Wiltshire Council facing £100,000 legal bill over incinerator, By local democracy reporter Jude Holden

WILTSHIRE Council have been hit with a £100,000 bill in legal costs by the developers of the Westbury incinerator after a long-fought battle.

The council has already forked out almost £200,000 in legal fees fighting the controversial development – and must now pay an extra bill for causing unnecessary expense to Northacre Renewable Energy Ltd. (NREL), which is building it. The £100,000 is currently being negotiated by Wiltshire Council so the final figure is yet to be decided.

Council officers have said the applicants claimed the legal battle cost them £400,000 and expect Wiltshire Council to pay 25% of that cost. NREL was contacted to justify how this figure was calculated.

Councillor for Westbury East Gordon King said, “It’s a very large amount of money and although we always expected that if the appeal was lost there would be a cost, I think that this number is absolutely outrageous. The costs that would have been incurred by the appeal are not that great. It’s not really cost them that much money.”

Councillor for Westbury West Matthew Dean added, “My view is that Wiltshire Council should never have approved the first incinerator all those years ago. It was very unfortunate they did that because they set a precedent which made resisting this larger incinerator more problematic.

“I was never confident that it was going to be possible to stop the incinerator, but I did everything I possibly could to try to stop the application being approved. I certainly think it was worth fighting the planning appeal because in my view the incinerator is in the wrong place and my residents had an expectation that the council should do everything it could to try to stop it.”

NREL won the appeal case for the approval of the £200m incinerator in February of this year. The planning inspector decided the council do not have to pay NREL’s full legal costs for the appeal because their actions were only found to be unreasonable on two counts.

The inspector said in his report the first way the council were unreasonable was arguing that the development plan, which councils use to determine which buildings are allowed, was out of date so could not be used to support the incinerator. But the inspector found no reason to consider the development plan out of date.

The second way the council behaved unreasonably was in their presentation of unrealistic and overly theoretical scenarios of how waste might otherwise be dealt with such as shipping it to a plant in Hamburg.