Big turnout to quarry meeting

Yesterday evening I met 100 locals about Tarmac’s plans to dig up 5.5million tonnes of sand and gravel from over a 100 hectare area around Fisherwick and Comberford.

The Bit End Pavilion at Whittington was packed and a very high quality debate ensued. A genuine acceptance that our region and the UK as a whole will need aggregates for construction in the future but also a healthy disdain that Staffordshire provides 65% of the entire West Midlands quota for sand and gravel.

The meeting agreed with my stance that other mineral rich areas within the region must take some of the burden from our county. Staffordshire with a contribution of 65% is in an ineqitable situation when you see that the next biggest aggregates contributor is Warwickshire with less than 10% of the regional ‘pot’.

And although some seem averse to bringing politics into this the plain fact is that the last 30 years of Labour control in Staffordshire has meant saying NO to growing amounts of quarrying just hasn’t been on the radar screen… hence where we are now.

Labour strongholds tend to be in the more urban areas of Staffordshire and to the best of my knowledge you don’t find quarries in the middle of Burton or Tamworth towns! So the whole thing has got out of hand. Conservatives have already pledged to fight for a decent size reduction which would mean more of a chance of avoiding the need for the quarry proposals in southern Staffordshire where we are.

The County haven’t carried out the quarry consultation as well as they might have either. They allowed the Tarmac proposal to be submitted late, after the intial formal consulatation finished, and failed to consult the Comberford and Elford areas even though they would be affected by the Fisherwick proposal.

It is between those two villages that the processing plant is proposed to go with the finished product moved by road in both directions along the A513. Estimates suggest around 140 massive quarry lorries each day.

To give those communities a chance to have their say I’m at another public meeting specifically for Comberford and Elford on 25th March at 7.30pm. It will be in the church at Comberford village.

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