Forum topic: How you can help the Pinkham Way campaigners

Another significant milestone achieved by the Pinkham Way Alliance (PWA).


Now in its sixth year this titanic struggle which pitches a few (thousand) residents against seven councils, DEFRA, a statutory waste authority, sundry big business, major consultants and other ad hoc professionals, plus variously politicians and the Cabinet Office grinds on. And in its sixth year the PWA score yet another noteworthy win.

This time the focus has been on Haringay Council and specifically the outcome of the Examination in Public of their Site Allocations Development Plan Document.

Formal Representations were first submitted by PWA in March 2015, often drawing on and referencing substantive earlier work. Since that time many exchanges, formal and informal, including in open forum under the jurisdiction of the Planning Inspector, have taken place as the process went forward and ultimately contributed to the recently published Inspectors report.

In a major victory for PWA, the Pinkham Way site will be removed from the Council’s Site Allocations development plan document (SADPD). This means that the Council can no longer argue that Pinkham Way is a strategic employment site needed to deliver its strategic employment policies. (Recall that the intent has been to build and operate a large waste plant(s) of various forms.)

The Inspectors concluding sentence was to the effect that any future planning proposal for the site would have to be considered against the full range of national and local plan policies. Thus potential developers would now have real difficulty arguing that development of this site would have the benefit of contributing to the delivery of the council’s employment strategy. Arguments that the benefit of a proposed development would outweigh the harm to its nature conservation value are weakened, as the site is not required to make any contribution to the strategic employment policies.

And that immensely significant step has taken many hundreds of hours of very carefully developed PWA analysis, input and discussion; and without a tweet or Facebook-post raised in anger.

PWA has long argued that this green site is environmentally valuable and should be protected as such and that its current planning designation for ‘employment’ is wrong (dual designation, along with being a Grade 1 Site of Importance for Nature Conservation.) Reading the Report it seems clear that the Inspector agrees. However this current process didn’t have the power to recommend removal of the employment designation. This was because the matters before the Inspector were ‘modifications’ to policies rather than the policies themselves.

However, given the comments made by the Inspector about the Pinkham Way site, for example citing its long period as vacant land, its conservation value, and the length of the PWA campaign to remove the employment designation, and then pointing out that a Planning Authority should not retain an employment designation where there is no reasonable prospect of development, the PWA view is that Haringey Council will have little option when it next reviews its strategic local plan but to finally remove the employment designation from the site. This would have fundamental, effectively terminal, implications for any waste plant(s) development.

PWA efforts will now be focused on having the Pinkham Way site removed from the draft North London Waste Plan which is due to be reissued later this year.

Local support has been fundamental to this long running - and to date - successful campaign. You can show your own support by registering for (very) occasional update e mails at www.pinkhamwayalliance.org . It really does help.

This is a long, long story, littered with successes by the Pinkham Way Alliance (PWA), a grouping of 3000 or so residents and businesses not in favour of plans to develop a valuable green space for waste disposal use. After probably PWA’s biggest single success, the saving of £900m (their figure, nearer £2bn, PWA figure) from the cancelling of the Procurement, much skirmishing has continued, interspersed with the occasional full frontal battle across various fora.

A key part of any proposal is the underlying North London Waste Plan (NLWP). Now 12 years since this kicked off, a lot of PWA activity has been spent highlighting what a load of old tosh (a view) has frequently been proposed; and then they end up back where they started to think again.

A new mailing (attached) indicates the latest attempt to deliver an acceptable NLWP is about to commence, and when. (Much as with the railways, we tend to see many timetables, none of which prove to work in the harsh light of day to day life.)

With significant increased population forecasts (pre Brexit anyway), a London Plan requiring all London’s waste to be dealt with within our city, more recycling and its associated processing sought, but broadly people seeking less “stuff” (less money, smaller houses / rooms, sharing economy, other) and several other key variables, it’ll be interesting where this latest incarnation seeks to take things. I’d hazard a guess they’ve now run out of track, with PWA having blocked so many routes on solid grounds near impossible to argue against, that the focus for waste may well now be elsewhere than on a Grade 1 Site of Importance for Nature Conservation. But let’s see.