Reflect on the fact that both Aggregate Industries and DCC fought tooth and nail to include Straitgate Farm in the Devon Minerals Plan. Sites were discarded that even the Environment Agency thought had less constraints. The DMP was delayed for years while DCC bent over backwards to allow AI to sort themselves out and prove that Straitgate’s sand and gravel was deliverable, and in the quantity promised; a quantity that was put forward as a "proven" 7.25 million saleable tonnes and has faded to a can't-be-bothered-to-prove less than a million.
Why less than a million? Because AI’s prediction for the maximum winter water table – the prediction that defines the base of any quarry and hence the available resource, the prediction that was "defined with confidence" and used to make ridiculous statements to the nearest cm – has already failed in dramatic fashion (detailed here, here, here, here, here and here) and has been exceeded by water levels in a number of places – in one area by an astonishing 2.8m in the middle of summer!
Was all that trouble for the DMP for a relatively small amount of finished product – product that would need to be plundered from precious farmland; product that could only be processed 23 miles away; product that (excluding the 20% waste) would have effectively travelled 58 climate-unfriendly miles for each processed load before onward distribution – a good use of public funds? Of course not.
It makes you wonder if there's any point to minerals plans; particularly if those carefully constructed policies contained within stand for nothing either. This is one policy from the DMP:
Objective 1: Spatial Strategy
Within geological constraints, secure a spatial pattern of mineral development that delivers the essential resources to markets within and outside Devon while minimising transportation by road and generation of greenhouse gases, supporting the development of its economy while conserving and enhancing the County’s key environmental assets.
It means nothing – with DCC entertaining AI’s 2.5 million mile plans for Straitgate Farm.
So why have minerals plans? Why not have a free-for-all? After all, the MPA says "Over the past 10 years, 48% of new permissions issued were for sites that had not been allocated in mineral plans".
Only this month, go-ahead was given in Nottinghamshire for a 59-hectare quarry extension – on an unallocated site. More farmland will be lost – this time ten arable fields and one pasture field – for 3.6 million tonnes of sand and gravel; we obviously couldn't care about food any more, despite warnings from the World Wildlife Foundation that "Humanity must produce more food in the next four decades than we have in the last 8,000 years".
No wonder locals didn’t waste time and effort on a legal challenge to Straitgate’s inclusion in the DMP. What difference would it have made anyway?
Seemingly, little stops these multinational mining giants from chewing up farmland in their ever-growing and unsustainable quest for minerals. How many quarry applications are turned down? The MPA tells us that "the average approval rate for sand gravel applications over the period 1999 to 2016 stands at 91%."
Does that indicate a level of perfection in the environmental information supplied? Not if Straitgate is anything to go by; its application, and the quality of the information contained within, has been shoddy – in places, no more than a catalogue of fiction.
Perhaps under-resourced planning departments no longer care, as long as boxes are ticked and conditions are set. That's set, not met. It's another matter enforcing those conditions – as AI's repeated non-compliance of a S106 hydrological monitoring condition at Blackhill so aptly demonstrates.
