Unfinished business: Viridor promised to conduct restoration work at Beddington Farmlands from 2005. Successors Valencia are trying to get out of all their obligations
INSIDE SUTTON: If the council won’t take action against big business for failing to honour its planning commitments, then a coalition of around 150 community groups – backed up by a major legal firm – will. By ROSE HILL
The Wandle Valley Forum has served notice on Sutton Council for its failure to enforce legally-binding planning conditions to create the Beddington Farmlands Nature Reserve.
Inside Sutton has reported at length on the refusal of multi-national corporations, over many years, to fulfil their obligations, describing it last November as “a modern ecological tragedy”.
On Friday, the Wandle Valley Forum finally took steps to try to retrieve the sorry situation.
The Forum is a coalition group of around 150 community groups and voluntary organisations, stretching from Croydon through Carshalton and Merton along the course of the chalkstream to the Thames “for everyone who shares a passion for the Wandle”.
In its formal objection, the Wandle Valley Forum wrote that “Sutton Council should also be pursuing vigorous enforcement action in relation to the multiple areas where it is now confirmed there is ‘no significant change’ from the original proposals that have missed the deadline of end December 2023.
“This should draw down on the fund held by Valencia Waste Management to guarantee delivery where necessary.”
a) Commit to enforcement action to ensure the leaseholder completes the reserve
b) Guarantee financial delivery by the leaseholder to pay for the reserve development
c) To uphold current ecological targets
d) To enable public access.
The former landfill site should by now be restored as a wildlife haven and country park, but successive owners of the site have put energy profits before environmental obligations, and have usually been allowed to do so by flacid Sutton Council.
The deadline for the completion of the restoration of the Beddington Farmlands into a nature reserve was supposed to be December 31, 2023. The plan to restore the landfill site has been in train for nearly 30 years, with the latest planning condition for the total restoration of the Farmlands agreed in 2015.
Environmentalists, locals and elected councillors all agree that Valencia, and Viridor before them, have been given an easy ride by officials working at Sutton Council.
Broken promises: this is how the nature reserve at Beddington Farmlands was planned, and agreed as part of thie rplanning permission, by incinerator operators Viridor
Previous site owners Viridor had been making empty promises about how they were going to transform the nasty, smelly, polluted landfill site into a nature reserve as long ago as 2005. Eventually, the re-wilding of the site was presented as some kind of environmentally friendly sop in the planning conditions, a quid pro quo against Viridor being allowed to burn waste under a £1billion contract for their Beddington incinerator and send tons of noxious fumes into the atmosphere.
Beddington Farmlands is a 400-acre site that forms a key section of the Wandle Valley Regional Park. It had been used for landfill from 1998, first by Thames Waste, then by Viridor following acquisition in 2005.
The landfill closed five years ago, as the incinerator took over the disposal of non-recyclable waste. Viridor had a legally enforceable deadline of the end of 2023 to transform the landfill as a habitat for wildlife.
Viridor never took the restoration seriously and did little work, but officials at Sutton Council claimed they were powerless to act until the 2023 deadline passed. Which was a bit odd, because an enforcement case was opened against Viridor in February 2018. That case remains live.
In March 2022, Viridor sold its landfill sites, including Beddington, to an Isle of Man-based company, Frank Solutions Ltd. It renamed Viridor Waste Management Ltd as Valencia Waste Management Ltd.
Extinct: a juvenile spotted redshank, a species that can no longer be found at Beddington after decades of neglect and broken promises by Viridor and then Valencia
While Viridor failed spectacularly to complete the restoration, Valencia were even more lax.
Sutton issued Valencia with a letter before action – a legal yellow card – in May 2023, threatening an injunction to force the completion of the restoration.
This spurred Valencia into action, not to discharge their duties over the Farmlands, but instead to try to find legal and planning loopholes so that they would not have to do anything. Valencia sought pre-application advice from the planning authority – Sutton Council – to change the terms of the restoration.
The existing plan, according to Valencia, was unviable and not deliverable,”due to concerns over the acid grassland habitats and the challenge of delivering that without risking the Wandle chalk stream”.
The restoration schedule, as originally agreed, includes 190 tasks to be undertaken by the landowners. Sutton Council’s planning officials have confirmed that Valencia had done nothing with 80% of them, and where they had bothered to do what they were legally required to deliver, the quality of the work was “substandard”.
There was “considerable doubt” that Valencia was committed to the project, a council report to a committee last November said. They had shown a “lack of urgency and real commitment”. No one from Valencia bothered to turn up for the council committee meeting, such is their commitment to delivering on their legally agreed commitments.
As one councillor told the committee meeting four months ago, “It is time for enforcement, not discussion.” And now the Wandle Valley Forum, with legal back-up from the impressive firm of Leigh Day Solicitors, is about to try to force Sutton Council to act.
In their objection to Valencia’s planning application to, effectively, erase all of the previous ecological commitments to restoring the Beddington Farmlands, Wandle Valley Forum submitted: “The future of Beddington Farmlands is of the highest importance for the Wandle Valley. It offers an unprecedented opportunity to achieve transformational outcomes for people and wildlife both locally and strategically.
“The site has been identified as one of ‘Ten New Parks’ being promoted across the capital by CPRE London and its significance goes much wider than the Wandle Valley… This has strategic significance at a London-scale.
“The failure to deliver the wildlife and public access commitments secured as part of planning consent for the major on-site incinerator has been wholly unacceptable.
“The shocking scale of the shortfall in habitat creation, decline in biodiversity and lack of public access is confirmed by the supporting evidence. It is a cause of widespread public distress.
“We initiated the first major online petition for delivering these commitments and contributed to the decision by Sutton Council to initiate the current enforcement action given the failure to meet the 2023 deadline for delivery of the new nature reserve.
“We agree with the view expressed by Sutton Council councillors at the Housing Economy and Business Committee on 26 November 2024 that ‘Valencia have categorically failed us’.”
Read more: Sutton’s ex-leader in extraordinary attack on waste company
Read more: Officials ignore councillors’ calls for action over Farmlands site
Read more: Viridor’s charge sheet: incinerator operator’s eco-vandalism
Read more: CPRE tells Mayor Khan to make Farmlands a new public park
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
