A date for history books. Last Tuesday, the 21st of January 2025 was the day that Shropshire Council abandoned its target of becoming net zero by 2030. The Northern Planning Committee approved the final permissions for the NWRR despite there being no hope of it offsetting its carbon emissions before 2030 and no plan in place to achieve net zero by 2050. The council says it needs until 2030 to work out how to achieve net zero even though it still aims to start building in 2027.
I have never seen a formal council policy seriously breached by a committee in this way before. The decision to ignore net zero 2030 should have been made by the full council. Opposition groups argued this at the meeting but the Conservatives voted our amendment down.
Planning and legal officers strongly backed the application and some of their arguments that didn’t stack up. After the meeting, it was revealed that the council had sent confidential information from the business case for the road to external organisations of the road who submitted letters of support. It did not make this information available to the committee and we only learnt of this subterfuge after the meetings.
I have seen abuse of process to achieve political objectives before over decades. But this is one of the worst cases I have seen.
During the meeting, a planning officer acknowledged that the new estimate for carbon from the construction and use of the road would breach the council’s 2030 net zero target. But then said:
“While the numbers look quite big, actually, in reality, they don’t make a great deal of difference… On the world stage, it does not make a great deal of difference.”
After the meeting the portfolio holder for the road, Dan Morris, has said the emissions from the road only represent 0.0001% of global emissions so their impact won’t matter. This is worthy of Donald Trump. Everything we do that leads to more carbon in the atmosphere makes a difference. Climate change has no boundaries. That means what we do here matters elsewhere. Years of ignoring that reality is why the weather has changed so much and one of the reasons why the fires in Southern California have been so destructive and are still burning (a point I made in the meeting).
A legal officer tried to argue that there is no sense in applying the council’s net zero target to every planning application:
“If that logic were applied to every planning application – if there were an application today for houses because it is not compatible with the council’s policy of net zero.”
This argument doesn’t stack up, as I said in the meeting. The emissions from the NWRR are 100% owned by Shropshire Council. It’s our carbon budget. Emissions from a housing development are owned by the developer and have to be accounted for in their carbon budget.
A motion put forward by Julia Evans (Green, Radbrook), seconded by me called for the decision to be sent to full council for a decision. This was defeated on political lines with Labour, Greens and Lib Dems voting for and the Conservatives against.
As a result of this decision, Shropshire Council’s carbon reduction targets have been incinerated.
Dan Morris, interviewed about the decision on BBC Radio Shropshire said, “The only way to get this road built is to vote Conservative in May”. The converse is also true. The only way to stop the road and get Shropshire back on track to reduce carbon emissions, is to vote the Conservatives out. That’s politics. But planning in Shropshire has now become political. It shouldn’t be like that.
Rachel Read will be proud of them – let’s get the economy hey! One approach to this would be to put the word out to the contracting community that if the conservatives lose power in the May elections, design work on the project will be halted.
This saga is worthy of submission to Private Eye. I am sure they would publish it.