The LDP is wrong not only for devoting huge greenfield areas for housing – a house-builders charter – but also
a) for suppressing all ideas of a Green Belt to the west of Cardiff.
FoE argued strongly for this at the 1999 Public Inquiry and won the argument against the Vale planners and won the Inspector’s support. He recommended including all the eastern Vale up to Five-Mile-Lane, but the then Vale Council disregarded his arguments. A Green Belt is the best way to resist developer pressures that would make the eastern Vale into residential suburbs for Cardiff. Regional planning should meet more of Cardiff’s housing needs in Valley communities that want regeneration and have many brown-field sites waiting. The LDP fails from the start in refusing to face these issues and going for quite ‘unsustainable’ development in sacrificing huge green-field areas.
b) for allocating Barry dock for waste incinerators, with no full waste management plan as is required.
The Tory Cabinet and officers want to justify their past approvals of incinerators of waste wood and domestic waste amidst the light-industry businesses and close to housing on Dock View Road. They ignored waste-transporting lorry traffic, the high noise levels of power plant, the vast tonnages of potentially toxic ash that needs on-site processing, the probability of accidental fire and the inevitable emissions of toxic gases and dusts, all considerations for competent planning.
In addition to these obvious reasons, general policy says to site such plant adjacent to industrial heat users, as heat is the majority of the energy output. Barry's chemical complex has empty ex-industrial sites, and Dow Corning did express interest in the heat. Yet the LDP goes for incinerators (masquerading as 'waste management facilities') rather than devoting the half-empty dockland to mixed development with housing in accord with declared 'aspirations'.
The LDP has by law to include principles for an integrated waste plan and Friends of the Earth have put in a strong case that this one doesn't. It needs facilities for reclaiming waste materials including maximising recycling. It has to justify incinerating household waste rather than previous policy for mechanical and bio-treatment after maximising recycling. It needs to show integration, including facilities for processing the ash from any incinerators. It's not acceptable to plan to send vast quantities of toxic ash for dumping in English landfills.
So Barry & Vale FoE wants Labour's scrapping the LDP to extend to scrapping its awful planning for waste and to addressing the Green Belt idea.
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