You may remember the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Minerals and Waste Preferred Options 2 Consultation which came to the village some weeks ago. Myself and a few other villagers visited the roadshow and I reported on it here.

Our parish council put their comments in after their meeting at the start of October. Their minutes are not yet online but they commented on various issues. They then got an email response back from the lead officer at the County Council which I was shown a copy of. It read in part:

I assume therefore that the Parish Council has therefore no comment on the following […]:

• aspirations of the operators of Milton Landfill to build a permanent major waste management site including Energy from Waste on the land off Butt Lane . Whilst not our Preferred Option, it is still part of the consultation.

If you’re wondering what the significance of this is you need to know that “Energy from Waste” is what used to be called an incinerator!

Now I saw nothing in the consultation documents that mentioned this at the time and it certainly wasn’t highlighted at the roadshow. I went through the documents again after I saw the email and could still find nothing so it’s no surprise that the parish council didn’t comment.

I’ve spent the last ten days making phone calls and writing emails trying to get to the bottom of this one and today, with the help of our county councillor, Michael Williamson I’ve tracked it down. There it is tucked away in Appendix C on page 607 of 886 (obvious really, why didn’t I look there immediately?). You can now find the relevant pages here.

Although the County Council are not recommending the option it is still on the table and they need Milton’s support to ensure it doesn’t become a preferred site.

When I reported this back to the parish council today I discovered that they are now planning to discuss this again at their meeting on 10th November and they may then choose to comment however this is such an important issue to the village that I think we need to do so individually too as an incinerator on Butt Lane would be directly up-wind of the village, so when we weren’t getting smell from the sewage works we would get fumes from the incinerator.

We have until 5pm this Monday, 20th October to do so so your response will have to be via email to mwplan@cambridgeshire.gov.uk or their preferred route which is via their Web portal.

You need to comment on the document titled “Site Specific Proposals Plan” reference “Para 4.51 Site SS4-81” and say that you support the County Council’s view that this should not be a preferred site for a waste Recycling Centre and Transfer Facility, Mixed Waste, Single Stream, Composting, Inert Recycling or Energy from Waste.

(If you want to do it in writing there is an MS/Word document you can download here and if you post it today first class it should be with them on Monday but you’ll have to be quick.)