subject to a submission from Natural England which is still awaited, with a section 106 agreement and a long list of conditions.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Did you make any representations on the application?
6:36 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I have discussed progress with officers. I have registered to make representations by speaking at the meeting.
1:19 am
Gary Bullivant said…
I don't agree that the area to which this application relates can be described as vast. It is clearly a very limited onshore surface footprint and the onshore subterranean element is evidently not financially viable without approved access to the offshore coal field, which has still to be proven to JORC standards in association with a valid and convincing feasibility study.

The wider and more significant approval lies outside the gift of CCC, as the officer has recognised (with the recommendation for a Grampion condition). The vital onus is on the Coal Authority to convert the conditional licences to unconditional, the Marine Management Organisation to safeguard the environment and HM the Queen, with the support of her heir apparent I imagine, to give her permission as owner of the mineral rights. If as much effort is needed to clear those hurdles as has been needed to get this project this far then it is unlikely to get a green light during the life of this government.
1:38 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Thank you for your thoughts on this.

There is room for more than one view about what you consider qualifies as vast but by comparison with most planning applications the area included in the site as defined in the site boundaries in the submitted area plan is extremely large.

There will indeed be other permissions required before this can go ahead. I note however that all six Cumbrian MPs signed a cross-party document last year which inter alia referred to benefits of the scheme.

A very considerable amount of spadework which has already been done to get the planning application to this stage. Evidently the applicants are seriously committed to this project.
2:31 am
Unknown said…
Vast or not, it is what it is and it is certainly a significant proposal. I don't question that the applicant, a single purpose company, is seriously committed. £20m, even if it comes from Singapore and unidentified places beyond, is a lot of seed capital. From Tuesday onwards less metaphor and more actual exploratory spade work is what's going to be needed to turn the speculative benefits identified by local and regional politicians into practical reality for job seekers and candidate suppliers.
10:10 am
Chris Whiteside said…
Fair comment. I've been told that a lot of the investment comes from Australia: clearly this is a global business.

That isn't necessarily a problem if we get the local details right, including good conditions on the environmental impact and local people getting a very significant share of the jobs created.
12:11 am
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