TORIES CONTINUE WITH INCINERATOR PLAN

10.34.00am BST (GMT +0100) Thu 22nd May 2008

At the annual meeting of Gloucestershire County Council, Conservative Party Councillors have continued down the slippery slope to building a 270,000 tonne waste incinerator on Javelin Park.

Liberal Democrat Councillors on the council have pushed forward a motion, expecting that the Outline Business Case for an incinerator would have to be re-written after it was passed. But the Tories stated that they had no intention of re-writing the Business Case.

After the vote was taken, with the motion passed, Councillor Jeremy Hilton, leader of Gloucestershire County Council Liberal Democrats said: "This Council has now made a decision. They're rejected the Cabinet's preferred solution, an incinerator, in the business case they submitted to DEFRA. We'll be watching them now, and we expect to see that case withdrawn and re-written, and for them to do that soon. They're ready to issue a Compulsory Purchase Order on land at Javelin Park, and build a vast incinerator, which can only be fed by huge amounts of commercial waste. The prevailing winds will then blow the emissions that it produces all over Gloucester, Cheltenham, and other populated areas of our County."

Councillor Roger Brown, Liberal Democrat spokesman for waste on Gloucestershire County Council agreed, adding: "I am convinced that the decisions taken so far by the Tory Cabinet are inevitably leading to an incinerator and are based on inadequate information. We should first thoroughly investigate other technologies. Most importantly of all, we should increase our recycling rates by improving curbside collections. At the moment, we have a chaotic variety of collections in each of the Districts."