Sutton Council is accused of ‘hoisting the white flag’ after latest acidic air emissions, as a multi-billion American-owned business seems set to be allowed to pump even more pollution into the south London atmosphere.
EXCLUSIVE By STEVEN DOWNES
Blot on the landscape: independent councillors have spoken out against Viridor’s Beddington incinerator being allowed to burn more waste
Local councillors and environmental activists have responded with shock and anger to the Environment Agency stating that it is “minded” to approve Viridor’s application to increase the amounts licensed to be burned at the Beddington incinerator – despite the multi-billion company breaking the existing limits on their licence 916 times between September 2022 and March 2024, and never bothering to report those failures.
Even as they have been waiting for EA’s ruling, Viridor’s failures to manage their plant within supposedly “acceptable” limits have increased. In October, Viridor’s Beddington plant pumped sulphur dioxide – the chemical used to make sulphuric acid – into the south London skies with emissions of 382.4 mg/m³, nearly double the permitted daily limit. The volume was literally off the scale on the plant’s public monitoring charts.
In general, the prevailing winds carry emissions from Viridor’s toxic twin chimneys out over Hackbridge, Wallington, towards Broad Green and Waddon and parts of northern Croydon.
Infant mortality rates in one part of Croydon, downwind from the waste incinerator at Beddington, increased by more than four times in the first year after Viridor began plying their polluting trade in south London, according to official data.
The Environment Agency is, of course, the toothless watchdog which has presided over record levels of pollution incidents by the water companies without ever taking effective action to stop such incidents. The EA is answerable to DEFRA, the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, where the Secretary of State until recently was Steve Reed, who has been MP for Croydon North since 2012.
News of the Environment Agency’s likely decision (“minded to”, remember) to cave in to the demands of megabusiness Viridor – motto: where there’s muck, there’s billions of public money – came at a community liaison group meeting held in Sutton last week.
According to Tim Foster, one of Beddington’s independent councillors, the Environment Agency rep told the meeting that in reaching its judgement, the EA ignores the increase in the number of HGV lorries trucking other people’s old rubbish into Beddington. “That’s a planning issue,” the EA bod said.
Estimates suggest there will be an additional 7,500 lorry journeys to and from the incinerator, often using routes through Croydon and along the Purley Way, if Viridor’s money-spinning wheeze is granted.
Except it will be ordinary residents of Croydon and Sutton who will be the ones wheezing…
‘Total disdain’: Beddington independent councillor Tim Foster
Last week’s meeting was told that Sutton Council’s air monitors have recorded no issues with the incinerator – even after the 916 reported exceedances on NO² over an 18-month period.
“This plant is the original blot on the landscape,” Foster said.
“Promises made about energy recovery should have been couched in terms of revenue recovery on behalf of the operator.”
Foster points to Viridor’s many broken promises over habitat recovery at Beddington Farmlands, their failures to control their pollution “and a total disdain for the residents of Beddington and Hackbridge”.
The important community liaison group last met in September, when the 916 licence breaches were revealed. Last week’s meeting was supposed to have been chaired by local MP and Liberal Democrat councillor Bobby Dean.
Dean failed to show up.
Sutton’s LibDems have their hands very dirty over the Viridor incinerator. It was they who accepted lavish cash donations from Viridor’s charity arm towards repairs to a church hall that they use for party gatherings. And the LibDems pushed the planning application through, without mentioning that one of their councillors on the committee was a lifelong mate of the managing director of Viridor.
They even tried to cover-up for Viridor’s pollution incidents, with one of their councillors seriously claiming at a council meeting that all that came out of the incinerator’s twin pollution stacks was… steam.
Croydon’s local politicians have an inglorious record over the Viridor incinerator, too.
Tory lies: the incinerator pledge from 2010, when Jason Perry and his colleagues knew that Beddington was the chosen site
Ahead of the project being agreed, local Tories, including then council cabinet member Jason Perry, distributed thousands of disingenuous leaflets saying that there would be no incinerator built in Croydon. They already knew that a site was earmarked on the other side of the borough boundary.
The plant was eventually granted planning permission by Boris Johnson, when he was Mayor of London.
And when Labour took charge of Croydon Town Hall in 2014, their leader, Tony Newman, was embarrassed live on air on BBC Radio London when he was forced to admit that the SLWP contract with Viridor allows for the burning of radioactive waste at Beddington, and he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Viridor has been paying £1.4million per year in business rates to Sutton Council since the incinerator became operational.
Since the 916 emission breaches, Viridor’s compliance rating with the EA has dropped from A to E.
Only recently have Sutton’s LibDems shown the slightest bit of concern over Viridor’s repeated breaches of the terms of their licence.
Barry “Basher” Lewis, the Sutton Council leader, wrote stern letters of complaint to the EA and to DEFRA citing “an erosion of trust”. It was about as intimidating as one of those hard stares from Paddington bear.
“It is important that our residents have confidence in the ability of agencies like yours to provide the highest levels of regulation,” Lewis said. Hard Stare.
“We are astonished that the EA is still even considering this. This is unequivocally the wrong decision.” Hard Stare.
Jim Duffy, a long-standing and widely respected environmentalist who lives in nearby Carshalton, called the EA’s decision “alarming news”.
Duffy told Inside Croydon: “I asked the agency to commission a local study on the health impact of the incinerator in my submission to their consultation on the proposed increase.”
Duffy has been unable to check infant mortality rates by council ward for the past five years, because the Office for National Statistics has stopped publishing the information.
“I was hoping the EA could access the data,” Duffy said.
Acid air: the sulphur emissions from Viridor’s Beddington incinerator literally went ‘off the charts’ last October
Duffy says that neither the EA nor the UK Health Security Authority has responded to his requests for the information.
And Nick Mattey the Sutton councillor who quit the LibDems in disgust at their collaborations with Viridor, has described Sutton’s feeble opposition to the latest licence application as “a dereliction of duty to protect residents’ health and the environment”.
Battling on: independent councillor Nick Mattey
He says that despite council leader Lewis’s “stern” letter, within weeks, the council’s PR department was trying to encourage residents to visit Viridor’s on-site green-washing education department.
“This represents total capitulation to Viridor’s demands,” said independent Councillor Mattey of the licensing increase.
“This has resulted in a clear failure to prevent the expansion of waste burning at the Beddington incinerator. The council hoisted the white flag and adopted a policy of total collaboration with an outfit that ultimately takes its orders from Donald Trump’s America.
“For families living, working and sending children to school just a few hundred metres from the stack, the health of the air they breathe cannot wait for another strongly-worded letter.
“What they need now is decisive action: a return to cleaner backup fuel, independent verification that controls actually work under all conditions, and an end to expansion plans until the plant can prove – day after day – that it is no longer a danger to the community.”
Read more: Infant death rates were up by 233% after incinerator fired up
Read more: Viridor’s charge sheet: incinerator operator’s eco-vandalism
Read more: Viridor incinerator fined for multiple pollution permit breaches
Read more: ‘People will die’: Dombey accused of Viridor ‘Faustian pact’
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- 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
- Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network