As Cllr Jerry Brook – chairman of the same committee that will determine Aggregate Industries’ planning application to quarry Straitgate Farm – acknowledges, and as we all know, "years of hard work went in to preparing and consulting" on the Devon Minerals Plan to provide "the policy framework for mineral development in the county" over the period to 2033.
The "All mineral development will need to comply..." statement in the press release appeared earlier at the Development Management Committee 15 July 2015 when members were asked to endorse the Pre-submission Draft Minerals Plan:
The Devon Minerals Plan therefore proposes a vision for sustainable mineral development and provides a range of policies to achieve this goal. The Plan emphasises the need to conserve mineral resources for future generations and to make best use of the waste generated by mineral and construction activity, while acknowledging that, for some resources, working will need to extend into new areas. All mineral development will need to comply with a set of policies addressing their impacts to minimise harm and boost positive outcomes.
If that last sentence had been replaced with:
Some mineral development will need to comply with some policies…
or:
Mineral development will only need to comply with those policies that do not impede the operations of mineral companies, even if ignoring some policies would cause harm and negative outcomes...
how would councillors have voted then?
What policies are we talking about? Policies such as this:
The transportation of extracted materials for processing elsewhere should meet the requirements of Objective 1 and Policy M22 for minimal transportation by road.
In 2017, we posted Just how many policies would DCC be ignoring to push Straitgate Farm through? and wrote:
Now it looks like DCC is wanting to forget all about policies – in order to facilitate the destruction of East Devon farmland, mayhem on Ottery's main road, and millions of miles of polluting HGV haulage. In which case, local people will rightly wonder what all the "years of hard work" were for, if – when the first greenfield quarry application comes before it – so many of the policies contained within DCC's expensive new Minerals Plan stand for nothing. And if the policies stand for nothing, and the Council has its own agenda, people will also question the point of responding to DCC's various consultations... and will most likely conclude none at all.
Has anything changed since then?
Of course, one policy relevant to Straitgate that was junked after that meeting in 2015 was the one that would have maintained a 1m unquarried buffer above the maximum water table to protect drinking water supplies. "Table C.4: Constraints and Mitigation Measures for Straitgate Farm" once read:
The development of this site will only involve dry working, above the maximum winter (wet) level of groundwater with an unsaturated zone of at least 1m maintained across the site.
How many more policies are to be cast aside to appease Aggregate Industries?
