NEW PLANNING STEAMROLLER

The new planning fix, councils’ duty of care and faux-consultations

The incinerator industry don’t want health effects and real before and after pollutant monitoring to be discussed now…they want it as part of the “planning process”, somewhere a long way down the line. The new legislation that the Labour government has brought in to steamroller Nuclear and Heathrow 3 can be just as easily used for Incinerators. It is a very different planning regime than the one we have got used to. More draconian, shorter, more limited witnesses, less appeal.
Councils are saying that there are lots of technologies out there…you bet there are….clean, dirty and very dirty….but they say they aren’t expert enough to decide what they should be (this is a real problem the country round) and will leave it to the chosen contractor. Really!?
What about their duty of care to the community, not only their own, but those neighbouring ones that are not part of the consultation process, but will be affected by burner accidents and chimney “leaks”. They will be footing the bill for disasters, not the PFI profiteers. They will be the ones in court using our council tax to fund their defence in cases of alleged negligence, like that in the High Court now about Corby.
The public should be consulted on the type of contract, the safety monitoring and frequency and independence of inspection regimes, the health monitoring of nearby nursery and primary schools, the pregnancy outcomes in the surrounding areas. Instead we are infantilised by badly structured documents where health was not even an option…….