Jeremy Irons is in Town! Campaign Update April 2015

Post date: Apr 29, 2015 9:25:32 PM

LEGAL CHALLENGE

We still have a chance to stop the incinerator: Stroud District Council has challenged the decision of the Secretary of State to grant planning permission. A High Court judge will consider their legal challenge on 25th June in London. Their case is based on interpretation of the County Council’s Waste Core Strategy, and they have put forward a strong argument. So fingers crossed! If they win, then the case gets returned to the Planning Inspectorate who must then reconsider the decision - this could possibly mean re-running a Public Inquiry. So watch this space!

TRASHED - THE MOVIE

38 Degrees have managed to get Jeremy Irons, multi-award winning stage and screen star, to come and personally present his film Trashed (2012), in which he stars and narrates a hard-hitting exposé of the perils of landfill and incineration, backed by academic and scientific experts from around the world.

The event is at the big screen in Stroud VUE Cinema on the evening of bank holiday Monday 4th May at 7.30pm and there are just a few tickets left.

Tickets available HERE- http://www.side.st/trashed.htm and cost £8 (this is purely to cover hire of the cinema and equipment).

All Gloucestershire County Councillors have been offered complimentary tickets on the basis that their duty to the public interest will be usefully informed by the content of the film...

After the film there will be a discussion and Q&A hosted by barrister and earth lawyer Polly Higgins.

PLUMEPLOTTER

Ever wanted to know where the emissions coming out of the incinerator stack would land? A local resident has developed a model to indicate where the plume from the incinerator would go and what concentrations of pollutants it would disperse.

This is a real-time model showing wind direction and predicted concentrations of pollutants on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis. It has been verified by a number of independent analysts, and is viewed to be as valid and as accurate as any of the information produced by UBB. You can see the model here: http://www.plumeplotter.com/glos/ . The message it gives is really powerful - see what you think.

SECRETIVE GCC WITHOLDING INFORMATION

Several GlosVAIN supporters have been trying to get information from Gloucestershire County Council about their contract with UBB. Once again, the financial details of the contract have been withheld. They will not tell us:

  • The breakdown of the £500m that GCC say the contract will cost over 25 years, including how much they would be paying UBB per tonne of waste.
  • How they have calculated the claimed savings of £150m over the lifetime of the contract.
  • The costs of cancelling the contract.
  • And much more…..

This is about taxpayer’s money - OUR money - and we have a right to know how GCC propose to spend it. How can Councillors decide on whether to go ahead with the incinerator when they do not have this information?

We are appealing to the Information Commissioner to review the case, and we hope that he will find in our favour and force GCC to release the information. This has already happened with anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, where the commissioner has ruled that the information should be in the public arena. We’ll keep you updated, although it may take some months before we get a result.

You can read the case put to GCC to reveal the details, which they they then refused to do here.