There must be an election coming, as the LibDems in Sutton finally wake up to the ‘environmental disaster’ that they have inflicted on Beddington, and Croydon, as our investigations editor, CARL SHILTON, reports
Polluting plume: Viridor’s Beddington incinerator broke its licence limits 916 between 2022 and 2024
Twelve years too late, Sutton’s FibDems have finally admitted that the toxic pollution coming out of the chimneys of the Viridor incinerator at Beddington just might not be an altogether good thing for the people they are supposed to represent.
Sutton’s Liberal Democrat leadership has complained to the Environment Agency that repeat environmental offenders Viridor should be denied permission to burn even more rubbish at their Beddington plant.
After more than a decade of dodgy deals on planning and official cover-ups by the LibDem-controlled council, they have written to Steve Reed, the environment secretary, and to the Environment Agency to say that the Viridor should finally be placed under proper checks and controls, after it was revealed that the £1billion waste-burning facility had broken the terms of its licence nearly a thousand times in just 18 months.
Barry “Basher” Lewis, the Sutton Council leader, last week whizzed off a letter to the CEO of what he called “Virador” (you’d think that by now, after all Viridor’s generous donations to LibDem-supported causes and the millions of pounds paid in business rates, Lewis and his mates might at least know how to spell the company name).
In his note to Pierre Dorel, Viridor’s managing director, Lewis said: “For far too long, Viridor has forgotten the wider community in Beddington, demonstrating little desire to educate or communicate with residents about the facility’s operations, site management and critical operational issues.
But Lewis and his lackey, Christopher Woolmer, the LibDems’ lead councillor on environment, have been strongly criticised for their “total grovelling obsequiousness” to Viridor by an opposition councillor over what they describe as “the latest environmental disaster inflicted on the borough”.
In truth, it is an environmental disaster for Croydon, as well. Parts of Croydon sit downwind of the pollution plumes from Beddington, and infant mortality rates have increased since the Viridor plant came into full operation.
According to a report from the Environment Agency, between September 2022 and March 2024, there were 916 occasions unreported when the site exceeded its daily emissions limits for the amount of Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) being released into the south London atmosphere. This 916 was in addition to 12 other occasions when Viridor broke the terms of their licence.
Blaming someone else: LibDem council leader Barry ‘Basher’ Lewis
The agency has also admitted that the Beddington incinerator’s emissions, compiled by Viridor, have been incorrectly measured for a number of years, due to a errors in calibrating the incinerator’s air quality monitor (a pretty essential bit of kit for an incinerator, you might think).
The EA has downgraded Viridor’s compliance rating from A to E.
Yet the agency is still actively considering an application to amend Viridor’s licence to allow the company to burn even more rubbish at the plant, which trucks in lorry-loads of other people’s shit from across south-east England.
Sutton’s senior LibDem councillors have been accused of a lack of transparency, and of trying to block efforts of other councillors to keep a check on Viridor’s polluting plumes. Dave Tchil, one of Sutton’s two Labour councillors, accuses the LibDem administration of “[washing] their hands of the responsibility and [acting] like it’s others’ problem”.
Tchil says that the council’s senior staff and LibDem councillors have worked to block his efforts to investigate serious incidents at the plant, “such as the fire on site, the malfunction of the chamber, the noise pollution incident and the numerous complaints about smell and pollution from the stack, all of which seem to have been ignored or not pursued”.
Tchil wrote to residents in his Hackbridge ward: “The council and administration must not be let off the hook for their subservience and disregard for our community.”
Blocked complaints: Labour councillor Dave Tchil says he has been ignored when he has raised multiple issues with the incinerator
And in a letter to Spencer Palmer, the council’s strategic director of environment, as well as to Lewis and Woolmer, Tchil said: “Too often, complaints are logged, minimal information is shared, and it becomes business as usual.”
Tchil calls Lewis’s letters of complaint to the EA and Reed “a hollow gesture”. “This very council and LibDem administration actively campaigned for the incinerator, granted its planning permission and defended its operation.
“The local elections are approaching, and this letter has the appearance of a last-minute attempt by the LibDem administration to distance themselves from this issue.”
According to Lewis and Woolmer in their emails to Reed and the EA, the volume of emissions does not breach air quality standards, and they cite the UK Health Security Agency as suggesting that the emissions are unlikely to have caused harm to human health or the environment. Other experts, however, argue that NOx has no safe threshold before harm to people’s health can occur.
In their letter, Lewis and Woolmer write: “However, for our residents who live in the area, this news will still be deeply troubling.”
The LibDems granted planning permission for the facility in 2013, even contesting a Judicial Review over its process in the High Court in 2014.
‘Total grovelling obsequiousness’: opposition councillors have been unimpressed by Basher Lewis’s belated realisation that Viridor are his borough’s biggest polluters
Viridor’s managing director at the time of the planning application was a life-long chum of a senior Sutton LibDem councillor, who sat on the planning committee but never declared any conflict of interest.
Now, Lewis and Woolmer complain: “What is also concerning is the lack of proper monitoring and scrutiny by the EA of the data they received from Viridor. In order for these sites to run as required, it is important that our residents have confidence in the ability of agencies like yours to provide the highest levels of regulation.
“The report’s findings only contribute to the erosion of that trust.
“Despite the report, and the downgrading of Viridor’s compliance rating from A to E, we are aware that the EA is still considering approving plans for Viridor to treat more waste at the Beddington site.
“The council has opposed any increases and we are astonished that the EA is still even considering this. This is unequivocally the wrong decision.”
Consistent: councillor Nick Mattey
Having acceded to pretty much every request from Viridor since 2012, Sutton’s LibDems now demand of the Environment Agency that they “hold Viridor to account” and take “strong and appropriate enforcement action against Viridor”.
And rather than take Viridor’s own monitoring at face value, they have belatedly decided that independent monitoring of the site is required and more frequent EA inspections are necessary.
Nick Mattey, the Beddington independent councillor who has consistently and persistently exposed Viridor’s polluting practices and the money-grabbing hypocrisy of local Liberal Democrats, described Lewis’s letter as “pathetically weak”.
Mattey said: “It could not even be regarded as a mild rebuke — the subtext is simply that ‘we want to stay friends, and we have an election coming up next year’.”
Mattey says that the EA report exposes yet more shortcomings in the way Viridor have been measuring, and underreporting, their emissions. “There are no figures provided about how much additional NOx was released into the atmosphere.
“This omission goes to the heart of the matter: without transparency on the actual scale of excess pollution, residents are left in the dark while the council bends over backwards to protect Viridor.”
Read more: Infant death rates were up by 233% after incinerator fired up
Read more: Now ‘Basher’ Lewis knocks out debate on polluting incinerator
Read more: Viridor incinerator fined for multiple pollution permit breaches
Read more: Viridor’s charge sheet: incinerator operator’s eco-vandalism
Read more: After a decade of delay, Sutton condemns Viridor. Sort of
- There’s a running total of the breaches by Viridor’s Beddington incinerator at http://www.merton.tv/incinerator-breaches/
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