Sutton (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Waste firm Viridor has been exposed for nearly 1,000 environmental licence breaches in Sutton, raising concerns over pollution and regulatory oversight.
Sutton‘s FibDems have finally acknowledged, twelve years too late, that the poisonous pollution emanating from the chimneys of the Viridor incinerator at Beddington may not be entirely beneficial for the people they are meant to represent.
The Environment Agency has received a complaint from Sutton’s Liberal Democrat leadership, arguing that Viridor, a repeat environmental offender, should not be allowed to burn any more trash at their Beddington facility.
They have written to the Environment Agency and Environment Secretary Steve Reed to demand that the Viridor be subject to appropriate checks and controls after almost ten years of shady planning agreements and official cover-ups by the LibDem-controlled council.
Sutton Council leader Barry “Basher” Lewis wrote a letter to the CEO of a company he called “Virador” last week. Given Viridor’s numerous charitable contributions to LibDem-supported causes and the millions of pounds it pays in business rates, you would think that Lewis and his friends would at least know how to spell the name of the company.
“For far too long, Viridor has forgotten the wider community in Beddington, demonstrating little desire to educate or communicate with residents about the facility’s operations, site management, and critical operational issues,”
Lewis said in a note to Pierre Dorel, managing director of Viridor.
But one opposition councillor has harshly criticized Lewis and his henchman, Christopher Woolmer, the LibDems’ main environment councillor, for their “total grovelling obsequiousness” to Viridor over what they call “the latest environmental disaster inflicted on the borough.”
In actuality, Croydon is also experiencing an environmental catastrophe. Infant mortality rates have gone up since the Viridor facility started operating, and parts of Croydon are located downwind of the Beddington pollution plumes.
The site surpassed its daily emissions limitations for the quantity of Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) being emitted into the south London atmosphere 916 times between September 2022 and March 2024, according to an Environment Agency assessment.
Sutton’s senior LibDem councillors have been accused of a lack of transparency, and of trying to block efforts of other councillors to keep a check on Viridor’s polluting plumes. Dave Tchil, one of Sutton’s two Labour councillors, accuses the LibDem administration of “[washing] their hands of the responsibility and [acting] like it’s others’ problem”.
Tchil says that the council’s senior staff and LibDem councillors have worked to block his efforts to investigate serious incidents at the plant, “such as the fire on site, the malfunction of the chamber, the noise pollution incident and the numerous complaints about smell and pollution from the stack, all of which seem to have been ignored or not pursued”.
Tchil wrote to residents in his Hackbridge ward:
“The council and administration must not be let off the hook for their subservience and disregard for our community.”
And in a letter to Spencer Palmer, the council’s strategic director of environment, as well as to Lewis and Woolmer, Tchil said:
“Too often, complaints are logged, minimal information is shared, and it becomes business as usual.”
Tchil calls Lewis’s letters of complaint to the EA and Reed “a hollow gesture”.
“This very council and LibDem administration actively campaigned for the incinerator, granted its planning permission and defended its operation.
The local elections are approaching, and this letter has the appearance of a last-minute attempt by the LibDem administration to distance themselves from this issue.”
In their letters to Reed and the EA, Lewis and Woolmer claim that the amount of emissions does not violate air quality requirements and quote the UK Health Security Agency as saying that it is unlikely that the emissions have harmed the environment or public health. However, other scientists contend that there is no safe threshold for NOx levels before health problems arise.
The facility was given planning clearance by the LibDems in 2013, and in 2014, they even challenged a Judicial Review of its procedure in the High Court.
Sutton’s LibDems have acceded to almost all of Viridor’s requests since 2012, and now they want the Environment Agency to “hold Viridor to account” and take “strong and appropriate enforcement action against Viridor.”
Additionally, they have now determined that independent site monitoring and more frequent EA inspections are needed, rather than accepting Viridor’s own monitoring at face value.
Lewis’s letter was deemed “pathetically weak” by Nick Mattey, the independent councillor for Beddington who has continuously and steadfastly exposed Viridor’s polluting activities and the local Liberal Democrats’ money-grabbing duplicity.
Mattey said:
“It could not even be regarded as a mild rebuke — the subtext is simply that ‘we want to stay friends, and we have an election coming up next year’.”
Mattey says that the EA report exposes yet more shortcomings in the way Viridor have been measuring, and underreporting, their emissions.
“There are no figures provided about how much additional NOx was released into the atmosphere.
This omission goes to the heart of the matter: without transparency on the actual scale of excess pollution, residents are left in the dark while the council bends over backwards to protect Viridor.”
What enforcement actions can the Environment Agency impose on Viridor?
The EA often begins with informal advice or direction which we hope encourages operators to return to compliance without deciding on enforcement action. For serious or repeatings issues the EA can issue a formal, written warning which may lead to increased penalties for any future breaches an operator commits.
These usually require operators to cease offending activities or have the operators restore and remediate environmental damage. If operators do not comply with the enforcement action, they could face legal proceedings. There are also VMPs or Variable Monetary Penalties which allow the EA to use financial penalties that vary according to unlawful gain or cost avoided by an offender. They allow more rapid enforcement and a more efficient process than prosecution.
The EA may also consider voluntary agreements where the offender agrees to remedy the breach and not to repeat the offence.