YORK Residents Against Incineration welcomes the news that DEFRA has decided to withdraw funding for the proposed incinerator at Allerton Park. But we deplore the length of time that it has taken the Government to reach this conclusion.

DEFRA could have recognised far sooner that this plan represents poor value as a way of reducing landfill, based as it is on outdated projections of waste volumes.

York and North Yorkshire must acknowledge that the process has been flawed from their side, with no meaningful consultation, contradictory information on liability, and policies being hastily redrawn twice. It has been that common feature of modern political life: an ‘omnishambles’.

The councils must use the government’s decision as an opportunity to reformulate their waste strategy.

The abandonment of this scheme will save council taxpayers millions over the coming years and this money should be put into more intelligent schemes of waste reduction.

These should be coupled with smaller facilities more closely located to population centres, using more up-to-date technologies such as anaerobic digestion and thermal MBT.

Recycling and composting technologies have developed over the last ten years and the retail industry is slowly but surely using less and more easily recyclable packaging. We cannot afford to be locked into a 25-year contract to burn waste which may not be there within the next ten years.

Owen Clayton, Catherine Heinemeyer, Richard Lane, Guy Wallbanks, Ivana Jakubková and Will Dyson, York Residents Against Incineration.

 

• FOLLOWING your article on the pulling of the PFI funding for Allerton Park, there is no reason why City of York Council or North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) should have to make extra cuts.

I have previously suggested to Coun Weighell, the leader of NYCC, that there are alternative methods of dealing with waste other than incineration that cost far less than the Allerton Park incinerator. He appears to be deaf to any such suggestions. NYCC has failed to respond adequately to the mounting evidence that the financial model on which the waste problem was originally put out to tender is fatally flawed.

When adding the withdrawal of the PFI funding to the flawed model, the cost to the taxpayer and consequent reduction of further services is outrageous. The incinerator project must be halted immediately and adequate consultation taken on the options open to the City of York and NYCC.

Carl Stitt, Boroughbridge, York.

 

• SO the Government has withdrawn the funding for the proposed waste incinerator project for York and North Yorkshire, to be built at Allerton Park. City of York Council leader James Alexander says, “I’m not happy with the situation; it’s shambolic”.

Perhaps Coun Alexander might now appreciate this is how many York residents view his administration, when it introduces cuts and withdraws services regardless of the views of residents.

Trevor D Scott, Boroughbridge Road, York.