Yorkshire Against New Coal

Yesterday, the Plans Panel (east) of Leeds City Council rejected the application from Banks Developments to rip 875,000 tonnes of coal out of the ground from an open cast coal mine directly opposite the Fairburn Ings nature Reserve, near Castleford.

Chris Mackins, spokesperson for Yorkshire Against New Coal who urged the panel to reject the application on climate change grounds confirmed that “this is a victory for common sense and for climate protection” as now more than 2.57 million tonnes of CO₂ will be prevented from being released into the atmosphere.  This would also have caused more than £133 million in associated climate change damage.

The officer’s report was weighted heavily in favour of the applicant. Comments from the panel included the need to consider public opinion, which directly contrasted the officer’s report which advised the committee that public opinion was not enough to reject the application.  There were more than 1600 individual objections of which YANC had contributed a submission of 1100 objections based on climate change.

Another councillor acknowledged the need to consider the carbon footprint of Leeds City Council and referred to the complete lack of references made in the officer’s report regarding climate change.  Subsequent to the release of the officer’s report, YANC confirmed to the planning officer and to the members of planning committee that planning guidance should ensure that climate change is considered in planning decisions.

The Plans Panel was reminded that Leeds City Council Executive recently passed a new strategy called ‘Vision for Action’ to address the causes and impacts of climate change.

The officer’s report was also laced with distractions and assumptions about where the coal may go and made references about technology which does not exist and even suggested that this was a sustainable project!

Climate change must become an integral element of the planning process, and there is national guidance which confirms this.  Planning officers have a responsibilty to guide planning committee members and ensure that there is vision and support responsible action; unfortunately this was not the case yesterday, but the planning committee made the right decision.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009, 11:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.