A £1million ‘hush fund’ announced for community groups by incinerator operators is being used to try to subdue local opposition, according to one activist. BELLE MONT reports
Viridor, which has a £1billion public contract to operate the incinerator at Beddington Lane, is freezing out local environmental groups from a grants scheme which they had promised would help “mitigate” the effects of their industrial-scale waste-burning operation being built on what was supposed to be a wildlife reserve.
The Viridor incinerator at Beddington Lane, under construction last month
That’s the suggestion of one leading environmentalist who spent a decade trying to get Viridor to honour its legal agreements to improve the local wildlife environment at Beddington Farmlands and around the site of the incinerator.
“Mitigation” is the weasel word used by local authorities and multi-national corporations when they know that what they are about to do, often for vast private profit, risks damaging the environment and the health of people for miles around.
“Viridor want the local community to jump through hoops and wants to treat them like dogs,” said Peter Alfrey, a professional environmentalist who lives close to Beddington Farmlands. “I suggest that the local community give them the dogs they don’t want – ones that bite back.”
The South London Waste Partnership, comprising Croydon, Sutton, Kingston and Merton, will be paying Viridor for a quarter of a century to burn the boroughs’ rubbish, as well as rubbish trucked in by thousands of HGVs from across south-east England. To mitigate the pollution and damage caused by the operation, Viridor were obliged to promise a series of packages for local interest groups.
But with the incinerator due to be fired up and operational from 2018, having got the acquiescence of local groups by dangling the carrot of grants of a few thousand quid, Viridor is now telling some that they won’t be getting any grants. Some suspect that the message is that they have not been quiet enough in their grumblings about the incinerator.
Alfrey, who worked as a wildlife warden at Beddington Farmlands for more than a decade, has recently been “warned off” by Viridor from leading guided tours of what was supposed to become a public country park, before the incinerator scheme was pushed through.
“I have stepped down from my role in the neighbourhood development group so that I can speak freely about the community manipulation and abuse that is occurring by Viridor and the members of the community fund panel,” Alfrey told Inside Croydon.
LibDem councillor, and Viridor shill, Pathumal Ali
Last November, Viridor launched the grants scheme, inviting “applications to share part of the funding pot worth over £975,000 spread across the 25 years of the partnership between Viridor and the South London Waste Partnership”.
To save you doing the arithmetic, that means a company receiving £40million a year from four south London councils to run an incinerator will be shelling out all of … £39,000 per year. Generous, eh?
“Viridor’s community fund is hush money, simple as that,” was the reaction of Nick Mattey, an independent councillor for Beddington North who has campaigned against the imposition of the incinerator on his residents.
The panel’s terms of reference can be seen here in a draft document obtained by Inside Croydon.
The document shows how the panel which determines who receives funding is quietly dominated by Viridor. The panel’s quarterly meetings are at Viridor’s offices in Beddington Lane, the panel includes at least one Viridor representative and one Sutton councillor (a LibDem appointee, currently Beddington North councillor Pathumal Ali), plus one member each from Hackbridge and Beddington community groups.
“Membership of the BLGFP is by invitation only,” the terms of reference state, suggesting strongly that Viridor will ensure that only pliant representatives are given the role of prefect, doling out the crumbs from the Viridor table.
The logo of Viridor’s hush fund, a ‘derisory’ measure in return for burning millions of tons of rubbish for decades
The area in which community groups qualify is also quite tightly focused, limited to those bodies within two kilometres – barely 1¼ miles – from the incinerator.
According to Alfrey, after months of work by volunteers from environmental and community groups on putting together three bids for funding from the panel, they have been told now that they will get nothing, and that they need to re-apply if they want to receive any of Viridor’s “community help”.
Alfrey says that Viridor’s “derisory mitigation package” is only an updated version of previous schemes for earlier planning applications (in 1995 and 2005). Alfrey claims that Viridor has failed to uphold some of those planning conditions, but has rarely been subject to any enforcement action by Sutton Council or the Greater London Authority over broken promises over habitat restoration, funding bonds and public access commitments.
“I met personally with Dan Cook, a Viridor director, and Andrew Turner (their communications chief), and following on from their glorious victory in the Judicial Review at the High Court allowing them to build a 300,000-ton-a-year incinerator in a nature reserve, they said that they were keen to try to build relations with the local community,” Alfrey said.
“I explained to them that there was a very active local community and both the Beddington North and Hackbridge communities were both preparing Local Neighbourhood Plans, plans which when implemented would be statutory documents and would be a strong reflection of local community aspirations.
Peter Alfrey: disillusioned over the way Viridor has moved in on Beddington Farmlands
“They agreed that there was no more robust platform to support local community aspirations and confirmed that the various objectives and projects within the plans were exactly what they wanted to support.
“Therefore the neighbourhood development group and also the Hackbridge Ecology Park Group submitted three applications to the community fund.
“One application was for a wildlife gardening project, another for improving the green spaces and parks in Hackbridge and another was for developing plans for the visitors’ centre in Hackbridge for the regional park.
“All the projects had a strong public engagement element, to develop stronger local community and develop an improved and vibrant neighbourhood. All applications were policies or projects within the neighbourhood plan. All applications were also about furthering projects that already had a strong grounding with pilots, detailed plans and detailed implementation strategies. The applications tooks several months to prepare and were submitted accordingly with the encouragement of Viridor communications.
“Then last week, we heard from the community fund panel. All three applications had been rejected. The visitors’ centre application had been rejected in its entirety and the other two had been requested to be completely re-submitted, both on grounds of minor details. A re-submission would involve going to the back of the queue again and starting the process from the beginning, with no guarantee that the new applications would be accepted.
Community groups in Hackbridge and Beddington have already run successful wildlife garden pilots
“The panel claims to encourage discussion with applicants. So surely if that was true the panel could have asked the applicants to meet and discuss to finalise the minor details so the applications could keep moving forward?
“Rejecting them totally or sending them back to the drawing board is an outrageous insult to all the effort and background work that applicants carried out – applicants that include the founder of the Sutton Community Farm, the chief executive of Bioregional and other experts and professionals within the neighbourhood.
“As far as I am concerned the rejection of all three applications sends out a very strong and worrying message.
“The community fund is being used, falsely, to entice the local community into hope to achieve community objectives but in reality are being drawn into a game of prolonged jumping through hoops and being given the run around for as long as possible.
“It’s a callous strategy being used to draw attention and focus away from activism about the threats that the incinerator presents to the local community and also to draw effort away from the issues where Viridor are still in breach of conditions to develop a public regional park.”
Inside Croydon approached Viridor’s press office and Andrew Turner, the former Viridor employee now hired as a consultant from Newgate Communications, asking for a full roster of the members of the panel and for details of the awards made by the community fund in the eight months since it was launched.
Turner replied saying, “The Beddington Community Benefit Fund have [sic] successfully awarded funding to a number of applications.”
But Turner was unable, or unwilling, to divulge to what causes those awards had “successfully” been made. “The panel intend [sic] to issue a press release once the projects have been completed – this will include information about the projects and photography,” he said, adding that the announcement will come “in the coming months”.
Turner was also unable or unwilling to answer the question about the make-up of the fund’s awards panel, instead directing us to a webpage which does not have that information.
Inside Croydon understands that as well as Turner himself, and Councillor Ali, the award panel meetings have been attended by David Goymour from the Hackbridge and Beddington neighbourhood development group, Dennis Philpott of the Beddington Farmlands community liaison group, and Mike Stafford, formerly Viridor’s site manager at Beddington Farmlands.
Turner never mentioned why such information is regarded by Viridor as top secret.
Alfrey is unimpressed. “Presumably the community fund will take on a similar role to the landfill tax fund, where instead of empowering communities into achieving local aspirations, public money from tax breaks was taken by Viridor and given to established organisations like churches who will re-fit pews that are hardly ever sat upon, using money that should otherwise be spent on empowering modern communities.”
Holy Trinity, sponsored by Viridor
Notoriously, Viridor Environmental Credits, a charity funded by tax breaks handed over to Viridor, made a £275,000 “gift” to a church in Wallington.
“It seems that Viridor would like to keep the local community in the Dark Ages so they can continue destroying the local environment. The last thing Viridor wants is a strong and vibrant local community, and they certainly don’t want too much trouble when the incinerator fires up and the public really starts to notice the damage that is being done to their environment, the air that they and their children are breathing.”
Local community groups have already begun to fund independent air quality monitoring for the area, in Croydon as well as in Sutton, to be able to compare the situation before the Viridor incinerator starts to operate, and what the air quality is like once it is burning waste on an industrial scale.
“Quite rightly, it’s not wise to trust the statutory bodies considering the breaches of current environmental conditions on the Beddington site,” Alfrey said. Alfrey highlights how a Local Government Ombudsman investigation in 2015 led to Viridor being instructed to fulfil its planning conditions without delay.
“Viridor remains in breach of those conditions to this day, two years later,” Alfrey said.
“It’s time for local community groups to start biting back at Viridor,” he said.
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Maybe the local environmental groups are, unintentionally, being done a favour by Viridor? Should the groups take a principled moral stand, to be be independent, and determine to carry out their business without the dirty hush money dished out by Viridor. Tainted money–just refuse it, if Viridor decide to change their tune in the face of the local outrage.
Yes, easier to take easy money from the likes of Viridor, but integrity counts for more. If you can’t run your charity without taking sweeteners, you shouldn’t be in the business.
Thank you (and others) so much for keeping the spotlight on this issue. It is a horrible feeling to know that very soon the air that we have to breathe will be even more polluted that it already is. Besides the huge, negative environmental impacts, incineration is a gross waste of resources. We should be recycling, reusing and repairing everything possible. We have the technology, just not the political will. Wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Not knowing anything about this we happened to be walking around the Wandle trail (we live over in Brixton) And decided to take a look/walk to the reserve. Found it all locked up and rather annoyed/sad at what looked like corporate idea of a nature reserve. Now we know why.
Hush money is about right. I used to live near Hinkley Point in Somerset where community groups were routinely given funds by the nuclear industry plainly to keep them quiet about the radiation pouring out of the reactors and the obvious safety risk. Local councils and the MP were very chummy with the place. Looks similar here with the incinerator operators.
A clear moral dilemma for these local organsations. Take the (tainted??) money ……. or not?
Another similar dilemma is the one involving supermarkets and bigger conservation organisationss ones are the conservation organisations ( I know of one national Bird charity, and one County Wildlife Trust –but there were probably more) who campaigned against supermarkets givig out free plastic bags, but were happy to change their tune and take the money offered by those same supermarkets in respect of the money they charged for “bags for life”. It would be very interesting to do an analysis of the amount of plastic discarded in the form of “one trip plastic bags” which are very flimsy, and the so-called bags for life which are much chunkier, but which get thrown away quite quickly. The “life” (whether the life of the bag owner or the bag itself is unclear).
The other , very topical one is presumably suffered by the conservation organisatiosn who offer corporate membership to commercial companies, such as Water Authorities and Water/ Sewer authorities. All very well, but does this stop the conservation organisation crticise the same companies when they dump raw sewage in the local rivers, and abstract too much water from them.
I can sympathise with the goal of getting valuable sponsorship to help the work of the conservers, but does it hamstring their will to campaign against enviro crimes, and end up voiceless, their once protesting mouths now stuffed up with £10 notes?
Perhaps these local organisations should actually be thankful to Viridor for not doling out the dosh— and not impaling them on the horns of a real environmental moral dillemma.
Should they take the money and run ? The tendency, once the first “award” is taken, is to stick around for more.
Another bullish metaphor of not being given the money is that this saves them from being castrated. That might allow them to fight on, and not be docile yes-mooing cattle.
Be careful what you wish for.