An open letter to the Chair of the North London Waste Authority
Dear Councillor Loakes,
At one point during the 25th June NLWA meeting you defended the huge capacity of the new EFW by stating that the Authority must take into account ‘… the future growth of North London’. The only inference that the casual listener – and perhaps your colleagues on the NLWA Board – would have drawn from your comment is that increased population / households will produce more waste..
As you know, any forecast should be based on up-to-date available data. In N London we’re fortunate enough to have this to hand in the Joint Waste Strategy (JWS) that you signed in 2009, and its Annual Monitoring Reports (AMR), for whose accuracy you as Chair presumably take responsibility. The JWS stated:
'The increases in population, number of households … suggest that patterns of waste growth in North London are likely to continue during this Strategy’.
In the 2018/19 report there is a chart plotting number of households against waste ‘arisings’ which tells a very different story.
This shows that although households (red line) have increasedby c 25%,as forecast, household waste arisings (blue line), so far from reflecting this, have fallen by c 12%.
Yet the 2018/19 AMR, identical to every available AMR, states that:
The continued increases in population and the number of households in London suggest that the amount of waste generated is likely to grow over the remaining period of this Strategy.
This is self-evident twaddle. Are you aware that, when one opens any of the available AMRs including that for 2018 / 19, the title is identical: ‘Annual Monitoring Report 2013/14’?
No-one has apparently bothered to look at the text for years, hence the twaddle.
Your NLWA tenure has been notable above all for its inaccurate forecasting. There can’t be many public authorities that negotiate for two years plus, to buy a piece of land for a specific 30-year purpose, a purpose evaluated by millions of pounds worth of professional advice, only to find 18 months after purchase that the professional forecasts underpinning it are so wide of the mark that the purpose is no longer justifiable.
You made a serious error in your statement last Thursday. It’s unclear whether you intended to mislead or that you simply don’t actually know enough about the business of the Authority that you chair.
Either way, you need to set the record straight publicly. The best place to do that is surely in the responses to the points raised by last Thursday’s deputees that the Authority has promised to publish.
With kind regards,
Stephen Brice
Chair - Pinkham Way Alliance.
A video recording of last week's meeting is still available on the Camden Council website. The meeting starts with the seven deputations mentioned at the start of this article and I would recommend watching them all and the responses from Cllr Loakes. Francis Sealey has edited down the dialogue between Cllr Loakes and Cllr Vicki Pites from Enfield - see below.
Here is the complete recording of the meeting, other than the confidential parts of the meeting:
