New planning guidance on waste disposal sites leaves Eric Pickles open to the charge of Orwellian double-think. Or are some policies more equal than others?
I first read 1984 when I was 15 and, as a fervent young communist, it took me a good few chapters to realise it was a critique not an advocacy. As I have got older I find myself prone to what George Orwell referred to in the book as double think i.e. the ability to unquestioningly hold two or more seemingly contradictory opinions at the same time.
For example, I like football but loathe most other fans for their boorish obsession with a futile pastime. I don’t eat chicken because I think battery farming is cruel but I cheerfully scramble down from my moral high ground to eat veal and foie gras. Finally I work in the sustainability industry but have five children, a huge fridge and drive a car that’s thirstier than an elephant in a heat wave.
I could go on all day listing this stuff but my wider point is that I doubt I am alone in double thinking and this week I have discovered that Eric Pickles seemingly has a similar ability. It was a bit of blink and you missed it announcement but this week the government set out obscure changes to planning legislation which will have far reaching consequences for the waste industry.
At the moment if you want to build a waste treatment facility somewhere in the countryside, the position is quite straightforward. In considering the application, the local authorities have to abide by the snappily titled Planning Policy Statement 10: Planning for Sustainable Waste Management. In simple terms, this directs officers to acknowledge that ‘the wider environmental and economic benefits of sustainable waste management, are material considerations that should be given significant weight in determining whether proposals should be given planning permission’.
To you and I, this means a broad presumption in favour of building waste management facilities so your application is more than likely to succeed unless it is slap bang in the middle of the Lake District or some other area of outstanding natural beauty.
The new Guidance issued by Eric Pickles this week will reverse this positive assumption and mean that planning applications for new waste disposal sites on the green belt should be treated the same as all other applications which ‘will only be approved in very special circumstances’. In reality this means that very few if any new waste plants will get built in the Green Belt.
Now you may take the view that this is all very positive, saving the leafy countryside from urban sprawl etc but there is a counter argument that say this is a massively retrograde step and smells like good old reactionary single issue politics. Mr Pickles' announcement talks in emotive terms about ‘protecting’ the environment from ‘the likes of dumps and incinerators’ whereas actually most modern waste recycling plants are safely housed in bland metal sheds and look just any other light industrial application.
Furthermore it seems to escape his notice that not all of the 6,000 square miles of the sacred Green Belt is wisteria clad cottages in rolling green hills. Within that big, mainly empty space, there are an awful lot of old airfields, derelict factories and abandoned quarries that could easily be reused as the sites for waste recycling facilities. This would have the double benefit of both creating local employment and reducing the carbon footprint of transporting waste to existing plants which may be hundreds of miles away.
Let’s not forget that this isn’t just about protecting the Green Belt from the perceived grasping hand of greedy waste contractors; it’s also about how as a natio, we deal with the 9 million tonnes of waste that is currently sent to landfill each year in the UK. There are rarely simple choices in politics and to meet the government targets for landfill diversion, the UK has until 2020 to build lots of waste plants to recycle or recover an additional four million tonnes of waste per annum. Put bluntly the infrastructure to do this has got to go somewhere and if not on brownfield sites in the Green Belt then where ?
The governments step back towards unthinking planning intransigence leaves the waste industry in a bit of a pickle (excusing the pun). They are told they cannot keep putting waste into holes in the ground but they can no longer build plants in the Green Belt either. Presumably it’s still ok to build these thing in the grimy Labour voting inner cities or better still send it to be dealt with overseas where there is less wisteria and a more pressing need to create jobs.
Or maybe there is no alternative to allowing waste infrastructure to be built in the countryside but nobody in DECC is joining up the policy dots on all of this. This is the thing with double thinking, it’s ok as long as you think in silos and don’t ever see a bigger picture.
So looping back to 1984, I cheerfully maintain my own double thinking when it comes to football, chickens and saving the planet. I explain these away by saying they are manifestations of the complexity of modern life and, with the exception of the earnest looking Buddhist chap I sometimes see outside the tube, I suspect most of you could come up with a similar list. In the same vein, joined up government policy is a nice idea but not always practical in the context of global events and 24 hour rolling news.
However I do think it is not unreasonable to expect at least a single minister to weave together the disparate strands of his brief into coherent thought. Pickles is in charge of planning within the Green belt. He is also in charge of facilitating investment in new waste infrastructure and finally he is in charge of bringing abandoned brown field sites back into use rather than leaving them weed strewn and derelict. It would help if he could see that maybe somewhere these three issues were somehow connected.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO. @michaelware13
