In 2013, Aggregate Industries decided to run an aggregates bagging operation out of Hillhead quarry without planning permission.
It was picked up by local people, and AI was forced to submit a retrospective application DCC/3527/2013. At the time, we posted:
DCC has finally received a planning application for Aggregate Industries' bagging plant at the block works near Uffculme - "a direct replacement for the Company’s former aggregate bagging plant, located at Bishops Court Quarry in Exeter". AI had been running a bagged aggregates distribution operation out of the mothballed Hillhead Quarry without permission. Even after DCC had served AI notice to clear the site, there were local reports that AI continued to deliver bagged aggregates to Hillhead. DCC said:
We are keeping the situation under review and the company has been served notice requiring them to provide us with information on land ownership should the need to take formal action arise.
Hillhead was not cleared by the deadline imposed by DCC, but AI has evidently secured an extension. Is AI's haphazard modus operandi any way for a multinational business to be conducting its affairs, any way to be integrating itself into the community it disrupts?
We returned to AI’s modus operandi in 2017, pointing out that:
Many will be surprised to learn that it wouldn’t be Aggregate Industries' personnel rolling up their sleeves and quarrying Straitgate Farm. According to the company:
Contractors would haul any material off site.Contractors would be engaged for soil stripping, earthworks and restoration.And contractors are expected to be brought in to extract any sand and gravel.
It’s AI’s hard-nosed modus operandi: screwing down costs now it's part of the lean mean LafargeHolcim money counting machine, as workers facing the sack at AI’s Glensanda superquarry are finding out.
But we missed something in 2017, something to do with the bagging operation – the one that caused so much fuss just four years earlier.
In 2013, we had posted how, despite recommendations of refusal from Mid Devon District and Uffculme Parish councils, AI's bagging plant application for Uffculme was nodded through by DCC, how:
Staff at Aggregate Industries must be smiling. They must think DCC is a pushover, following the council's approval of its bagging plant application this afternoon. Robert Westell, AI's Senior Estates Manager, gave a faltering defence of his company's retrospective application, noted by a DCC officer as being "fairly disastrous" from a public relations point of view, seemingly unaware of one of the basic planning conditions - that there were to be no retail sales from the site.
Mr Westell – one of those referred to in Gosh, another person behind the Straitgate project moves on and once responsible for AI’s Straitgate proposals – is no longer with the company.
Was the restriction on retail sales from the site a problem for AI? Perhaps it was.
AI’s planning application concluded:
The proposed facility would be a suitable location for a strategic aggregates bagging facility to serve Devon’s construction market. 10.5
And indeed it did prove a suitable location – for somebody else. Because in the same month that the second planning application for Straitgate was set in motion, we failed to notice that AI – or rather the bean-counters at Swiss-parent LafargeHolcim – quietly disposed of that bagging operation at Uffculme to Midlands-based GRS Group.
GRS is apparently the "UK’s largest independent trader and handler of construction aggregate, waste materials and associated services". In 2017 it was, according to GRS, among the highest climbers in the Sunday Times top track 250 growth companies. Plainly GRS is a company on a mission, and one worth watching. Why?
2017 was a critical year for GRS – firstly acquiring West Country materials firm Maen Karne in January, then buying two further bagging plants, and at the end of the year came the acquisition of London infrastructure services business S Walsh & Sons.
Long suffering readers might remember S Walsh & Sons, who were in touch with us in 2014. They wanted to increase the use of secondary aggregates, of which Devon and Cornwall have hundreds of millions of tonnes littering the landscape, and assured us there was 'no need for any more new quarries'. In fact, S Walsh won the contract to supply the South East with secondary aggregates derived from china clay waste in Cornwall. The company’s directors believed, however, that wider use of secondary aggregates would not come about without a higher Aggregates Levy:
Our message is clear... quarries should only be used as a last resort. Digging and filling holes in our countryside does not provide a sustainable future for Britain’s building requirements. We seek that Government introduce an Aggregates Levy Escalator in next year’s budget to create thousands of sustainable green British jobs which will make the UK a worldwide leader in sustainable building.
