THE FACE OF CHANGE

Life is tough for quarry companies, not least because the visibility of quarrying has long placed it in the environmentalists' firing line. Yet Government plans to reform old mineral permissions are attracting flak from environmentalists and quarry owners alike, albeit for very different reasons.

Proposals published by the DoE earlier this year suggested that planning permissions granted between 1948 and 1981 should be reviewed and that only limited compensation be awarded to the companies involved.

But the Council for the Protection of Rural England believes the Government has failed to question whether certain permissions should exist at all.

'The Government's proposals are a recipe for muddle and confusion,' said minerals campaigner Lilli Matson earlier this month.

'The time is now up for these damaging old minerals permissions and local authorities should have their hands untied by removing the requirement to pay compensation for upgrading environmental standards'.

Trade organisation Bacmi immediately slammed CPRE's response as 'misleading'.

'Its claim that the quarrying industry is "significantly different in planning terms to other forms of development" is untrue,' said Bacmi economist Jerry McLaughlin. 'Like all industrial processes it is subject to the full provisions of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act and does not receive compensation for compliance with these provisions'.

Bacmi's official response to the DoE's planned reforms, sent to the DoE last week, includes a number of serious criticisms, not least in response to the proposed removal of planning rights without compensation.

'This is totally without precedent and fundamentally wrong. No other industry is being attacked in this way,' it claims.

The compensation regime for amending mineral planning permissions is 'fudged', it says, and the proposal to reduce the expiry date of pre-1982 permissions to 30 years would hit the long-term planning of sites and leave workable minerals in the ground.

The Sand and Gravel Association is concerned that recommendations it made to the DoE beforehand were not followed and says the proposals are 'unreasonable and inequitable in their implications for the industry'.

'It appears that the scale and stringency of the measures proposed are out of context with the relatively limited problems that occur with some sites at present,' states the organisation's initial response.

SAGA takes serious issue with the suggestion that old sites are a financial burden on the taxpayer: 'There is no recognition of the substantial improvements in environmental performance made by the minerals industry over the years, particularly in relation to restoration, progressive working and in the Codes of Practice.'

It appears, says SAGA, that the sand and gravel industry is still tarred with the "failure to restore" criticism, an issue it claims to have addressed back in the 1970s.

The battle over reforms to old permissions looks like being protracted, taking the heat off that other great quarrying issue, Mineral Planning Guidance Note 6.

In general terms, the MPG6 guidelines, which were introduced earlier this year (CJ, 21 April), call for a reduction in the amount of quarrying and increase in the use of recycled materials. Not surprisingly, they provoked a mixed reaction from the construction industry.

At the time SAGA said they would lead to company closures and increased imports and aggregate giant RMC labelled them 'potentially damaging'.

The guidelines call for the construction industry to reduce its dependence on land-won aggregates from 83 to 68% by 2006 and forecast England's demand for the next 15 years to be 4,280 million tonnes.

The number of superquarries is limited to a maximum of four over the next 15 years - a relief for local quarry operators and environmentalists alike, especially as the idea of 20 or more superquarries to supply the UK market had been mooted previously.

Bacmi welcomed what it called the 'underlying realism in the guidelines that most aggregates demand will continue to be sourced from local quarries'.

RMC technical services director Brian Frost echoes these sentiments:

'The idea of superquarries is not realistic when one considers the capital cost of development.'

So Foster Yeoman's Glensanda quarry in northwest Scotland remains the UK's only superquarry for the present at least. Representing an investment of more than œ40 million, its annual output stands at around five million tonnes, and rock is transported by sea to southern England, mainland Europe and even as far as the US.

A public inquiry into Redland Aggregates' plans to develop a superquarry on the Isle of Harris is set to start in October.

Scotland's own minerals guidance, published at the same time as MPG6, names the north coast of the Highlands, Shetland and the Western Isles as the preferred sites for future superquarries.

The MPG6 call for the use of 530 million tonnes of recycled and secondary materials by 2006 prompted some scepticism. Although Bacmi says it supports the increasing use of recycled materials, it believes that the DoE's assumptions on just how much can be recycled may be too high.

Frost says the construction industry has long been recycling 'what's necessary' and criticises MPG6 for not including a financial incentive to encourage the use of secondary aggregates.

The most unpopular feature of MPG6, however, must be the reduction of the landbank (the amount of land won material with planning consent at any one time) from 10 to seven years and the restriction of the period covered by the guidelines to 12 years. This will help, claims the DoE, 'to achieve a more sustainable approach'.

The industry does not agree.

'(It) will have no impact on the amount of quarrying or sustainable development and will cause disruption to both the operation of the planning system and to local competition between operators,' says Bacmi. It also believes that the shorter period of the new guidelines will create problems for local authorities in the production of mineral local plans.

Marine aggregates suppliers will maintain their 7% market share, but with added restrictions relating to environmental and coastal impact.

Despite the disruptions to the quarrying industry caused by MPG6, the sales of construction aggregrates nevertheless grew substantially in the second quarter of the year, reflecting, says Bacmi, a substantial increase in orders for new construction work registered over the past year and the large number of road contracts awarded in late 1993-early 1994.

Bacmi figures show that construction orders rose by 12% in 1993 and 14% in January to May this year, with the latter increase most marked in private sector markets.

The underlying annual sales trends for the year to June were positive for sand and gravel and ready-mixed concrete but negative for road surfacing materials.

Bacmi expects the basic divergence between general construction and roads markets to become more apparent over the next 12-18 months, says McLaughlin, 'with Government and local authority road budgets pointing downwards'. The general construction movement is upwards though, he adds, 'and this will compensate in overall terms'.

He is quick to dispel CPRE's claim that the road programme will use almost 7 billion tonnes of aggregate. This assertion, he says, assumes that in each year between 1992 and 2025, road building will be four times greater than at present.

The CPRE calculations in reaching this figure assumes that the average new two-lane road has a paved surface width of 100m rather than the actual 7m, 'with similar exaggerations for other roads'. Given such inaccurate assumptions, says Bacmi, the scale of overstatement in the CPRE publicity is less than surprising.