What an utter farce.
Aggregate Industries has today submitted a response to all the outstanding issues connected with its planning application to quarry Straitgate Farm in the form of a brief letter.
The letter again contains the word final.
On 5 March 2021, Aggregate Industries wrote to Devon County Council saying "Please find attached our final submission of additional information...". On 7 April 2021, "Please find attached our final submission of additional information...". And today, "Further to our March 2021 submission of additional information I am now writing to provide our final response to the queries raised as part of the consultation." Perhaps the company is now as keen as the rest of us to see an end to this ridiculous scheme!
However, the letter – written by the company’s planning manager, not by the relevant experts – utterly fails to address the majority of concerns that have been raised – including from the statutory consultees Natural England and the County Council's Flood Risk Management Team.
We’ll hold our response for another day, save for one point: the Greenwash Report. On "Why Penslade was not included as an option in the Greenhouse Gas report", Aggregate Industries answered "The gravels that do occur at Penslade do not have the same high psv properties that occur at Straitgate". Clearly – with a resource of 23 million tonnes at Penslade – that must be disappointing for Aggregate Industries. But the statement is at odds with the Council’s Local Aggregates Assessment.
These figures show Straitgate’s 1 million tonnes x 26% = 260k tonnes of crushable gravel, and Penslade’s 23 million tonnes x 13% = 3 million tonnes. In other words, Penslade would have more than ten times the amount available at Straitgate. Not quite so disappointing after all.
Also today, an extra document has been supplied by Wood, Aggregate Industries’ water consultants, following this meeting. However, it's immediately apparent that the document is incorrect. It claims:
With respect to Professor Brassington’s comments regarding the photographs of trial pits, these trial pits were not 6 -7 m deep as he reports.
But Wood is wrong. Again. Clearly some of the pits shown in the 2017 Reg22 document (below, on the right) are identical to those we photographed in 2012 (below, on the left). These test pits – which had to be deep enough to yield pebble bed material for analysis – were 6-7m deep, as we posted at the time. Perhaps Wood would like to apologise?
