Thanks to the initiative of Suzanne Noble there is now an official Herefordshire Seed Swap group. Next meeting is at 8pm Wed 24th Sept at the Volunteer, Harold Street, Hereford. All welcome. We aim to have a seed swap event next Feb.

The case was based on two narrow points of law. The legal questions concerned:

(1) Whether the council gave adequate reasons for their departure from the inspector’s view.
(2) Whether the council should have considered ordering a second inquiry

The Dinedor Barrister presented his clients case in a very clear and concise manner and demonstrated that he had a thorough understanding of the whole situation.

It seemed to those on the public benches that the Council’s barrister struggled; he certainly went away from the main thrust of the case. He brought in such irrelevancies as that no houses had yet been built on the alternative sites recommended by the government inspector and which have also been taken up by the council for housing development (i.e. Holmer).

Bloor Holmes had joined in to defend the action and employed a Queens Council, who proved to be a very powerful advocate and a specialist in planning matters.

The case ended at lunchtime on the second day, with Mr Justice Collins reserving his judgement. He asked to see minutes of the council’s meetings and invited further submissions, in writing, from both parties.

Judgment will be delivered at the end of July.

Herefordshire Friends of the Earth have commented on the application for a wind farm as follows:-

Phil Mullineux
Herefordshire Council
Planning Services
PO Box 230
Blueschool House
Blueschool Street
Hereford
HR1 2ZB

19th June 2008

ONW2008/1289/F
Reeves Hill Wind Farm


Dear Mr Mullineux

I am writing on behalf of Herefordshire Friends of the Earth with our qualified support for this application.

Issues relevant to support for the application

1. Runaway climate change is the context for all energy generation. We know that policy on carbon reduction is lagging behind the scientific consensus and that scientific consensus is lagging behind the best climate science on the rate of change. We must get better and faster at bringing renewables on stream.

2. The related problems of oil depletion and energy security also argue for timely substitution of fossil fuel based energy sources with renewables.

3. The environmental impacts and long-term legacy of wind power are infinitely preferable to nuclear power. Decommissioning a windfarm poses few problems.

4. Wind companies must make certain that they are good neighbours to the communities affected by their turbines.

We support the application but would like to see a planning obligation attached which requires the developers to mitigate unacceptable levels of noise and flicker.


The context for granting planning permission to renewable energy generators

We would like to see the implementation of an increasingly strong framework for demand reduction, or demand side management, to accompany the development of all new generating capacity. This should be funded and managed through public-private partnership between local authorities and energy generating companies.

Finally, the overriding rationale for windfarms is climate protection. If Herefordshire Council do not ensure that their policy on reducing carbon emissions is coherent, they will pursue developments which negate the benefits of renewable energy and betray the communities who bear the impacts of renewable energy generation. We therefore would like the Council to formally assess the carbon impact of every development, public and private, to ensure that carbon emissions are steadily reduced.


Yours sincerely


Paige Mitchell
Transport and Planning
Herefordshire Friends of the Earth

The Bullinghope Housing Court Case, after two days last week in the High Court before Justice Collins, concluded with a deferral, waiting further evidence to be provided by the Council. The judge will then make his decision by July 25th 2008. We will post the result as soon as we have it. More details on www.dinedorhillaction.co.uk.

This is a press release from the Hereford Liberal Democrats.

----

Terry James the leader of the Liberal Democrats has written to Herefordshire Council Director of Regeneration Geoff Hughes calling on the Council to face the reality of the current economic and housing climate and relook at the housing proposed throughout the County in the UDP.

“It is clear” he says “that Herefordshire Councils plan to build 17,000 houses in the County has hit the buffers. The current housing slump means that for a number of years there is likely to be a substantial drop in the number of houses built in the County. So it ill serves the Council to push ahead with housing developments which are ill thought out and inappropriately sited. The classic example being the 300 houses proposed at Bullinghope.

It is nearly two years since with less than half an hour to go Councillor Phillips inserted the proposal to add this development to the UDP without any consultation with the community. Members were misled into thinking that this site had been appropriately assessed and had they been made aware of the problems with this location they might have looked at alternatives in the area.

Whilst I have always been supportive of the principal of housing funding infrastructure improvements it is now increasingly clear that this particular site is probably the most unsuitable for housing development in the whole of the South Wye. It appears that little had been done to investigate the suitability of the site before inserting it into the UDP. It does not have decent access, it floods, there is difficulty in connecting public services to it and maybe a site of historic and archaeological interest. We have been told that the Council would not seek its normal 33% affordable housing quota on this development, it will also have made no financial contribution to the Rotherwas access road. Indeed with the substantial fall in the value of houses now predicted as well as the inevitable drop in the number of houses being built it is likely that the benefit from any 106 agreements in the short to medium term will be substantially less than originally envisaged. Therefore it will not be sufficient to fund any major improvements to the road network.

I think now is the time with a new Forward Planning process to look more carefully at any future housing developments. The current Bullinghope proposal is ill thought out, environmentally damaging and will cause enormous traffic problems. The council need to get real, we must stop living in a fantasy world this is Herefordshire not Disneyland.”

The Dinedor Hill Action Association versus Herefordshire Council over the housing at Bullinghope finally goes to Court on June 26th and 27th at the High Court, The Strand, London. 

According to the lawyer:   The judge in this case will have very little (or no) interest in whether Bullinghope is the right place for housing.  That is not the legal question that he needs to consider at all and is (almost) legally irrelevant.  The legal questions concern:

(1) whether Herefordshire Council gave adequate reasons for their departure from the inspector’s view;
(2) whether they should have considered ordering a second inquiry. 

How suitable or unsuitable the site is for housing is largely irrelevant.  These points will be made briefly (in order to explain the background and emphasise the need for cogent reasons) but the case will be fought (and won or lost) on the much narrower legal ground of whether the Council applied the correct legal tests – that, for better or worse, is the nature of judicial review.

We will keep you updated.

Hereford Labour Party has demanded that the Council drop the Bullinghope housing as the High Court today considers a legal challenge about whether the Council has acted correctly in the way it was approved.

The full text of the Labour party release is copied below.

THE COUNCIL SHOULD NOT DEFEND THE CASE

“This week’s High Court case is a waste of time and money” says Hereford Labour Party secretary Bob Clay. “The Council is in a “lose, lose” situation. Even if they win the Court case the Bloor Homes application is “dead in the water”, (literally flood water and sewerage.”)

Bob has written to Herefordshire Council Chief Executive Chris Bull arguing that he should advise Tory Council Leader Roger Phillips not to defend the High Court Action by th Dinedor Hill Action Association which starts in the High Court this Thursday (June 26th.) (Letter attached).

Despite a reminder last week we are seriously disappointed that the Chief Executive has failed to respond. The points made were serious ones. Sadly, once again we appear to be dealing with people who seem to think that they are not only beyond “due process” but do not even feel the need to offer an explanation.

The facts are clear: against a Planning Inspector’s decision the Council voted to include Bullinghope in the UDP. Many Councillors made it clear that they only supported this because they were told that a contribution from a developer at Bullinghope would secure the funding for the Rotherwas Access Road.

It is now a matter of fact, admitted by the Cabinet, that the RAR has been completed without funding from Bloor.

This is not a minor technicality. Allocating Bullinghope for housing has been a major controversy for several years.

If the Dinedor Hill Action Group succeed at the High Court then Bullinghope will be out of the UDP and that will be the end of the housing proposal. But since it was only included in the UDP because Councillors were seriously misled there should now be a political decision not to defend the case and to allow the Bullinghope land to be removed from the planning boundary. It is not good enough for officers to decide how to conduct the court case. The problem is that no councillors dare express an opinion on this matter because of the interpretation of the code of conduct and common law that has been used repeatedly in Herefordshire to imply that councillors expressing a view on a matter could be deemed to be “pre-determined” and therefore unable to participate in planning committee decisions. This is why the Chief Executive should have intervened.

THE HOUSING CANNOT GO AHEAD ANYWAY

Anyone examining the objections lodged against the Bloor Homes application is bound to come to the conclusion that it will be rejected even if the Council survives this week’s court case. In addition to massive numbers of well argued objections from local residents and a devastating analysis of the traffic implications by independent consultants, the Environment Agency make it very clear that they think the proposal is far too liable to be affected by flooding, and Welsh Water make it clear that they cannot even commit themselves to a date when they could commence a water supply to the proposed estate. They also make clear that they think the proposals will exacerbate the serious sewerage problem that already exist in the locality.

On top of all this, there is no socially affordable housing proposed despite the Government and County Council’s own policies.

It is very difficult to understand why Bloor have even bothered to submit such an incompetent proposal.

There is already a strong case for an independent enquiry into how the Council got into this incredible mess and for every day that it now continues there will be more reason to call those responsible to account.

It was ten years ago that the ETA, along with similar-minded organisations, founded the Slower Speeds Initiative. One of its aims was to ensure that all road vehicles had variable speed limiters. Read more

Bobbie Blackwell, letter to Hereford Times

Looking down on an eerily empty Rotherwas Relief Road I wondered, in the light of escalating oil prices, if empty roads are a vision of our future.

Our haulers, van based businesses and the poorest dependent on cars to get to work, post office, shop and schools are the first feeling the oil pinch. In winter the poor will be facing the choice between spending on warmth or food.

I wondered what it will take before our local councillors grasp the implications that the peaking and decline of cheap oil, gas, electric, petrol and diesel will be having on our fuel dependent society.

The world now consumes 10 million barrels of oil…. a second!! Heading towards $200 a barrel it won’t stop there as demand outstrips easily accessed oil supplies. New oil finds are decreasing, are smaller and far more difficult and expensive to extract. When it costs three barrels of oil to extract one barrel of oil, is their any point?

Rumour that petroleum giants BP and Shell are negotiating merger suggests the oil industry is in deep water.

Yet Hereford Council still sees fit to spend precious money on a by-pass we have done without through the height of oil age. They plan to cover fertile food producing land at Bullinghope with hundreds if not thousands of high carbon emitting homes creating another massive suburb. Without its own infrastructure this will further increase car dependence and more carbon emissions. They want to replace an existing agricultural market with more clone town companies and high carbon emitting houses. Will this be a tourist pull when it becomes fuel cheaper to shop at home? When, not if, fuels are rationed, how well will people cope in homes without alternative heating systems and how many more roads will we need when bikes, trams, horse power and trains make more economic sense?

Do our councillors really believe that with some tweaking to the economy, energy prices, supplies and business can return to ‘normal’?

No alternative energies can substitute the 10 million barrels a second humans war over.

The sooner governments openly acknowledge that the decline in oil and gas supplies is a deeply serious permanent condition with no quick fixes available, the sooner influence can be brought to bare on councils who waste money on development programmes, that in a few years time, will not function economically without either cheap energy to ‘drive’ them or adaption to meet future conditions.
The transition from a high energy economy to a low energy future won’t provide the economic growth we have seen over the last 60 years. Motorways, multinationals, airports and runways will be the next chapter in our history books.

With our future now teetering on the brink of energy decline, public investment must move towards re-establishing smaller sustainable local trading economies, local food security, decentralised alternative and private energy production, health care, affordable low carbon public transport systems, eco housing, and the re-skilling of ourselves and our children in agriculture, land management, animal husbandry all benefiting from scientific/medical advances made over the last 150 years.

Perhaps our councillors would benefit from a trip to Germany to see how they are achieving a low energy, low carbon economy.

Once again the Peace Council has a stall at the Charities & Volunteers Fayre in High Town, Hereford on this coming Saturday.

They are focussing on BAE, Britain's leading purveyor of Weapons of Mass Destruction and world wide corruption.

There will be posters, petitions, postcards and the usual badges, flags etc.

The stall is open from 10.00am to 3.30pm ..ish.

18th June: FOE AGM at Canal Road Day Centre - meal/social 6.30 to 7.30. Meeting starts at 7.30. We need as many people as possible. Paige Mitchell and Janet Parry will be resigning after many years as Joint Coordinators and we need to discuss what happens next to the group. Please come….

2nd July: A welcome return by Jay Abrahams who will be talking to us about Community Methane Harvesting Schemes and probably also a little on Living Off Grid.

AUGUST - no Meetings (No bookings at Canal Road for any group!)

SEPTEMBER: First FOE meeting on Wednesday, 3rd September at Canal Rd. Day Centre…… topic to be confirmed.

The BBC reports...

Multi-million pound plans for a new railway station and faster and more frequent train services in north Worcestershire are set to be approved.

Read the full story here...

We look forward to a similar upgrade for the Hereford - Worcester section.

You have until 1 minute before midnight on the 19th of June to respond to Herefordshire Council's consultation on how they should develop their recycling services.

This appears to be largely about having fortnightly kerbside collection from every household in the county using wheeled bins 'where possible' which would take unsorted recyclables including glass but excluding textiles (for which recycling banks would be provided around the county). Residual (non-recyclable) black bag rubbish would still be collected on a weekly basis.

The consultation format is novel: an online discussion forum where you can post your views. The stated purposes is 'To discuss with all local residents ideas for waste reduction, management and recycling and to help shape the future waste and recycling contract' in order 'To help shape the future waste collection contract'.

You can participate by clicking on www.herefordshire.gov.uk/talkrubbish

Have fun!

A London borough is to allow bicycles to travel the ‘wrong’ way down one-way streets in an experiment to see whether it makes cycling safer and more convenient. There will be no dividing line between cyclists and motorists because the council believes that it will be safer to allow them to negotiate their own path past each other. Read more from this ETA report...

Our online route finder is a nifty tool, which not only allows you how to best plan your route but estimates your carbon emission for that journey and offsets it if you wish. Have a go with it at www.eta.co.uk/map

Today with petrol at £1.18 a litre and no sense of the prices falling in the short term to medium term, people are naturally anxious about the impact that this will have on their outgoings. However, there are many things one can do to reduce the impact these prices have. If you are doing none of them at present then you have much to gain – if you are doing all of them then the fuel price has no direct impact on you. Read more from the ETA News Release...

Many environmental groups are championing wood and biomass-burning as a sustainable carbon-neutral source of energy – both for heating and electricity production – for the future. However there are several problems with moving towards a wood-burning economy which are not really being addressed. These are:
 
Wood burning is not carbon neutral.
There are serious health implications from the smoke produced from wood burning, even from clean burners.
Basing home heating requirements on wood burning requires a large area of dedicated woodland managed as a fuel wood.
 
In terms of carbon neutrality, the burning of wood often ignores the fossil fuel used in the harvesting, preparation and transporting of wood.
 
The carbon dioxide released when burning wood (about 1900g CO2 for each 1000g of wood burnt) is balanced by the fact that this carbon was taken up by the tree from the air when it grew. So this part of the emissions is carbon-neutral. However, many other chemicals are produced when wood is burnt, including one of the most potent greenhouse gases, nitrogen dioxide; although the amounts may be small (200g of CO2 equivalent per kg of wood burnt), the gas is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and lasts 120 years in the atmosphere. Methane is also produced (70g of CO2 equivalent per kg of wood) – 21 times more potent than CO2. Carbon monoxide is also produced in large amounts which has an indirect positive effect on global warming. Recent research  suggests that particulates too have a positive effect many times greater than the combined gases although they are short lived. Overall, although figures vary depending on a multitude of factors, there is no doubt that wood burning is contributing to global warming.
 
The health implications of wood burning derive from the emissions which contain carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulates, as well as other noxious gases. In a rural situation, where the burning inside a building is clean and with a flue, the health effects will be minimal. In a situation in a village, town or city it is not so: ambient levels can rise severely (for example, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where wood burning is common, wintertime levels of particulates can become very high, causing an estimated 100 deaths a year and an increase in hospital admissions from respiratory complaints by 8%). An estimated 1.5 to 2 million people die per year worldwide from indoor smoke, mostly produced from open and unflued fires in the “developing” world. Smoke particles in the EU (from wood and fossil fuel burning) reduce average life expectancy by 8.6 months.
 
As to the area of woodland required, this is a less contentious issue. it depends, of course, on the type of building being heated – a newly built ultra efficient house will require much less than an older house. And if heating and hot water are both generated by wood burning this will increase the requirement. A recent case study of a new build with heating and hot water from wood burning estimates a requirement of 12 tonnes/year of dry Douglas fir, equivalent to about 9 tonnes/year of a denser wood like ash. Forestry Commission figures estimate 8 tonnes/year of air dry wood to heat a three bedroomed house. A 10 year fuel wood coppice rotation of mixed deciduous trees produces about 1 tonne/acre/year (or 2.3tonnes/hectare/year), so 8 acres of coppice would be required  to produce 8 tonnes of wood per year. Even the fastest growing trees – alder, willow, poplar, eucalyptus – would require 6 acres to produce 8 tonnes of wood per year. For the 30 million households in Britain this would require about 4 times the total agricultural plus forestry land area available! Nobody is suggesting the entire population of Britain use wood fuel, however, it is clear that in an era when food will have to be grown more intensively, more locally and more sustainably, there will be only enough land for a small minority to use wood for fuel.

ADD YOUR COMMENTS BELOW
 
References
http://www.smfrancis.demon.co.uk/airwolvs/index.htm
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/business/444255/446867/255244/substances/645/
 
The quantification of the effects of air pollution on health in the United Kingdom: COMEAP, Department of Health, UK, 1998.
UK national emissions inventory www.naei.org.uk
Domestic Woodfuel Installations – A Case Study. Scottish Woodland News No3. Nov 2007.

So Roger Phillips and the Council Cabinet announce their determination for a bypass in the same week as oil prices hit a new high. Not an irony that will be noticed by the same Council who tried to close our schools “to improve education”, or buried our heritage under a road “to preserve it for future generations.”

Are they asleep? Evidence now shows that oil production seems to have peaked and that we now face continually reducing supplies. This means that high prices are here to stay and will rise a lot further. There are lots of solutions to this but a bypass isn't one of them.

Oil provides 95 percent of the energy we use for transport. Airlines are already going out of business and even the bosses at BA agree the age of cheap flights is over. Much of the traffic through Hereford is caused by an oil-dependent system that shuttles food and goods around the world before we buy it. This will become uneconomic. It will become cheaper to supply things locally and this will reduce traffic. Lots of us are already cutting down on our own car journeys to save money. We don’t need more roads: we need more travel choices.

A bypass is yesterday’s solution for yesterday’s problems. The Council will cause huge problems if they go ahead with it the same way they did the schools review, thoughtlessly and without understanding the long-term consequences. They admit they can’t get funding from elsewhere so money will come from council taxpayers: you and me.

Everyone in favour of a bypass wants it for a very understandable reason: they are sick of sitting in traffic jams. But we need a solution that works and doesn’t cost too much. A bypass in the age of peak oil does neither.

Every mile of new road costs millions which you and I pay for in tax. Let’s spend a fraction of it on a first class pedestrian and cycle network, in modern rapid transport systems, and in greater rail capacity. These measures would reduce congestion and allow those with no alternative to the car, especially rural residents, to drive with less delay. It would make travel more affordable for all of us in an age of continually increasing oil prices. It would help local business. It would mean reduced council tax.

The desire for a bypass as oil supplies decline is like a thirsty man wanting to drink seawater. We know it won’t work. We know it’s bad for us and will drive us mad. But still we are apparently still deluded enough to want it.

Rob Hattersley

A must-read article in today's Independent...

The Iraq War means oil costs three times more than it should, says a leading expert. How are our lives going to change as we struggle to cope with the $200 barrel?

Geoffrey Lean reports in The Independent on Sunday...

The Observer (25.05.08) reports...

Soaring food prices are threatening to inflict widespread ecological damage on the countryside, as farmers abandon environmentally friendly schemes that have improved much of the landscape.

Read the full story here...