If every minerals-related planning application went as disastrously as the one Aggregate Industries has spent the last 6 YEARS pursuing at Straitgate Farm, there would be no minerals industry.
Last month, Aggregate Industries lodged a new assortment of documents with the usual nonsense, mistakes, omissions and falsity. Aggregate Industries may be good at digging holes – who knows? – but obviously planning applications are just a bit too much.
The whole thing can only be described as a clusterfuck:
(noun) A disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking
Put another way:
A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment
Could it even be a Mongolian Cluster Fuck?
A generally futile attempt to solve a problem by throwing more people at it rather than more expertise.
Whichever definition fits best, pictorially it might look something like this:
The fiasco has been going on for so many years, we risk forgetting some of the many twists and turns along the way. So let's remind ourselves. Where has Aggregate Industries gone wrong?
By arguing it had the "necessary rights" to use third-party land for site access, soil storage, etc. It hadn’t.
By forgetting that silt from intensively farmed soils would have to be dumped in a highly protected nitrate-sensitive area of European importance for conservation if Straitgate material was processed at Blackhill.
By claiming Blackhill couldn’t be restored without waste material from Straitgate, before then going on to restore Blackhill without waste material from Straitgate.
By obfuscating, for a year, the extent of safeguard that would remain unquarried above the maximum water table at Straitgate. It was zero.
By hoping 6 boreholes on a sloping site across 60 acres would be enough to guesstimate the maximum water table. It wasn’t. Twelve more had to be drilled. This still doesn’t give the full picture – nor allow for any margin of error. The model of the maximum winter water table was supposedly "defined with confidence" but has already failed at multiple times in multiple places.
By hoping its own report of the site back in 1990 would stay buried, the report that put the water table 2.8m higher than the company’s modelled maximum water table in the very same location proposed for infiltration areas to control flooding and maintain stream flows.
By dreaming up a "revolutionary" seasonal working scheme, an unorthodox scheme deployed nowhere else, a scheme that would necessitate an EA condition requiring "continuous (daily) monitoring of all site piezometers, and interpolation between them", a scheme proposed by someone no longer with the company, a scheme for a site where groundwater levels can rise by up to "1m in 5 days", a scheme difficult to follow and impossible to police.
By putting a stop to public scrutiny of Straitgate groundwater data. Why? Something to hide?
By claiming a S106 would take care of the risk to private water supplies, then showing it can’t be trusted with water monitoring S106s, by not sticking to the one at nearby Blackhill.
By arguing that processing Straitgate material at Hillhead would generate "a massively greater quantity of CO2 from the additional mileage required to be travelled". Then deciding to process at Hillhead.
By ditching nearby Rockbeare as a suitable place for processing because of GCNs, whilst claiming there were none around Straitgate when it hadn’t looked.
By putting compensatory planting in the wrong place and having to cut it all down.
By submitting a traffic count that bore no relation to reality for the road that would have to take up to 216 extra HGV movements a day.
By claiming high PSV material from Straitgate would have a lower carbon footprint than similar material from its quarry at Greystone, when, in reality, as-dug material from Straitgate would have to be hauled 3x the distance of finished material from Greystone.
By underplaying HGV accidents, including its own HGV with a coach.
By becoming bogged down with the cattle crossing conundrum, claiming there would be no additional livestock movements across the B3174, despite wanting to remove almost 90% of the available pasture.
By commissioning a road safety audit which was silent on all the accidents and failed to assess the impact of the dairy herd being forced to cross the road.
We could go on.
And we can already see other gems crawling out of the woodwork now that Aggregate Industries has released its "final submission" for public scrutiny.
In February, DCC’s Head of Planning told East Devon’s MP:
such sites are very complex and have to be meticulously scrutinised
Well, they obviously do when Aggregate Industries has its name on the application.
