For years the leadership of Surrey County Council has been working towards building at least one mass-burn energy from waste incinerator in Surrey. At Capel, Trumps Farm, and other places, possible sites have at one time or another been identified, evoking enormous hostility from from local pressure groups.

Forget it. Forget the forests of trees cut down for reports and committee papers, the impassioned arguments, the entire waste of time and effort. ‘We are scrapping plans for any EfW incinerators in Surrey,’ the Leader of Surrey County Council, Andrew Povey, announced to the press yesterday, even before he told the Council. ‘Today I will be instructing that planning applications for incinerators at Capel and Trumps Farm be withdrawn.’ 

We had heard rumours of an until-then embargoed press release, but had to wait for the Leader’s Statement at Council yesterday to learn how far the new Conservative leadership has come round to the way of thinking Liberal Democrats on Surrey County Council have been putting forward for at least the last five years.

• Landfill is ‘destructive to our landscape and environment’, costs Surrey £7 million a year,  and these costs threaten to rise to £13m in 2013.
• ‘We should have available to us a flexible range’ of technologies. The new proposals include an anaerobic digester and a gasifier, on the same site. This could power 10,000 homes.
• Looking to the future, Surrey needs to be aware of new recycling opportunities and needs, for example with the mercury in  ’low energy light bulbs … we really don’t want them in the waste stream at all.’ (Lynne Hack)
• The current 40% to 50% recycling rate across Surrey is a ‘fantastic result’ but ‘we can do a lot better’. Surrey will have a target of 70% recycling by 2013, which will ‘take us into World Class’*

 The ‘vision’ we were given was of an ‘eco park’ where there is already a waste management facility at Charlton Lane in Shepperton. The anaerobic digestor will take 40,000 tonnes and the gasifier 60,000 tonnes. The ‘eco-park’ would also contain an ‘innovation centre’ working on new technologies, and an ‘education centre open to all’.

So what’s the catch? 

Lynne Hack, the Cabinet Member for the environment, reckons that residents in the Charlton Lane area will be better off. She said the gasifier would fit entirely on the footprint of the existing shed-like waste transfer station, so that local residents will have a ‘very much better looking shed’ than they have now.

She also said, in response to questions from Liberal Democrat Caroline Nichols (Lower Sunbury and Halliford, which contains Charlton Lane)  that the already dodgy air-quality would not be threatened by increased traffic movements. ‘We believe the number of lorry movements will be less’ because waste will be treated on site and not brought out as well as in. She added that there would be separate entrances for cars going into the recycling centre, and seemed unconcerned about plans currently being developed for gravel - ‘ we have no plans for gravel recycling in this facility, there wouldn’t be room for that’.

Caroline Nichols and our other Liberal Democrat County Councillor from that area, Ian Beardsmore (Sunbury Common and Ashford Common), are far from reassured.

Can it be a co-incidence (as conspiracy theorists tend to say) that the areas of Surrey with high property values and Conservative voters - Trumps Farm, very close to Chobham and to Wentworth golf course, Capel in the well-heeled south of the County; the apparently untouchable Wisley - now seem to be off the hook? While the relatively crowded and unscenic Shepperton is the recipient of these new facilities intended to take Surrey’s waste?

And even if recycling rates do go up as planned, and waste is also minimised, what will happen to the rest of the 270,000 tonnes that would have been handled by the originally proposed incinerators?

After that, what about the risk of Surrey having to pay back to the Government the money we’ve already had for a PFI project to built EfW incinerators? Dr. Povey says DEFRA is happy that ‘this will be a quite considerably cheaper [solution] than where we were before’ and he has had a ‘letter of comfort’ from DEFRA.  

 I don’t know what that means.  I don’t know the answers to the questions that this brief statement leaves open about the hugely changed, multi-million-pound plans for waste in Surrey. My current lack of comprehension is not very important - but there is an Economy and Environment Committee, which I’m not on, whose members should be kept up to date on these issues so that they can ask the right questions and tease out implications. But the Environment and Economy Committee have been left largely in the dark while the Leader and Cabinet made this huge policy U-turn.  

Street Lighting

There were other things that happened during this meeting - most notably the announcement that the 25-year lighting PFI contract for Surrey with Skanska Laing (Surrey Lighting Services) has now been signed, and will come into effect on the 1st of March.

Woking is in the first phase to have new lights that can be controlled in a more sophisticated way from the central control room at Merrow, near Guildford. 

Renewing all Surrey’s street lights, as intended, is going to be a huge operation. There’s a lot of room for muddle and confusion. But let’s be optimistic, and hope for the promised new ‘bright white lights’ that will save energy, and a maintenance contract that does not leave us with columns unlit for months on end.

And there was more … we went on all morning and into the afternoon … but my fingers are now failing me ….     

*according to my tally, Dr. Povey used ‘world class’ six times in his statement, and it was used by other Councillors 11 times in the rest of the meeting.