Oh, the tales Aggregate Industries has told on its way to winning permission to quarry Straitgate Farm.
Would locals have been more sympathetic to the idea of a quarry at Straitgate if they hadn’t been spun so much fiction? Possibly not – but the company will now face a harder job if it wants to build any trust with the local community.
Last week, Aggregate Industries’ personnel – delivering letters to local people with private water supplies now at risk – said that, because of pre-commencement conditions, work would not start at Straitgate before 2025.
This is some 15 years after the company put Straitgate forward in a call for aggregate sites and some 57 years since the first planning application was turned down – with permission now granted for an amount just 1/8th or 1/20th of what was hoped for at those respective times. If all mineral planning applications were that successful, the industry would be on its knees.
But who knows whether 2025 will actually be the year that bulldozers finally rip Straitgate Farm apart?
Once upon a time, back in 2015, Aggregate Industries said that Straitgate should come on stream quickly to replace exhausted reserves at nearby Venn Ottery Quarry. The company claimed:
1.15 AI produces sand and gravel at Venn Ottery Quarry, which currently has permitted reserves capable of providing saleable material until early 2016 based on current levels of sales (350,000 tonnes per year). It is therefore necessary to plan for additional reserves being available from early 2016. The sand and gravel reserves at Straitgate Farm are considered to be a direct replacement for reserves at Venn Ottery.
What was wrong with the millions of tonnes of sand and gravel already with permission at Hillhead – which the company is now using? The company had another tale:
5.7 AI also has reserves at Hillhead Quarry (the Houndaller Extraction Area) located at Uffculme in East Devon. The extraction of the Houndaller reserves as an alternative to the mineral deposit at Straitgate is not a sustainable solution by virtue of the % ratio of gravel to sand. The Houndaller deposit is made up of 75% sand: 25% gravel. To meet the needs of the county in terms of gravel production would lead to a massive over-production of sand on account of this imbalance.
Somehow, since 2016, and now apparently not until 2025, Aggregate Industries has managed to meet the needs of the county with the reserves at Hillhead, and without the benefit of Straitgate. If anybody has seen a "massive over-production of sand" littering the Devon landscape, the Mineral Planning Authority at Devon County Council would surely like to know.
Straitgate material will be taken 23 miles to Hillhead for processing. One assumes Aggregate Industries will have assessed the financial viability of this, but in 2015 the company claimed:
8.27 If a processing plant were erected at Hillhead to process the Straitgate mineral, it would need to be substantially modified or reduced to be able to process the Hillhead mineral, rendering such a circumstance economically unviable.
This in contrast with what the company claimed at the Public Inquiry:
3.13 In contrast, the sand and gravel deposit indigenous to Hillhead Quarry is red in colour and is sand rich, containing circa 20% gravel. The two mineral deposits complement each other well and it is proposed to process the two deposits together to provide the market with the mix of products it demands.
The "mythical yellow sand of Straitgate" was "debunked" at the Inquiry. Furthermore, the company also once claimed:
8.36 It should also be noted that the current markets for the Venn Ottery mineral are in Exeter and East Devon. This is anticipated to apply to mineral from Straitgate. In the event of processing at Hillhead, this would result in further additional mileage being incurred to transport mineral product to the markets.
This again is contrary to what was claimed at the Public Inquiry:
6.96 The calculations in the report show that the appeal proposal for extraction at Straitgate Farm with onward processing at Hillhead Quarry will result in 11% lower GHG emissions than meeting the demand for sand and gravel in proposed markets from existing quarries. This is mainly due to these markets being closer to Hillhead than existing suppliers.
which was in turn contrary to another previous claim:
8.48 Processing at Hillhead may be feasible, but would generate a massively greater quantity of CO2 emissions from the additional mileage required to be travelled.
This was a line played back to Aggregate Industries at the Inquiry, a line that – as with so many other things – the Inspectors were happy to disregard.
So, going forward, people should be forgiven if they don’t trust everything Aggregate Industries tells them.
