Staffordshire quarrying looks like a fight

Efforts to reduce aggregate extraction looked on track but it seems the lawers may be needed after all…

Gosh, it’s been a battle and it looks set to escalate. I’ve written numerous times about the total failure over many years of previous Labour County Councils to halt ever greater quarrying across Staffordshire.

They never challenged either Government’s assessment of what the West Midlands should contribute to the national aggregates quota and failed to make any attempt at all to reduce what Staffordshire provides to that regional tonnage.

And that means that our county has more quarries than any other place in the West Midlands providing a massive 65% of all sand and gravel extracted in the region. That’s crazy and we pledged, when we won the County after nearly 30 years of uninterupted Labour control, that we’d stop the constant increase and reverse the trend in quarrying downwards.

It was going well and our efforts culminated a few weeks ago with an independent report taking into account everything from mineral reserves in each of the six strategic authorities that make up the West Midlands Region (Warwickshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands County (Greater Birmingham), Shropshire and Worcestershire and Herefordshire) to demand, historic contributions and environmental damage.  

That report concluded that Staffordshire is providing far more than is fair and my Cabinet colleague, Robert Marshall, set about negotiating to reduce our tonnage for the next fifteen years. Result! Or so we thought, until today when politicians from the other counties dismissed the report out of hand. Pure self interest because if Staffordshire provides less, the others will have to provide more.

Labour’s legacy is proving tough to break. So, we are now doing two things. Firstly, Staffordshire’s Legal Department will now start to prepare the groundwork for legal challenge, probably under some sort of Judicial Review, and secondly, Robert Marshall will return to the negotiating table to try for an amicable settlement in advance of the Courts.

This rollercoaster of eighteen months continues with more uncertainty… but we will not relent on this.

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