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Sunday Telegraph - 20 March 05
Mr Morley is one of our Biggest Tippers - Christopher Booker
Last week the
Sunday Telegraph published a letter from the evironment minister
Elliott Morley, attacking fly-tipping as an "anti-social and
potentially damaging crime". He was not prepared, he said, to
tolerate the criminals responsible for it any longer. What made this
outburst curious was that Mr Morley himself recently authorised one
of the most glaring examples of fly-tipping in the country, by
granting a licence for a further 200,000 tons of rubbish to be
dumped this year in one of the most beautiful bays in Cornwall.
The local community along the shores of Whitsand Bay, south west of
Plymouth, is outraged by Mr Morley's agreement that the Ministry of
Defence should be allowed to use their bay to dispose of vast
quantities of spoil being dredged to clear a channel in the nearby
Tamar estuary. Video evidence shows that this includes rubber tyres,
metal offcuts and piles of assorted man-made rubbish, which has
already turned the clear waters of the bay into a dirty fog,
inflicting serious damage on the seabed and marine life.
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The protestors, who include local politicians, such as Tory county
councillor Sheryll Murray and Lib Dem MP Colin Breed, scientists,
GPs and representatives of tourist businesses, are baffled as to how
Mr Morley could have agreed to the dumping without a proper
environmental impact assessment. The highly-respected Marine
Biological association nearby has offered to assess the scheme. But
Mr Morley preferred to rely on his own officials from the Centre for
Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture, whose report is still not
available months after the scheme was given the go-ahead.
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What makes the Whitsand Bay dumping scandal even odder is the
contrast it provides with the fate of the Cornish Calcified Seaweed
Company, forced to close at Christmas when English Nature refused to
renew its licence to dredge for the dead remains of calcified
seaweed off Falmouth, for use as a valued organic fertiliser. A
scientific report had shown that commercial dredging was doing much
less damage to the seaweed deposits than natural wave
action. But English Nature – which has not objected to the Whitsand
Bay dumping – ended the licence to meet its targets under EC
legislation.
Now work to clear a channel to Falmouth harbour will require the
dredging of 174,000 tons of calcified seaweed. But when the company
asked whether it could buy this for use as fertiliser, English
Nature ruled that the seaweed remains – worth millions of pounds -
must be dumped at sea.
Mr Morley's letter last week was a reply to my item reporting that
the cause of the current epidemic of fly-tipping is the deluge of EC
environmental directives which have recently made it much harder to
dispose of waste legally. Since Mr Morley, astonishingly, denied
that there is any connection, I can only suggest he sends for
last year's special issues of Your Environment, published by the
Environment Agency, which focussed on how "Waste experts fear new
waste rules could see illegal dumping soar this summer".
Here he would see his own officials predicting that new EC rules
greatly extending the categories of waste classified as 'hazardous',
combined with their massive reduction in the number of sites
licensed to take such waste, were about to create a waste
'nightmare', with "criminals dumping it illegally" in an epidemic of
fly-tipping. Mr Morley's officials have proved to be spot on. Yet
his only response is to write petulant letters to the press, making
claims he must know not to be true. Meanwhile, to compound this
strange behaviour, he himself authorises perhaps the most reckless
example of fly-tipping anywhere in Britain. |
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