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Judge sides with Viridor as incinerator case goes to appeal

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yes we khan franklin fontThe fight to stop Croydon and three other London councils from building an industrial-scale waste incinerator at Beddington Lane will now go to the Court of Appeal.

High Court judge Mrs Justice Patterson has refused an application to reconsider her own decision against Shasha Khan and the Stop the Incinerator Campaign’s Judicial Review.

You can see the document handed down by the judge by clicking here.

In a recent survey, 83 per cent of respondents said that they want Croydon’s Labour-run council to pull out of the incinerator deal.

But this week, somewhat damningly, the High Court judge dismissed the campaigners’ legal application, saying it “had no realistic prospect of success”.

Khan and other involved in the campaign felt that throughout the hearing they had been financially out-gunned by the expensive QCs hired with the generous legal budgets of Sutton Council, who were using public money to defend their decision to grant planning permission, and contractors Viridor, who will benefit from a £1 billion contract from the four south London councils to build and then operate the incinerator on Metropolitan Open Land.

“It was as if they were buying their legal services at Fortnam and Masons,” one campaigner said of the unequal struggle, “while we were shopping at Lidl.”

Khan and the campaign has a target of £15,000 for the appeal court hearing. “We’d like to do our shopping at least at Waitrose this time,” they said.

Khan described the judge’s decision to confirm her own previous judgement as “normal”.

“The High Court judge has refused permission and effectively left the issue to the Court of Appeal to decide,” Khan said. “We are undeterred and have the support of our legal team to file our request for permission to appeal in the Court of Appeal. The only obstacle is finance and we are encouraged by the massive local support for our fundraising campaign.”

The campaign continues to raise money online here .

Croydon Labour leader Tony Newman: has gone very quiet on the incinerator

The campaign’s legal team has until December 9 to file its legal request for permission to appeal.

In a poll of Inside Croydon readers, 83 per cent of respondents said that they want Croydon to pull out of the South London Waste Partnership and to oppose the building of the Viridor incinerator.

Croydon Labour, which spent five years campaigning against the incinerator being built on the borough boundaries, have been silent on this issue since being elected in May to do something about it. In the Labour local election manifesto, they claimed the “ambition” to make Croydon the cleanest, and greenest, borough in London.

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