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POLL: Should Croydon Council stop the incinerator?

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What do you, Inside Croydon’s loyal reader, want your council to do about Sutton’s plans to build a waste incinerator right next to Croydon, on the Beddington Farmlands Metropolitan Open Land site?

Micawber-like, Croydon Council had hopes that “something will turn up” in the incinerator Judicial Review. Is now the time for action by Tony Newman’s Labour council?

Do you want Croydon Council to back the £1 billion 25-year deal with private industrial contractors Viridor?

Or do you want them to cancel their part of the contract, and to put pressure on Merton, the other Labour-controlled local authority on the South London Waste Partnership, to do the same?

In short, do you want them to do the right thing?

Today, we are launching our own online poll, so that the politicians who run our corner of south London can be in no doubt about what the borough’s residents want them to do. After all, when they wanted your votes and needed your votes in May, they even made a promise about it.

Earlier this year, Tony Newman and Croydon’s Labour group took control of the Town Hall for the first time in eight years, with a manifesto that claimed to be “Ambitious for Croydon”.

Newman’s Croydon Labour manifesto said that they opposed the building of an industrial plant waste incinerator at Beddington Lane. Many people will have voted for Labour as a result of that policy.

Some residents, particularly in the north of the borough, including the previously Tory-held Waddon ward, were angry that the Conservatives had been elected in 2010 on a clear promise to prevent any incinerator being built “in or on the borders of Croydon”. Once elected, the Tories broke that promise and all voted in favour of building just such a waste incinerator.

Croydon Tories’ incinerator pledge from 2010: a promise broken. Will Croydon Labour break a similar promise on the same issue in 2014?

Surely Labour cannot be about to behave in exactly the same way over the Beddington incinerator?

In their 2014 manifesto, under the chapter heading “Cleaner and Greener” Newman’s Labour group  said, “Our goal is to make Croydon the cleanest and greenest borough in London.”

As Newman, and his deputy, “Clean and Green Stu” Collins, know very well, becoming London’s greenest borough will take more than a bit of fly-tipping prevention.

“Croydon Labour is ambitious to make Croydon the cleanest and greenest borough in London,” they said when they needed your votes.

“A Labour council will improve our local environment and make Croydon a more pleasant place in which to live, work, shop and visit,” Newman and Collins promised, apparently ruling out even the possibility of any industrial plant belching fumes and potentially noxious particulates over the borough for decades to come, as the Viridor deal implies.

“Croydon’s Conservative council has ignored the views of local people by … supporting an incinerator at Beddington Lane. Labour has always opposed this; a truly green council would never support the building of an incinerator that will be a potential health risk on its border, particularly one so close to residential areas.”

Seems clear enough, doesn’t it?

But since being elected, Newman and Collins have been relatively quiet in public on the incinerator issue, even though the matter has been argued in the High Court at a Judicial Review. It has been as if they were hoping that legal action by someone else would determine the future of the incinerator. Somewhat Micawber-like, they hoped “something would turn up”.

This week, that Judicial Review brought by local environmental campaigner Shasha Khan against Sutton Council’s planning decision to build the Viridor incinerator was lost.

There may yet be a legal appeal.

Now is the time for more than a few easy slogans and cheap T-shirts. The whole Viridor incinerator contract could be cancelled if Croydon, and their Labour mates in nearby Merton, another borough in the South London Waste Partnership, acted on their manifesto commitment and took action to pull the plug on this toxic project.

It is estimated that paying Viridor to build and run the waste incinerator will cost Croydon ratepayers at least £10 million every year for 25 years, under the contract which Mike “#WadGate” Fisher’s Tories signed up for. Meanwhile, the cancellation of a similar, as-yet-unbuilt incinerator scheme in Norfolk has proved to be much less costly in terms of compensation to the commercial contractors than the council officials there had predicted, amounting to a little more than £20 million in total.

So, people of Croydon, what do you want your council and your councillors to do?

Can anyone put a price on breathing clean air?

Take Our Poll

The poll is open for one week. Let Tony Newman and Stuart Collins know your view.

Coming to Croydon

 


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