Local residents have decided not to pursue the current request for a Judicial Review after the Court advised that there is no case to answer.
Surrey CC were aware of the legal challenge and therefore spent thousands more pounds of residents' money on expensive lawyers ensuring that the planning process used to pass the Eco Park application was procedurally armour-plated.
Surrey have simply ticked the right boxes in the procedure. It doesn't make what they have done, or what they are doing, any more right or good; and certainly not green or 'Eco' in safeguarding the health of Spelthorne's SCC tax-paying residents. The procedure needn't be decent, honest or truthful. That's irrelevant as long as it's legal it would seem.
A far more ecological and lower cost approach for Surrey residents, and one which would have removed the environmental risks (remember, judged too dangerous for the RHS's plants at Wisley!) from surrounding residents and schools, would be to send our processed waste to one of the many larger incinerators already built away from population centres and which are crying out for more waste fuel to remain viable. These facilities would also process the waste more cheaply per tonne with much more efficient energy recovery.
By contrast, Charlton Lane with its low energy recovery disposal, is ranked no better than landfill by DEFRA. In spite of SCC's misleading statements to the contrary, the County is not required to burn processed waste near to where it arises in order to excuse this low capacity inefficient plant. The much more 'Eco' and cheaper solution would also have avoided the need to build an unnecessary and disproportionately massive (for its small capacity) industrial plant at Charlton Lane.
Contrary to Surrey County Council's claims, no exceptional circumstances exist to justify what will be a huge plant in the green belt to dispose of a lesser amount of dry waste (45k tonnes per annum versus 400k tonnes in a not much larger and far higher energy recovery Eco facility). No, the only real benefit of this proposal is to ensure that the PFI grant profits for processing our waste are paid to SCC's exclusive PFI contractor, SITA, rather than to a cheaper and more 'Eco' competitor. It's shameful.
LOSRA together with Spelthorne Against the Eco Park (SATEP), the group campaigning to stop the development, are exploring several other avenues, and will not give up on such a misguided proposal which will soon turn into the biggest and dirtiest white elephant ever proposed in the County.
