Pollution central: the Environment Agency does little to control the noxious emissions coming from Viridor’s incinerator at Bedddington
Sutton’s Liberal Democrat one-party state will ask councillors at a meeting on Monday to back extending the Sutton Decentralised Energy Network by about half a mile.
SDEN is the council-owned scheme that was supposed to pipe heat from the Beddington incinerator.
Nick Mattey, one of only four councillors in Sutton who are not LibDem incinerator apologists, is urging the public to turn up for the meeting on Monday to witness the latest planning and finance travesty in the costly SDEN saga.
The meeting is due to take place at Sutton Civic Centre on at 7pm on October 19.
The council has already borrowed £3.16million from the Public Works Loan Board, the government lender to councils, to bankroll the network.
Sutton tried to keep that borrowing secret from the public. Once the detail was released after an Information Commissioner ruling, it showed that the loan was granted on the basis that SDEN would be paid for providing the heating for an 80-bed nursing home.
That nursing home has never existed.
“The council can’t say a project paid for with public money doesn’t add up and then keep feeding it more cash,” independent councillor Mattey told Inside Sutton. “Yet that is exactly what is being proposed.”
The scheme was originally presented as “green energy”, with heat generated by burning mountains of rubbish trucked in to Beddington from Croydon, Merton, Kingston and across south London.
The Viridor-run incinerator’s capacity was presented to the public as 275,000 tonnes a year, but it has actually been handling between 320,000 and 343,000. Opponents argue the SDEN pipe extension does one thing above all: it gives the incinerator another reason to keep running. They estimate that means roughly eight more years and around 3million more tonnes of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere in south London.
Pollution from Viridor’s Beddington incinerator has got so bad that the operators have been forced to hold back their legally-required monitoring reports.
Viridor is meant to publish the toxic emissions released over Sutton, Croydon and Merton twice a month. Viridor didn’t publish anything from September 9 until this week.
The number of CO2 emission peaks risked being in breach of their Environment Agency permit (not that the Environment Agency ever takes any real action).
Long service: Nick Mattey has been warning of the dangers of the incinerator for 12 years
According to Councillor Mattey, the SDEN heat network was also designed for a climate that we no longer have. Climate scientist Ed Hawkins’s warming data shows our winters getting milder, which means less demand for heat. It also means that SDEN’s customers face rising standing charges for a service they increasingly don’t need.
“Classrooms are overheating in summer, and pupils are breathing polluted air,” Mattey said.
“The money now earmarked for more heat pipes could pay for cooling and air filtration in our schools. That would make a real, measurable difference to children’s health and learning.
“Sutton’s councillors have a choice. They can admit the heat network was built on shaky numbers, and they can stop throwing good money after bad. Or they can sign off another extension and hope nobody checks the sums.
“Residents who care about how their council tax is spent, or about the air their children breathe, should be in the public gallery on Monday. Show up, and make sure the council knows people are watching.”
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