Formal policy on quarry reduction

For months now I’ve been fighting a battle to limit the aggregate extraction which takes place in Staffordshire

It surely doesn’t take too big a brain to understand that Staffordshire providing over two thirds of all the sand and gravel extracted in the West Midlands is inequitable.

New Administration's policy is to reduce quarrying

It certainly is and that’s why I was delighted when my Party gained power back in June and our policy to fight tooth and nail to reduce the current and proposed extraction figure considerably could be formalised. In my patch there are two major applications for new quarry works which have been put forward by the aggregates industry and as well as destroying yet more of our local coutryside it would mean thousands of new aggregate lorry movements every month.

Although Staffordshire County Council come up with a draft proposal for the amount of and places where more quarrying can take place over the next 20 years it is an ’independent’ Government Inspector who makes the final decision.

For the last 20 plus years the previous Labour Administartion at County have done nothing to check the growth of quarrying and consequently Staffordshire’s share has gone up and up and up. With a fair wind that should now stop. The new Conservative Administration have made it abundantly clear that the time for quarry growth is over and, actually, although our county has very large natural reserves of sand and gravel it is now time to share the burden across the Region in a much fairer way.

The message appears to be sticking and our partner County Authorities across the Region are now joining forces to try and force the Government to reduce the overall quota they have allocated for the West Midlands. There’s a way to go yet but the literally hundreds of objections that local people have lodged will help that fight tremendously.

We’ll know some more just this side of Christmas and the information available by then will be a good indication of whether our political determination and the sterling efforts of local people will pay off.

Click here to comment on this post