At the Public Inquiry in October 2022, Aggregate Industries assured Government Planning Inspectors that the need for minerals from Straitgate Farm was "urgent":
8.3 The landbank for Devon is below the required 7 year supply and as such the need can be considered as urgent. Combined with the lack of supply in the wider region which is detailed in the follow paragraphs, the need for the development is indeed considered urgent.
Aggregate Industries’ Mr Kimblin KC concluded in his closing statement:
170. The essential planning circumstances in this case are so very simple. The appeal site is one of two allocations in the DMP and the site is needed in order to maintain a steady and adequate supply of minerals, which the MPA is presently failing to provide.
Needed. Urgent. So very simple.
And yet, after struggling over many, many years to win planning permission to quarry Straitgate Farm – after fighting tooth and nail to make sure the site was in the Minerals Plan, after extensive site investigations, after two failed planning applications and a successful, but time-consuming and expensive appeal, after putting local people through decades of blight and aggravation – Aggregate Industries is now talking about mothballing the site.
How has it come to this?
Around the same time Aggregate Industries’ representatives made those claims to Planning Inspectors, another aggregates company in Devon was having altogether different concerns. It was not thinking needed and urgent. Precisely the reverse.
Aggregate Industries is not the only company in Devon with reserves of sand and gravel from the Budleigh Salterton Pebble Beds, the material that underlies Straitgate Farm.
Heidelberg Materials – or Hanson under a previous guise – owns Town Farm Quarry near Burlescombe in Mid Devon, close to the Devon/Somerset border. As-dug mineral from this quarry has previously been processed at Whiteball Quarry, 2 miles away in Somerset, which is itself only 4 miles away from Aggregate Industries’ Hillhead Quarry, where Straitgate material would be processed.
Heidelberg’s permission for Town Farm – extended in 2023 – does not have the same long list of restrictive constraints that faces Aggregate Industries at Straitgate Farm. Town Farm material does not need to be transported 23 miles between quarry face and processing plant, neither does it need to be worked and hauled using equipment and HGVs fuelled with expensive HVO.
And yet, even without these cost constraints, Heidelberg is not currently able to make the numbers work at the Town Farm and Whiteball sites, both of which were mothballed in 2023. Last year, a Devon County Council Monitoring Report stated:
As of 1st February 2023 it was confirmed that it has been necessary for Hanson to undertake a review of its Whiteball and Town Farm operations due to current economic conditions, in order to cut production capacity and reduce overheads and the decision has been made to temporarily mothball the Town Farm site until market conditions improve.
This year's Monitoring Report tells the same story. Heidelberg says the operation is still closed.
A number of issues will have conspired against Heidelberg: energy costs, red diesel rebate loss, interest rates, house-building slump, Liz Truss etc.
The situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. Last week, the Mineral Products Association reported that "weakness persists for heavyside building materials":
....ready-mixed concrete sales have plummeted to historically low levels, hit by the contraction in housebuilding, which compounded longer-term weaknesses in demand from new commercial offices and retail projects which have been subdued since 2017.
...demand for primary aggregates has been supported by the requirement for bulk fill materials on major infrastructure projects, particularly from HS2, but the lack of significant new infrastructure projects outside of the country’s only major rail scheme remains a concern.
The Construction Products Association says the sector is heading for a worse recession this year than previously expected.
Aggregate Industries will have been cock-a-hoop last year to have finally won the keys to plunder the green fields of Straitgate Farm, but, at a meeting last month, the company admitted that economic conditions are not currently conducive to the viability of Straitgate, and that once the permission is implemented the site could be mothballed.
Questioned more on the subject, the company would not be drawn further:
... we have 10 years from the date of commencement to extract the mineral and that remains our intention.
However, even with a fair wind, it’s hard to see Aggregate Industries ever making the figures work for the site – given the gargantuan haulage distances involved and the HVO fuel premium.
But hey. If the company has backed itself into an uneconomic corner, it has no-one but itself to blame; no-one forced the company to process the Straitgate material 23 miles away – a 46-mile round trip for every load of as-dug material, material that includes a 20% waste factor – or to work the site and haul material using expensive HVO fuel. It came up with those ideas all by itself.
As far as we’re concerned, however, the writing has been on the wall for some time. We’ve been questioning the viability of the site since long before this early post in 2012 – pointing to the fact that the company has access to little more than 5% of the material first thought possible, and asking What is AI’s bottom line, because it surely can’t be profit?
In fact, so concerned were we for Aggregate Industries' financial wellbeing – haha – we even created a viability label. Given the amount the company will have spent on winning those green-field keys – after a decade of fees to consultants and lawyers – the company should have perhaps heeded our advice.
But when did Aggregate Industries ever listen to Joe Public?
