And bore- A Starmer Wars story
Back in 2017, a fresh faced Andy Street had not long won his first term as metro mayor of The West Midlands. At that event held at Sandwell council house, I quizzed him about Rattlechain and the then plans in the ludicrous Dudley port supplementary planning document that are still on the anvil 8 years later without getting any nearer to build houses on the site.
As I have said before and will again, I do not believe that this post should exist, and nor should the combined authority, which was never created with a public mandate to exist. There are some devolution plans perhaps in the offing to allow the mayors strategic planning decisions, but in general it is the wonga for regeneration which concerns me more, and that polluters who land bank do not pay the costs for later so called “clean up”. I actively campaigned against Andy Street last year. His Head Master ways were out of steam, like the flagging metro he so adored which has gone virtually nowhere in the time he spent in office. Richard Parker, another ex businessman pipped him for the job last year, and I know little about him but am prepared to give people the rub of the green , so long as they do not rub my rhubarb up the wrong way.
The “ask the mayor anything” event held at West Bromwich Central Library was too good an opportunity to miss, and to see if the new helmsman had a different take to AS on nature matters and the toxicity of building homes on dodgy landfill sites.
Our intrepid reporter set out on his quest on the old 402 bus, disgusted that a single fare now costs £2.90 into the central shit hole that is West Bromwich. Gone is “The Golden mile” , you can call it “the brown pile” now. The library is perhaps one of the few buildings that has survived to inspire anyone that does not want to frequent a chicken shop or similar ghetto or hang out with the crack head drunks outside Wetherspoons or The Sandwell/Golden goose or whatever it calls itself now.
I like to think of Libraries as the closest thing I get to church. I have spent hours in these buildings and the closest to home I feel except in the company of the natural environment.
On waiting for the upstairs event to commence at 6pm, my eye turned to Shakespeare and a rather interesting quote I’ll just leave here. 😉
And then enter our man from stage left. There were around 20 people with me in the room set up with a large banner motif which Mr Parker stood in front of proclaiming “Jobs, Homes, Growth and Journeys for Everyone. ”
A little tardy, it transpired that he had had rather a busy time of late, returning from a trip to China and earlier in the day meeting with The Prime Minister and the chancellor at Jaguar Land Rover concerning the Trump tariff malarkey.
I detected as was confirmed later, a slight softly spoken West Country accent, sometimes hard to follow in its fast sotto voce (yeah but no but) flow, and the former Price Waterhouse Cooper adviser took a broad range of questions such as the poor transport links to the new Met Hospital, safety on board the trams, skills in the West Midlands and even 5G masts and 15 minute cities got in there.
Obviously, I was there for one thing, and that was rattlechain. My question required an introductory note, and I will say that in the video below,( just over ten minutes long), please forgive the tripping up of words on account of having to hold dodgy mic, and a camcorder whilst also focussing on the mayor and his NVC/answer.
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My statement, backed by evidential links and the question I asked was written as
“I want to raise the issue with you concerning unsuitable landfill sites being touted for residential development in The Sandwell Local Plan. In particular the so called “rattlechain site, in Oldbury, which is two separate ownership incompatible landfill tips, wet and dry, The lagoon still has an active environmental permit as a “hazardous waste site” containing tens of tonnes of white phosphorus which has provenly systemically poisoned wildfowl.
The owners on the dry tip have recently cut down acres of urban forest already in a local nature recovery network map area before any planning application has been submitted, refuses to publish a pre ecological survey it claims was undertaken and we know was not, and has longstanding dubious connections to Jersey registered companies who “sold”, in inverted commas, the land under four land registry titles for £5000 each in 2006, at which point the company who tipped the waste filed for voluntary liquidation cancelling the waste management licence. In 2020 however these were then sold back for £1.2 million according to land registry documents to a company based in Henley- in- Aden.
Would your administration and the WMCA be comfortable giving grant aid money to this dodgy land scheme prospectus, universally opposed by local residents?
Do you look into such matters of ownership history, and the original polluters provenance and dirty laundry on your watch, do you think that THEY should pay to remediate their own land which they soiled, or are you happy to be rinsed by scheming individuals who are not from our area, but who want our cash that you hold the purse strings to to further their own avarice to build the next “toxic town” twinned with Corby?
“So a few points of clarification. I don’t have local planning responsibility, I don’t decide what’s in the local plan for development and I don’t bankroll businesses that do the wrong thing, and I don’t erm, underwrite or hand our money over to developers prospectors or businesses that contaminate, that’s really really clear. You’ve made some really valid points there, but in the first instance it’s probably best if you put things over to the council and not me, but generally that’s not our role, erm.
I have, I may have some devolved through the next devolution bill, some planning powers but those will be more strategic and the way we map our future landscape to create jobs here, attract businesses here, and we build ownership that everyone needs. So at a local level I don’t have local responsibilities. What we do do , working with our council partners, is work with them to support the delivery of affordable social housing, that’s what I’m doing, and we are looking at ways in which we can and do it across the region, is support the decontamination of brownfield sits, brownfield sites, so they can be brought back into use, to create jobs and hones, and that’s really important because the legacy of the black country , and not the black country through deindustrialisation wasn’t just the jobs we lost but was that we were left with land that was contaminated by previous industrial use. And indeed you can’t travel across this region to see the blight that was left on this landscape, and one of the biggest sites, not in Sandwell is at junction 6 in Walsall where there is a mass of land being remediated that was a copper works that was left without any use for thirty or forty years, and we always as a combined authority work with our partners to… (inaudible)… decontaminate land so it’s brought back into industrial use, no shame in that whatsoever.
I would rather see that land decontaminated cleaned up and brought back into industrial usage to create homes and jobs than leave it barren and waste landscape that blights, so that’s a way of approaching this. It’s not about under.. bailing out previous businesses but bringing back things into economic use where we need it, that’s what we’re doing. Indeed in a part of Sandwell at Friar Park that was land as an ex sewage works that was bought by my predecessor in 2019 that has been left undeveloped since for context for 650 homes, and that redevelopment has been held up by one bit of environmental legislation that is decades out of date which is designed for other purposes and I’m now discussing with the environment agency how we can deal with that issue so we can meet their requirements and ensure those 650 homes are built on that land as soon as possible.
So we’re working in a responsible way, we’re doing it to support our local economy, to create jobs and to give people affordable homes that are needed in this region. Those things we will always abide to, everything we do needs to be value for money going through strict approval processes and are committed to ensuring that every possible bit of land in the black country particularly that has been left contaminated by previous industrial use that we can do as much as we can to make those places safe for jobs and habitation in the future.
But the specifics around that land, you’re going to have to go back to the council ”
REBUTTAL
In general he didn’t really answer my specific question about rattlechain and the Sandwell Local Plan. I accept he may not be familiar with such sites, but this is not another “brownfield land” site, the issues are unique and demonstrably impossible to fix with filling a hole in with foundry sand. It is not a place that is habitable and it never was designed for that.
As for Sandwell council, I would not trust a single one of these twonks if my life depended on it. Some of the characters that have (dis)graced Jabba’s Palace in Oldbury are the stuff of legend stranger than fiction.
Boob Fortuna- “Day wanna my wonga?”
Dazorean Guard. Do not feed him sugar sandwiches after midnight.
(There’s only one) Wankor keeper.
I have to say that I am extremely concerned and have a very bad feeling about this that he spoke so liberally of getting rid of an environmental law which he claimed was “decades out of date”. I do not know which rule he is referring to, but in general I would say as this blog has evidenced that regulation of landfill sites has been dire and shambolic since the days when the original licences were drawn up by the useless West Midlands County Council. It is their legacy, the cretinous politicians past, as to why we have rattlechain lagoon, and the fact that “jobs” were considered more important then than people’s health and wellbeing as it appears to be the case now. Homes are not the answer to landfill blight.
I raised the issue as you can see in that landfill sites like this are not “brownfield land” according to The National Planning Policy Framework.
National Planning Policy Framework – Annex 2: Glossary – Guidance – GOV.UK
I asked him if he would buy a house on such land and again it was an open answer as to if the tests were right. The concern about this is that many tests previously on such landfill sites/regeneration projects like the Corby case I referred to have been manufactured and there is no one to check if they are accurate or fabricated. The EA of course never tested for white phosphorus at rattlechain lagoon or the water discharge to the canal– they had no method to do so! Would you also want to buy a house on land where a politician has called for faster delivery of said homes because of “decades out of date” safeguards? It is the typical ploy of politicians to set up an arms length body or regulator and then use that executive agency as a means of fobbing off the public with decisions and rules being “independent” but which in reality they are constantly trying to water down from behind the scenes.
What is more perverse is that the regional governors are more interested in solar panels and electric vehicle charging points in homes than the fucking contaminated land that said homes are being built on! Their phoney hoax “climate change emergency” and “net zero” headline grabbing narratives are just the method of appearing to care about the environment whilst resetting their economies into which they have invested their own personal wealth. Whilst they point at the sky it is a purposeful distraction away from the toxic ground we stand upon , the polluted groundwater beneath our feet and the tainted forever chemicals in streams that flow right past us invisibly. Their “growth” and jobs” homes are the toxic town seeds planted upon industrial cultivated allotments of death.
I also did make a point of praising the council for being pioneers in the 1980’s with creating nature reserve sites like Sheepwash and Forge Mill. This is the way that they should continue when nature has never been under greater threat than it is now.
In terms of bailing out polluters, I hope that he does ask questions and not dole out money to tinkers. Already we have seen the combined authority pay out money to another Mintworth mess to create an ambulance base. The Henley trotters have their other two sites, both currently fucking useless without significant wonga being paid up front to deal with the over-tipped foundry sand and vacant voids- Coneygree and Duport’s Tip.
Then of course we come to Severn Trent- a major polluter who is bankrolled by the WMCA at Friar Park as well as getting overage from deals they made by flogging off land once owned by the public. Fat cat Garfield and co ARE being fed by our money and taking us for mugs, as are those who allow it to happen. Parker should be questioning why they never remediate their own contaminated sites, whilst failing to protect watercourses from their sewage pollution, but expect us to pay for the new infrastructure whilst they bank millions and instead pay out huge dividends to their shareholders.
The Walsall copper works were decontaminated by John F Hunt- one of the companies implicated in corrupt practices by the CMA alongside DSM demolition and fined £5.6 million for illegally colluding to rig bids for demolition and asbestos removal contracts involving both public and private sector projects. – hardly a good look is it to recommend this as a good example?
Government policy it appears from Emperor Toolpatine is making it easier to build on toxic land on two fronts. The environmental destruction agenda is real and numerous organisations including Friends of The Earth have already called this out and I fully support their concerns.
PLEASE SIGN THEIR PETITION AT THIS LINK.
I challenge Mr parker to get real on nature conservation and do more than his predecessor to protect it and create new nature reserves as a more suitable use for land blight than building homes. These jobs in the construction industry are transient and do not last very long. Tourism, leisure, conservation jobs can be far more permanent and more useful for all of us. NATURE AND ACCESS TO NATURE SHOULD ALSO BE FOR “EVERYONE”.
The other front concerns environmental permitting, which currently has a fairly dire “consultation” exercise in how it will be easier to rip up pollution issues tied to historic landfill sites like rattlechain lagoon.
HERE IS THE LINK TO TAKE PART IN THAT DEBATE.
We have already seen how the civil service has been complicit in the cover up of historic information about what’s in your backyard, and this is just another step towards building on dangerous land. I did say and make it clear to Mr Parker that we are now left with the very worst sites from the days of environmental permitting and that these are NOT suitable housing locations where spades can be put in the ground. I made it clear that by 205o we will see calls for public enquiries as to the health issues people face from living on or near landfill sites, and yet as ever, the political class and their lackies will attempt a cover up as they always do, from economical wonders like asbestos and talcum powder, and of course, the latest- their poison vax. All about safeguarding jobs, little about human health.
As a final note I would also ask why there were mugs bearing the logo of Speller Metcalfe on the table for refreshments? Are these the property of the library, or the WMCA and why? Product placement and subtle brainwashing may be at work here in associations with this industry providing nourishment. Subliminal advertising works, particularly when linked to the buzz key words prompted by the speaker he stood in front of. WE ARE NOT ALL SO STUPID AS TO NOT SPOT THEIR TECHNIQUES. JUST BE AWARE OF THEM AND QUESTION EVERYTHING.
Wherever they went, whatever town they set up a factory in, this chemical company blighted it and put local residents at risk. Their apologists can claim that accidents can happen, and these were somehow in the distant past but the worst incidents involving Albright and Wilson occurred in their dying days in the 1990’s before the Rhodia takeover. By way of example, we learn in Hugh Podger’s book “Albright and Wilson the last 50 years” that 9 people died at a plant in Charleston in America, something which gets all the attention of less than a page in his pathetic fiscal packed bore fest of a book. If this doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about who was running Albright and Wilson, then nothing will!
