Dean Pit

Mon 26 Sep 2011, 18:17

Very sad and very unnecessary-----Dean Pit will close on September 30th despite the fact that over 2000 people signed our petition to keep it open. The financial reasons for doing so are unclear to say the least and the Environment Agency, which we were told objected to it, has said they would have no problem in it being granted permanent planning permission.

1) We have been told by the OCC and WODC that now the roadside recycling collection has been extended we no longer need Dean Pit. This is clearly not true---there are many objects too large or unwieldy for the roadside collection but not large enough to warrant ringing up, paying and waiting up to three weeks for them to be collected. In fact, at the WODC Environment meeting last week it was reported that even with the new collection 'there has been little reduction in recycling at bring sites'. Dean Pit is well used---anyone who goes there can testify to that.

2) At WODC council meeting in June, when I enquired why Dean Pit 'had' to close, three councillors, including Barry Norton, the leader of the council, said that it would cost one million pounds to upgrade it---an upgrade that the OCC (who control Dean Pit) had said was requested by the Environment Agency. When Liz Leffman contacted the EA they said that they had not requested such an upgrade. They had made a few minor suggestions which would not cost anything like that amount of money and they stressed that they would have nothing against Dean Pit being granted permanent planning permission. When she applied to OCC under the freedom of information act, to ask how much OCC had costed for any works to upgrade Dean Pit, they said they had not done any costing because it was going to close anyway becasue its planning permission was about to expire !!

SO----OCC didn't know how much any improvememnts would cost so WHERE did the figure of one million come from ??? Also----planning permission was supposedly not granted BECAUSE it would be so expensive to upgrade it. So the argument is a vicious (very vicious) circle. OCC grant planning permission for sites like Dean Pit so they could, if so minded, have granted this permission. Instead they are using it as a fig leaf to cover the fact that they do not want to keep it going and are pretending that they would have been forced to make expensive improvements---so far we have found NO evidence of this.