Joy as burner bid is binned

Thousands of campaigners were celebrating today after winning their battle against controversial plans for an incinerator in Telford.

Planners last night unanimously threw out the Sita UK scheme for the waste plant saying it was in the wrong place and would ruin the landscape.

The proposals were for an energy-from-waste plant to run 24 hours, seven days a week, next to the Granville landfill site at Redhill.

The incinerator would have dealt with 62,000 tonnes of waste.

More than 3,000 people signed a petition put together by protest group Telford Pain and the council also received 250 individual objections from residents.

Councillors unanimously voted against the plans during last night's meeting of Telford & Wrekin plans board.

Councillor Gill Green said: "I took the opportunity to drive around the site and there are a lot of other places it could go. It's simply the wrong plan in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Ecological

Councillor Veronica Fletcher added: "Everything will be put into that incinerator and burnt and we don't know what's going to go into it and I'm concerned that there will be toxins in it. They are not looking at this in an ecological way."

The plant was expected to burn domestic waste, but on turning down the application Councillor Rosemary Chaplin said Telford residents must look at other ways to dispose of waste.

Councillors refused the application on the grounds that it was on a green network site, would be visually harmful to the area and not in keeping with the council's plans to reduce waste.

The board also agreed Sita UK failed to demonstrate there were no alternative sites.

After the meeting Stephen Pessall, co-founder of Telford Pain, said: "We are extremely pleased as a group.

A lot of people have been campaigning on this for over 12 months and what we were saying was picked up in the report and by councillors.

"Thousands of people have won tonight."

Objections were also received from Friends of the Earth, five parish councils and Mark Pritchard, Wrekin MP, and David Wright, Telford MP.

By Jason Lavan