The Burner debate: Norman Baker MP

SO, the merry dancing by councillors has ended and Newhaven is left stranded, facing the awful prospect of a huge incinerator in town.

What a surprise! There has been a dreary predictability about the position councillors would reach.

A hand grenade with the pin taken out has been hurtling round the area for months, but it always had Newhaven written on it.

That we have reached this position is a tragedy for the town. But it is also a demonstration of a failure of public policy to be able to grasp a big issue and deal with it courageously and imaginatively.

The seeds were sown with the publication of the Government's strategy, A Way With Waste (note the gap between the first two words).

Faced with a cap on landfill, a maximum of 35 per cent of household waste allowed to be disposed of in this way from 2014 and a pathetic national recycling rate of eight per cent, ministers have reached the easy but inaccurate conclusion that the only way to fill the gap is with incineration.

The use of incineration is "inevitable", environment minister Chris Mullin told me recently in the Commons.

Faced with that uninspiring lead, waste disposal authorities, such as East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove Council, have fallen meekly in line. What a pity there was not earlier public involvement, because by the time there was to any significant degree, the incineration die was already cast.

That led inevitably to the second act of the tragedy, as officers and members tried to identify "suitable" sites. The only question then was "where?"

Then we had a brazen display of arrogance from Steve Bassam and the rest of Brighton and Hove Council. Yes, there had to be an incinerator, they said, but there was no way it was going to be in their area.

It seems they want city status, but they want to have all their waste, of all sorts, dealt with outside their borders.

This is to treat Newhaven as some sort of apartheid-era Soweto, there only to provide what is necessary for the prime area, with whatever happens to the inhabitants of the "township" frankly unimportant.

I challenge Brighton and Hove Council to answer one simple question. Do they believe incineration is safe? If they do, then such a plant should be located within their boundaries, as the proximity principle to which they have subscribed says waste should be disposed of as close as possible to the point of production.

If however they share my view that it is unsafe and presents real and significant health risks to the nearby population, then how dare they impose it on others, in a display of imperial arrogance.

As public uneasiness grew, there then followed the deadly game of pass-the-hand-grenade-parcel, most notably between Beddingham and Newhaven, with Waterhall making a late entry.

With both Beddingham and Waterhall in areas of special protection, the end result was inevitable. (It is interesting, however, that Brighton and Hove which is so keen to defend such spaces by a National Park wants to build a football stadium in an area of similar designation).

The ordinary person is left wondering what all the discussions have been about, all the to-ing and fro-ing. Like a Shakespearian tragedy, the events have unwound inexorably towards the final awful conclusion.

That happened on Friday, September 22, when Tory and Labour groups on the County Council combined to dump the incinerator in Newhaven against bitter resistance from the Lib Dem group.

To make matters worse, they overturned a previously-agreed safety clause, inserted by Lewes Lib Dem councillor Ann De Vecchi, for a study of possible health implications in a ten-mile radius of any proposed plant before final permission is given.

Local government mirrors its big brother in Westminster. Having decided incineration is inevitable, it then declares it "safe", for to do otherwise is untenable. "Safe" is the word used by Chris Mullin in response to my debate on the issue in Parliament.

Yet his boss, the redoubtable Michael Meacher told the House of Lords in 1999 that "incinerator plants are the source of serious toxic pollutants - dioxins, furans, acid gases, particulates, heavy metals, and they all need to be treated very seriously.

Some of the emissions are carcinogenic. We know scientifically that there is no safe threshold below which one can allow such emissions. We must use every reasonable instrument to eliminate them altogether."

So are we, in Newhaven, in Seaford, in Lewes just going to sit back and accept this? No, we're not! It's time to rewrite the end of this tragedy and I intend to work with the community I represent to do just that.

Here are some good reasons why incineration as a technology needs to be resisted:

It presents a serious risk to human health and the environment from emissions, as the environment minister has said. Industry will tell you that up to 99 per cent of the mass of particles are captured, but huge numbers of ultra-fine particles escape. Most of these are minute specks of metal which have been shown to damage blood vessels. In any case, even if the limits were safe ones, they are not adhered to. Since 1996, there have in the UK been 499 breaches of emission limits, just with the incinerators we already have, most breaches being linked to dioxins.

Incinerators produce large quantities of highly-toxic ash for disposal to landfill, so present no answer to the growing shortage of holes in the ground.

Incinerators are hugely expensive and need to operate at full capacity for 25 years or so to return a reasonable return on investment. That both takes money away from greener solutions such as recycling, and actually undermines recycling by requiring the constant production of an unrecycled waste stream to feed its ever-hungry mouth.

As far as Newhaven is concerned, there are other reasons why an incinerator must be rejected:

It will drastically undermine business confidence. Businesses will up sticks and leave, says president of the Chamber of Commerce, Marek Lorys, while the Newhaven Economic Partnership, the public-private engine of regeneration for the town, is sufficiently worried to have commissioned a study.

It is simply mad for Tory and Labour councillors on the County Council, having joined with the Lib Dems to invest public money in the town, now to pull the rug from under that investment.

Being some way from the main waste generation area (Brighton and Hove), the town will suffer from hundreds of extra lorry movements weekly, with all the damage to the environment that entails.

My constituents in Newhaven have a right to feel let down by what has happened so far. Local politicians from Hove to Rye may feel they have closed the file on this, but I have news for them.

Newhaven isn't going to take this lying down. And neither am I.