Thursday, October 18, 2012

Hartlebury Waste Incinerator

The controversial incinerator that has been planned to be built at the Hartlebury Trading Estate is kicking up letters in the Shuttle. This PFI initiative has been in the planning stages since 2008 and ended up having to be approved by Eric Pickles MP. Let's not forget though that the original plan was for a waste disposal site at the old Sugar Beet site in Kidderminster until it was quite rightly pointed out (by the public) that there were insufficient road linkages and the hypocrisy of claiming that this was a central location for waste when the hospital was added to Worcester's outskirts due to Worcester's "central location". So this has been a pet project for Worcestershire council for quite some time and just because the public aren't in favour of it is no reason to stop now.

The latest letter from Louise Brooks of HWAG (not to be confused with WAIL) contends that the price would increase possibly to £1bn. How ridiculous! There's no evidence that the cost of this £35m incinerator will ever increase. Indeed this £120m incinerator is set to be brought in at exactly the cost as originally outlined and the council will never have to subsidise the cost of waste processed as their 28-year forecast will be shown to be as highly accurate as all their other forecasts.

Seriously even Communist Russia never tried to go beyond a 5-year plan. 28 years of 'prediction' is a joke.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are right about the predictions being a joke, since 2009 they created a document called OBC (Object Business Case Lite) which states that the build alone could be £166 million considering they have got to dig down 8 metres into sandstone, next door to a landfill site which is giving off methane.
Councillor Blagg came to Hartlebury and informed us that they don't even know the costs.
They are not going to use the steam (CHP) Combined heat & power.
There is no water supply, so they will have to use the drinking water supply from Severn Trent.

Have a look at the 1998 redacted contact interesting that the Contractor owns the waste on collection and with that any recyclable value and not us the tax payer.

Worth you looking at and FOI


http://www.worcestershire.gov.uk/cms/recycling-and-waste/waste-contract/residual-waste-treatment/energy-recovery/freedom-of-information/foi-requests-page-9.aspx

For the following

Request
Balloon Payment: I would have thought that this is not a totally undefined figure and would ask for at the very least a budget figure as surely to undertake an evaluation you must have an indicative figure in mind? Additionally, I would ask what the mechanism is for calculating the Balloon Payment? (As you have stated the tender exercise is complete, so barring evaluation which should not take long to complete, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask for firm figures for this Balloon Payment).

Response
We do not know what this balloon payment will be. Until all of the commercial and financial negotiations are complete this will not be available. For information our contractor is carrying out the evaluation. They will then use the capital sum for the build of the facility to inform the financial model which will then produce a cost to the Councils. There will then be further commercial negotiations before a decision is made by Councillors. This will take some time and is dependent upon many external factors such as exchange rates etc. We do not expect a report to be prepared until late this year (2012).

There is more in waste, as the old saying goes where there is muck there’s brass. the conjractor knew that in 1998 recycling was only 6% in Wychavon it is now 45% just think that money could have been used on our hard pressed services and not given to a private company.

FlipC said...

Wait "exchange rates".. oh Mercia Waste Management are "owned jointly by Focsa Services (UK) Ltd and Urbaser Ltd. These organisations are in turn owned by two major Spanish conglomerates, FCC (Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas SA) and ACS (Actividades de Construccion y Servicios SA) respectively."