Call to close Walleys Quarry
Environment Agency officials should reconsider closing Walleys Quarry, in the face of growing problems.
Simon Tagg, Leader of Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, spoke out after the regular monthly report to the authority’s Cabinet said there had been a marked increase in bad odours since November.
The 203 complaints received by the council in December are more than in both 2022 and 2021, and the authority has already received 319 complaints by the middle of January.
Cllr Tagg said:
The EA is the principal regulatory body for Walleys Quarry with the power to suspend operations, restrict what’s done, or require work be carried out and it should consider using its ‘Closure Notice’ powers to close the site for as long as it takes to sort it out.
Given the suffering in our communities over a long period, it is important that residents can see that their representatives, and the organisations that are there to help them, are doing all that they can.
Newcastle Borough Council has pursued legal action via the Abatement Notice, which can lead to the operator being fined, and it’s up to others, such as the EA which has closure powers, to do all that they can to help bring change to the site.”
Cabinet members expressed disappointment that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had not yet responded to a letter from the Leader of the Council calling for a public inquiry into how the EA had managed the situation.
Written in December, it said that residents had suffered almost three full years of appalling problems and that hydrogen sulphide levels were still routinely above recognised ‘annoyance thresholds’, while the news that years of air quality data was flawed because equipment had been wrongly programmed was the ‘final straw’.
Cllr Tagg said:
This is one of the biggest issues in Newcastle for many years and it is so frustrating that it has carried on for so long – perhaps there would be a different approach from those in authority if this problem was in the south east of England.
I firmly believe there should be a public inquiry into the EA’s handling of this landfill, which generates more complaints than all of the Agency’s other regulated sites in England, and that making a commitment to do so does not compromise any legal action.”
Cllr Tagg and Cabinet colleagues also heard that the authority’s budget proposals for 2024/25 included increasing a ‘Walleys Quarry contingency fund’ to £300,000 in case it was needed for legal costs.