That this House has considered waste incinerators.
I declare my interest as a Derby city councillor of almost 17 years and a former leader of the council. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell.
I pay tribute to the amazing residents of Sinfin, Osmaston and Normanton; I have campaigned with them against an incinerator in our community for the past 16 years. I promised them that I would take this fight to Parliament, and that is exactly what I plan to do today.
Many present will be all too familiar with stories like that of Sinfin—and worse. It is a story of broken promises and good money thrown after bad. At its heart is a community that has suffered the consequences of poor planning, poor management, poor decision making, and a lack of transparency and scrutiny. Residents have lived in continuous anxiety and fear that the incineration plant in Sinfin will become operational. They have endured a protracted planning process, with the incinerator eventually being approved only on a technicality following a High Court ruling. They are rightly concerned about the impact that the incinerator would have on their health, local environment and quality of life.
Unfortunately, so much of the story is not unique to Sinfin or Derby. Incinerators loom large over so many communities across the UK, so we are here to say that incinerators do not have a place near schools, people’s homes, allotments, elderly residents, or spaces where our children grow up and play. We are here to say that enough is enough. Incinerators must be kept to a minimum, especially when they impact local communities.
I recognise that waste must be disposed of responsibly, and we have to accept that some incinerators will be needed to achieve that, but they must be safe, be appropriately located, use proven technology and be kept to a minimum. We do not need local plants that impact the lives of local people in local areas. For the sake of our communities and environment, we must also take bold steps towards increased recycling rates and a circular economy. When we talk about waste disposal, we are also talking about the future that we want to create for our children and grandchildren.
It is important to highlight what it is like to live next to an incinerator. Nobody wants to live next to noise pollution from a constant stream of heavy goods vehicles, deal with a fly infestation because waste is being left on site, or worry about their health and their children’s health because their next door neighbour is an incinerator that is leaking sulphuric acid and damaging air quality. All those are lived experiences from the plant in Sinfin, which has never operated for a single day, and which failed during commissioning.
It is not just the experiences of impacted residents—the statistics on incinerators speak for themselves, loud and clear. BBC analysis has found that burning household waste in incinerators to make electricity is now the dirtiest way that the UK generates power.
My hon. Friend and neighbour has spent many years fighting on behalf of residents on this issue, and I thank him for that. Does he agree that, after 16 long years and with no working incinerator, it is time to say that enough is enough and to explore cleaner, safer alternatives for waste disposal in Derby, particularly given that producing energy from waste is as bad for the environment as burning coal?
I thank my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for that timely intervention. She is absolutely right. Incinerators are right at the bottom of the waste hierarchy, and recyclable material in incinerators is being burnt because it has a higher calorific value. It is time to say that enough is enough. Nearly half the rubbish produced by UK homes is now being incinerated. While we continue to burn waste, recycling rates have stalled over the past 14 years. The message is clear: too many incinerators are not working for our environment or for our communities.
There could not be a better example of a failed incinerator than that in Sinfin, where poor decision making, exaggerated business cases and hidden truths have landed our community and local authority finances in an absolute mess. This incinerator has been nothing short of a nightmare from the start, and unfortunately there is no finish yet. After a drawn-out planning process, years of opposition from residents and the staggering sum of nearly £150 million of council tax payers’ money going down the drain, the incinerator still has never operated and, in my view, will never operate. Let us imagine what the community in Derby could have done with £150 million invested in local projects, delivering real outcomes for our community.
Instead, the incinerator has never processed operational waste and has created minimal employment. It gives me no pleasure today to say, “We told you so,” because at every opportunity the community has spoken out against the incinerator, and has been ignored by big business, council officials and decision makers. Clear warning signs were not heeded, at the expense of residents.
As a joint project between Derby city council and Derbyshire county council, the incinerator was intended to be a gasification plant. Gasification is a largely unproven technology with a history of failures and technical challenges, and unfortunately Sinfin has been no different. The facility has consistently failed commissioning tests, and we now need to say, exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson) just did, that enough is enough. The incinerator does not have a place in Sinfin and we do not want it there.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I commend the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this important debate. Huntingdon could be impacted by two waste incinerators just four miles apart from each other, and I rise to express my opposition to them once again.
Warboys incinerator was first proposed in 2022, put on hold in 2023, and then revamped in October 2023. The plant would operate 24/7 and process 87,500 tonnes of waste per year. I commend Councillor Ross Martin in my constituency for campaigning against it. There are many concerns about the significant impact on local residents in Warboys and nearby Pidley of not just the Warboys site but of being slap-bang in the middle of two sites of this scale.
Just four miles away, another plant in Huntingdon has already been approved, known as Envar. I have met the local campaign group POWI—People Opposing Woodhurst Incinerator—and have heard their opposition to the plans that would blight our land with a 26-metre-high chimney, create even more congestion and raise concerns about health risks. There are also concerns about the increase in vehicles, particularly given the proximity to the dangerous Wheatsheaf junction, which still has not been repaired. The incinerator was originally rejected by both Conservative and Labour councillors—the Lib Dem councillors, who did not live locally, voted in favour of it. The rejection was overturned on appeal, and the Labour Government then approved it.
On 30 July last year I was concerned that, in the Deputy Prime Minister’s response at the Dispatch Box to my question about her approving the site despite the council rejecting the initial application, she claimed not to have dealt with that decision, deferring responsibility to the Minister of State, and ignored my request for her to meet the people impacted by the decision. That request was further ignored in a letter from a Minister on 13 September.
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell.
I want to raise the issue of an incinerator that has received planning permission on Shelton Road in Corby. I believe that, at best, the planning system is being exploited —without a shadow of a doubt, it is being played.
Corby is a growing new town. The site I will refer to is on an ex-ironside site with a sludge lagoon. The planning permission for the Corby incinerator was applied for in 2013 and granted on 7 February 2014—more than a decade ago. The only public consultation lasted for 20 days, and one single notice was placed in the Northamptonshire Telegraph, so most residents had no idea about the incinerator.
DEFRA’s temporary pause on issuing permits ended on 24 May 2024, and the Environment Agency permit for the incinerator was granted just 11 days later. No community funds—section 106 money—have ever been raised from the project. Planning permission has not expired, despite the fact that it is more than a decade old, because work has started on the site—basically, a pathway has been built, but the site itself has not yet been built out. That leaves residents uncertain about the future.
The planning permission was initially granted because the site was on the outskirts of Corby, but there has been expansion ever since, which has not been taken into consideration. The site is no longer on the outskirts of Corby; it is in the heart of a community, right next to local businesses and thousands of houses. It is 750 metres away from the houses and 1 km away from Priors Hall school and nursery, all of which did not exist when the planning permission was granted.
The traffic impact assessments carried out 10 years ago have not been updated, and even then they estimated that there would be 175 lorries a day carrying waste through Corby. Do Members not think that, after seeing “Toxic Town”, the people of Corby have had enough of lorries with waste being driven up and down its streets? They do not need it anymore.
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker), my constituency neighbour, for securing this debate and giving me the opportunity to address this important issue.
I want to voice the concerns of some of my constituents about the proposed new incinerator in Swadlincote. I have met the lead campaigner against it and—for balance—the two companies that want to build and run it, so I want to start by acknowledging that we have a significant waste management challenge in our county. This has been identified and reported on by DEFRA. No campaigner against the incinerator denies this.
Shamefully, the east midlands is the second worst region in the country for the amount of waste sent to landfill. Even more shamefully, Derbyshire is the worst-offending county in our region, with almost 750,000 tonnes being sent to landfill and just over 308,000 tonnes being sent to incinerators. We produce a lot of waste.
A challenge in South Derbyshire is that existing incinerator facilities at Drakelow and in neighbouring Derby have struggled. The latter has rightly been mothballed since 2019, having never worked at all. The former has failed to reach its full potential because it is no secret that gasification technology, as used in these plants, has had a “litany of failures”, as described by experts including United Kingdom Without Incineration Network.
In Derbyshire, the proximity principle—which emphasises that waste should be treated as close as possible to its source—has been undermined by these two existing incinerators not solving the problem. We therefore need to transport waste over long distances to facilities outside of Derbyshire. Sending waste elsewhere not only impacts our carbon footprint but contradicts the very principles outlined in our local waste plan. We are exporting our waste to distant incinerators, including to northern Europe, and in doing so we miss an opportunity to truly address our local waste management issues. That is not to say that we need incinerators in local towns, as is being called out today.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this debate.
I hope my speech will be a lesson to those hon. Members lucky enough to not yet have an incinerator in their constituency. The Surrey waste transfer station is in my constituency of Spelthorne. For those Members who thought Spelthorne was in Lancashire or Lincolnshire, it is actually the only borough in Surrey north of the River Thames. Why someone decided to put Surrey’s eco centre right on its northern boundary remains a mystery to me. It was opposed by the borough council and by the public, although in the face of that opposition it nevertheless went through.
Those Members who represent constituencies to the west of London may subliminally know the centre. As you drive out on the M3—just as it starts and before the M25—all is green and beautiful and then there is this horrific chimney pumping out goodness knows what into the atmosphere. It was planned to be a gasification plant; post recycling, waste would go into the gasifier, which would then produce the electricity to run the anaerobic digestion plant, where food waste would go. The trouble is that, like the provision mentioned by the hon. Member for Derby South, it does not work.The gasifier has never worked to optimum capacity and has continually broken down, and the process does not work because it does not produce enough electricity to run the anaerobic digester. Anyway, Surrey is not diverting enough of its food waste into the anaerobic digester for it to run at capacity and throw off additional electricity on to the grid system.
I hope that that is a lesson for those who want to build their case against further incinerators—come and have a look at the case study. The noise pollution, the air pollution and indeed the water pollution caused by food waste leakages have all plagued local people. That is a source of considerable frustration.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this very important debate.
On 8 October 2021, a fire broke out in a warehouse at an industrial site near the villages of Cargo and Rockcliffe in my constituency. The fire forced the local primary school to close, residents were advised to keep their windows shut, and for nearly a month the fire burned at the site, fuelled by hundreds of tonnes of plastic, household waste and wood that had been kept in the warehouse. Calls to the Environment Agency show residents complaining of breathing problems, sore throats and headaches from the fumes.
I share this because, just three years later, the owners of that site, on whose watch that fire took place, brought forward a proposal for a gasification facility. As we have already heard today, this appears to be an unproven technology, and it is one that has raised a great deal of concern among residents in Rockcliffe and Cargo. I pay tribute to them for the concerted campaign they have waged for well over a year now in opposition to that application.
The proposed facility would allegedly heat pellets made of plastic, wood and paper, creating a gas of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It is claimed by the applicant that that gas would be used to fuel the generation of electricity and to power the site, enabling the replacement of the diesel generators now. I would fully support the reduction in carbon emissions that that would bring were it not for the fact that those diesel generators could be dispensed with today if the site owner would only use the grid connection to the site that already exists. It is also worth noting that other emissions from the proposed gasification plant will fall on adjacent farmland, which is used by two local farmers, both of whom I have met in the last month and both of whom have very real concerns about the proposed plant.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I welcome this crucial debate, the way it was introduced by the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) and the excellent intervention by the hon. Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson).
We have had debates in the past in Westminster Hall in which, unusually, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and I joined forces—[Laughter.] Yes, it is true. We joined forces to oppose the expansion of the Edmonton incinerator for a number of reasons: first, that it would create high levels of pollution; secondly, that it is in quite a poor area of north London; and thirdly, that the exhaust gases would descend over Essex and land there, causing all kinds of problems. We opposed it because it was over capacity. The modelling even predicted that it would import waste from Europe to keep the incinerator going, because the design was far too big. I can see hon. Members nodding in agreement, because exactly the same kind of nonsense has been talked elsewhere.
When the Government are represented at the UN plastics treaty convention in Geneva this August, they might, if they have a moment, have a chat with the mayor of Geneva. I spent an interesting evening with him some years ago, and I asked him what problems he had. I complimented him on the levels of recycling in the city, which are very high—it is well run. He said, “Fantastic. The problem is that we are stuck with a private finance initiative-type incinerator that needs a vast amount of rubbish to keep it going.” Geneva has to truck burnable waste from Milan through the Alps to keep the incinerator going. This is the economics of the madhouse.
I recognise that we cannot immediately end all incineration, but the fact is that the Edmonton incinerator, which produces 700,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, is being expanded. The recycling rates of north London boroughs are better than they were, but none of them is very good. The Minister will probably remember the occasion when she and I were both in Islington—she was a councillor—and we discovered that some Islington waste had turned up in Indonesia, which is obviously a handy place to take waste from Finsbury Park. It is utterly absurd. We need a different and better approach to waste in this country.
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The councils have now selected three potential partners to try again to operate the plant, but huge question marks over the project’s viability remain. I urge all involved to do the right thing by our local community and say of this incinerator that enough is enough, because over the past 16 years it is the people of Sinfin and Osmaston who have suffered the consequences of its shocking mismanagement. Understandably, they have lost trust in politicians and council officials because while residents have been ignored, consultants have made millions on this project.
During attempts to commission the plant, residents have suffered vile smells, despite a promise from operators and officers that there would be no smell off site. In fact, they were told that it was impossible for the plant to emit odours. One resident said:
“Where we are, the stench is really strong and smells like rotting food. We have been getting loads of flies around here as well. The summer has been horrendous, we have had to keep our windows closed in the hot weather because when we open them it is just awful.”
Sitting with the windows shut throughout the summer is no way to live. I am absolutely confident—I wish I was not—that other hon. Members present will share similar stories from their constituents. Whether the concerns relate to health, noise, pollution or the environment, incinerators are not working for too many of our communities. But we know that waste needs to be disposed of responsibly, so where does that leave us?
As the Climate Change Committee states, we need a step change towards a circular economy. That means transitioning away from incinerators and urgently increasing recycling rates, which have been shockingly low in recent years. Data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs shows that higher rates of incineration mean lower rates of recycling. That is known in the industry as “deliver or pay”, where clauses in council contracts demand that a minimum amount of waste be sent to incinerators for burning. We are facing a climate crisis, and that is not good enough. We do not have time to lose getting it wrong on waste disposal methods that harm our communities and planet.
I wholeheartedly welcome the Government’s action to crack down on waste incinerators by introducing stricter standards for new builds, which include tougher local and environmental conditions. It is absolutely right that projects will be required to maximise efficiency and support the delivery of economic growth, net zero and the move to a circular economy. But for Sinfin residents, sadly, the measures are too late. Residents are stuck with an incinerator that does not and will not work. They can be certain of only one thing: every attempt to get the incinerator working means more of their hard-earned taxpayer money thrown down the drain on this white elephant.
I urge the Minister to instruct senior officials in her Department to investigate this mess and to meet me to discuss better protecting communities such as Sinfin, whose residents are stuck living a prolonged nightmare with the incinerator looming over their lives. We have to say that enough is enough, so that councils do not throw good money after bad at the expense of local residents. Ultimately, we need to turbocharge our transition to a circular economy, moving away from incineration, which is the dirtiest way to generate power.
The Government have updated the national policy statement in order to meet their ideological aims, and I feel strongly that the Government are doing their utmost to silence the opposition of people in Huntingdon to railroad through their plans. Residents across Woodhurst, Old Hurst, Pidley, Somersham, Colne, Bluntisham, Needingworth and the market town of St Ives will likely be impacted by Envar, with residents of Pidley and Warboys being impacted by both the Envar and Warboys incinerators. St Ives is the second largest town in my constituency, and the incinerator is right on its doorstep.
The Deputy Prime Minister did not consider the scheme to be in accordance with the Huntingdonshire local plan, and my constituents need clarification on precisely why the decision was deemed beneficial above and beyond the local plan. Local job creation was given significant weighting in the decision-making process, even though only 22 additional jobs would be created at the site. My constituents want to know the reason for that weighting, given that so few jobs would be created.
The NHS 2023 clinical waste strategy outlines the need to reduce waste incineration, and that the development of in-house capability should be viewed as a strategic priority, so I am at a loss to see how the approval of a privately owned healthcare waste recovery facility can be justified. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain that. I asked the Government the current medical waste incineration capacity in the county, and they did not know, so I do not see how they can know that the additional capacity is required.
I want to hear why the Government seem to be rewriting rules to fit their aims without doing my constituents the courtesy of listening to them. I want clarity about why things such as the creation of just over 20 jobs outweigh the raft of concerns from the affected local residents. Finally, I extend my invitation, for the third time, to the Deputy Prime Minister or any of the ministerial team: I want them to sit down and explain the process to the people of Pidley, Woodhurst, Old Hurst, Somersham, Colne, Bluntisham, Needingworth and St Ives, and explain why the Government have thus far ignored their voices and those of their elected councillors.
Ministers have informed us that the Government’s crackdown on incinerators will not apply to proposals with existing planning permission, although the fact remains that waste incineration is the dirtiest form of power generation, so councils must now reconsider. That shows that the waste incineration system is broken. The incinerator in Corby must be reconsidered, and we must have a full review of the planning permission that was given for that site more than a decade ago, given that not one brick has been laid and the local circumstances have changed beyond all recognition. That is the least we can do for the people of Corby.
In terms of local economic benefits in South Derbyshire, we have been told that the proposed incinerator promises over £200 million in investment and 39 skilled jobs. However, nothing more of benefit is being offered to the local community, which will have an eyesore to look at for something that does not solve our county’s waste problems. It is claimed that it will process 186,000 tonnes of residual waste. That still leaves us with almost 564,000 tonnes of waste going to landfill, so it is hard for people to believe that yet another incinerator is the answer. Are we not better to prioritise reducing waste in our county, region and country? Even when there are claims that new tech mean zero emissions, and when some of the outputs from incinerators can support sustainable practices such as creating sustainable aviation fuel from plastics as the aviation industry targets net zero by 2050, the truth is that where materials are burnt there will always be concern about the release of harmful chemicals and emissions into the atmosphere.
We must challenge ourselves to think beyond incineration and invest in a future where waste is managed sustainably and the environment protected for generations to come.
What can we learn from all of this? The first thing that we all ought to learn is that we should all waste far less food. Between a quarter and a third of all food in this country ends up in landfill, which is appalling when so many people are hungry. I am blessed to have in my constituency an amazing charity called Surplus to Supper, which takes in 4 tonnes of food a day from supermarkets within a 7 to 8-mile radius, and produces hundreds of thousands of meals a year for before and after school clubs. I recommend that we look at that model.
There is a second lesson that we can take from all of this. I heard the Secretary of State say that we were in a “sprint to decarbonise” our economy and I heard the Deputy Prime Minister say that, under the planning framework, nimbys were not going to stand in the way of development. Those two things concern me, because they could combine to allow further programmes and plans simply to ignore local concerns. If local concerns had been listened to at the time that the Spelthorne eco park was being built, it would not have been built and would not have become the failure that it is.
We need to have a weather eye on these cutting-edge and bleeding-edge technologies that promise the earth at the time they are developed but cost the earth in the long term.
I am not opposed to incineration in principle, but in recent years it seems to have become something of a panacea for the challenges of recycling. Over the last 14 years, recycling rates have stalled. Almost half of waste collected by local authorities in 2022-23 was incinerated, with just 40% being recycled. Rather than pursuing recycling, we appear now to have regulations that encourage businesses simply to burn waste, and that unfortunate trend is all too apparent in my constituency of Carlisle and in north Cumbria.
Just a stone’s throw from the proposed gasification plant is another site that is the subject of a planning application—for, yes, another incinerator. It should not fall to villages like Cargo and Rockcliffe to become unofficial waste clusters. That is why I am glad that the Government are proposing new, stricter local environmental conditions. Incinerators can have their place, but they must not be allowed to be a means to make a fast buck out of burning resources that we should be recycling.
Incineration is a sort of faux recycling. People say, “It’s okay—it’s burned; it’s gone.” It is not gone. It is burned, and pollution comes from it. Yes, we generate electricity from it and get some road-building materials from the ash, but surely we should look at recycling rates instead. The Government’s own estimate is that 55% of all waste is readily recyclable, quite a bit more is partially recyclable and only 8% to 10% is absolutely impossible to recycle. Our society needs a different approach and a different attitude.
I hope that the Minister will tell us that there will be no new licences for new incinerators in this country. I hope that she will look at the existing licences and see where we can reduce incineration to a much lower level, although I recognise that it is difficult to get rid of it straightaway. Finally, I hope that there will be a big Government initiative on recycling rates. That will mean looking at household as well as industrial collections. Too little is recycled, and too much food waste goes into landfill or to incineration when it could and should be composted. But if we have 45 different systems to collect household waste, we are bound to get confusion. Let us have a simpler system, much better composting and recycling, and an attitude that is about working with our environment, not destroying it.