Keep Dean Pit Open!

Fri 20 May 2011, 12:10 (last edited on Fri 20 May 2011, 12:32)

It's hard not to feel sceptical about whether the decision to keep Dean Pit open will be reversed -- even tho' the Council seems to have been rethinking their plans for Redbridge & some of the other tips.

Dean Pit has friends in high places it will be recalled, remembering the so-called "Toff Protests" of 2009 when Lady Chadlington (whose family owns the farm next door) helped protesters block access to the tip. Lord Chadlington of Dean aka Peter Gummer is a neighbour to Dave and helped fund his leadership campaign. He is also President of the Conservative Association in Witney. Peter Gummer, himself a top PR man, is also brother of Lord (John) Gummer, former Chairman of the Conservative Party, now in the House of Lords & also a consultant to the environmental consultancy company Sangwith International.

Dean Pit had a particularly good recycling record & was economic to run. Chippy Town Council have said in the past they believe it should stay where it is. Officers from both the district & county councils also seem to agree. The Oxfordshire County Council Planning Committee refused permission for their own officers to apply to keep Dean Pit open -- apparently because of the strong objections of one Dean resident. I wonder who that might be?

I wrote protesting about this decision ages ago, in response to some kind of consultation process, & signed the first petition. But I have not got high hopes of the new one.

Thu 19 May 2011, 20:40

Only 43 signed up so far c'mon you lot get clicking!!!

Thu 19 May 2011, 10:52

Every time one has agitated for keeping Dean Pit open the issue of it only having temporary planning permission has been raised. However, this is not set in stone and could be changed, as Liz says, if there was a mind to do it. I totally oppose the closure of Dean Pit. As others have said this will leave a very large area with no facility. The other problem is ---why does it have to be upgraded ? This was precisely one of the arguments raised at the library meeting----a really good library should have x and y and that would cost a lot etc. etc. Sometimes it is much more important to have a reasonable local library or tip than a super one miles and miles away,

Thu 19 May 2011, 09:29

Does anyone know why the County Council are planning to close the Dean Pit recycling centre this September, but are not planning to open the new facility which will be much further away in Kidlington,until 2012?

Thu 12 May 2011, 09:22

There is no doubt that improved roadside collections, particularly of garden waste, have made a big difference, and we are fortunate in having one of the best collections in the country now, but there are still a lot of things that are not collected. I'm sure that for many people in Oxford, having a second recycling facility to the north will be welcomed. However, this only serves to emphasise the way that services in general are being shifted to areas of greatest population, leaving rural communities ever more isolated.

Wed 11 May 2011, 23:50

Actually, I guess NIMBY is probably the complete opposite of what I meant as most people appear to want the tip 'in their back yard'!

Wed 11 May 2011, 20:44

Controversially, are we in danger of sounding a bit NIMBYish here?
I used to be a regular user of Dean Pit and have been very grateful for it being so close to Charlbury, but since the expansion of the weekly kerbside arrangements have gone there less and less. Perhaps we need to accept that iy may not actually be the best location for the greater number of residents in the wider OCC catchment? Although Kidlington will involve us residents out here having to travel further, are there not a greater number of OCC residents who will end up travelling a lesser distance to Kidlington, certainly lesser than they currently have to travel. Therefore in all round environmental terms will the total number of miles travelled by all users actually reduce?

Wed 11 May 2011, 16:41

Also no environmental saving - what about the total environmental cost of the 23% of us who use the pit consuming extra fuel and adding to congestion over years and years. Plus the cost of cleaning up the inevitable dumping by roadsides. I've been down this closure route before in London and that was the end result, displacing all the costs onto the taxpayer as an indirect tax in effect.

Wed 11 May 2011, 12:31

Hi Mark. I'm not sure where the figure of £750,000 savings has come from - the consultation paper implies that the saving across the whole of Oxfordshire would be in the region of £450,000 over a five to six year period, under the proposed strategy. Regarding Dean Pit, the problem is not that there is a need for investment so much as that it only has temporary planning permission. The council are using this as an excuse to close it but the permission could easily be extended if there were a will to do so.

The real issue is this: Dean Pit serves a relatively small number of people compared with recycling centres in other parts of the county. This is because it serves the most sparsely populated area of the county. So of course there are fewer people going to it. In the consultation, 23% of people responding used Dean Pit. Apart from Stanford in the Vale, responses from other parts of the county were very low, implying that this is a much bigger issue for people living in West Oxfordshire than for people elsewhere. This is entirely understandable, as we will be the ones having to travel long distances in future. It is unfair that just because we live in an area with a low population, we will be expected to travel on average twenty minutes longer to recycle - that also seems to defeat the object of recycling! Plus we will all be paying more to get to the nearesr centre, so no savings for us.

Wed 11 May 2011, 10:50

I wonder if you could gloss the issues here a bit? On the face of it the loss of the pit seems like a bad idea, and it's certainly going to be inconvenient to people who live in Charlbury. On the other hand, I was rather shocked to read the report on the proposals, which suggests that integrating the service onto a smaller number of sites will save £750,000 a year (to set that in context, the total library budget for the whole county is at present only £8.6m, so it's clearly a lot of money).

It also noted that the infrastructure at Dean needs substantial investment to keep it going. Do we know how much is needed: in other words do we know the cost of the maintaining the status quo?

Mon 9 May 2011, 17:02

Thanks to everyone who has signed our petition asking the County Council to review the decision to close Dean Pit. We had loads of slips returned to us on polling day, which I am now entering into my computer. If anyone would like to add their name, please let me know. I have also requested an online petition on the OCC website, which has yet to be confirmed, and I will let you know if and when it is up and running, so you can sign that. We plan to present the petition to the relevant meeting at OCC in the near future.