Anglian Water told to consider alternatives to Cambridge sewage works move
Anglian Water has been told to consider reasonable alternatives to moving its Cambridge sewage works a mile down the road onto green belt land.
Planning inspectors found the water company had failed to explain fully the reason for the controversial proposed move, except for stating it was needed to make way for thousands of new homes.
The £227million relocation of the sewage works to a beauty spot between Fen Ditton and Horningsea is being proposed to allow Cambridge City Council to develop the current site in Milton into a new housing district.
But when the water company submitted a draft proposal for the new treatment plant, inspectors told them to go back and draw up a “do nothing option”.
They also told the company to look at upgrading the existing waste water site at Milton to compare its environmental impact against the move.
Anglian Water was instructed to show how the current site would be decommissioned and cleaned up before developers start building the new North East Cambridge district on its grounds, as this explanation had been omitted from the proposal.
The Planning Inspectorate also scolded Anglian Water for missing documents and figures in its draft Development Control Order application. And it said the company should look again at “a fire and explosion risk associated with battery storage” at the proposed site.
The report, published at the end of last week, provides ammunition for campaigners steadfastly against the move.
It said: “Given the focus in the application documents on providing a carbon efficient (waste water treatment plant), consideration should be given to the inclusion of a comparative assessment for reasonable alternatives, including the ‘do-nothing’ option or the provision of the upgrades at the existing (waste water treatment plant).”
Without these, it explained, the environmental benefits of the proposed development were “unclear”.
The report added that while the new waste water plant would take extra sewage created by the Waterbeach New Town development, where 11,000 new homes could eventually be built, Anglian Water’s application “does not consider whether an upgraded plant on the existing site could address waste water treatment needs”.
It advises the company to look at this alternative in its Environmental Impact Assessment.
The relocation of the sewage works to Honey Hill, a green belt site between Fen Ditton and Horningsea, will enable Cambridge City Council to fulfil its ambition to develop a new low-carbon district on the current plant located in North East Cambridge.
There has been a three-stage public consultation, which started in 2020 after funding was allocated to Anglian Water and the council by the government’s Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) towards the relocation of the plant.
The new district could eventually provide 8,350 homes and 15,000 new jobs.
However, Anglian Water has admitted there is no operational need to move the sewage works at Milton, which were recently updated.
The water company withdrew its first draft Development Consent Order (DCO) application to the Planning Inspectorate in March after reading the advice report, which was only published online last week.
Anglian Water has since resubmitted its DCO application on April 28 - in light of the advice - but the contents have not yet been made public.
Campaigners in the Save Honey Hill group, who want to prevent the Cambridge sewage works being moved there, said they have been given new hope by the critical report.
Spokesperson Margaret Starkie said: “Anglian Water don’t seem to have given enough justification for the need for the relocation, certainly not sufficient to outweigh the environmental impacts. They are going to need to address this issue. When you consider how much money has been made available for this move, it is surprising they appear to have come up with something so poor.
“In some ways we take hope and encouragement from this, that they obviously do not have their facts at their fingertips.
“What we’d like is for it to be rejected out of hand but if it isn’t we are preparing to fight this. We already knew the weaknesses of their arguments, but this gives us even more information. So we’ll be checking their documents extremely carefully to see if they’ve addressed this, in particular things like the outline decommissioning.
“So far they’ve waved it away and said it’s the responsibility of the developer. But how can you leave a piece of land that is contaminated? How can you just ignore that and then expect it to be taken over by the developers? The chances are that if they haven’t looked at decontamination sufficiently, that piece of land will sit there with nothing built on it for years to come. And yet, they’ve had £227m to move it. It’s so sloppy - I hope it gets thrown out. But if they’ve addressed any of these things, we will be fighting them because we cannot believe they’ve been able to address them properly in such a short time.”
Other issues raised by the inspectors about the proposal include the lack of detail about what safeguards would be in place to prevent environmental damage from “road construction, land drainage works (and) the installation of up to 50 metres of the Waterbeach pipeline under and extending from both sides of the Cambridge to King’s Lynn railway line”.
Under the heading “Major Accidents and Disasters”, the report complains that Anglian Water has not assessed “the potential inherent risks” or vulnerability of the proposed new plant to natural or man-made disasters. In particular, it highlights that there is “no description of risks or potential effects” associated with the storage of liquified natural gas, other than “a general comment relating to potential fire and explosion risk”.
Additionally, the report said Anglian Water needed to consider a “fire and explosion risk associated with battery storage” as well as the new plant’s vulnerabilities associated with lightning strikes, overflows, major spills, and drainage or surface water flooding.
The report adds that the decommissioning strategy “appears to be to wash down and isolate” the existing sewage works when the move takes place, but that the water company would “leave structures such as the terminal pumping station and various pipes and tanks in situ” and that it was unclear how this had been accounted for in the Environmental Impact Assessment.
An Anglian Water spokesperson said: ”Having had constructive early discussions with PINS, we asked them to pause the processing of our application while we provide them with some further information. This is not unusual with an application of this complexity.
“As part of this process Anglian Water received advice from the Planning Inspectorate relating to the Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Plant Relocation DCO application on March 3 and met with PINS on March 9 about the nature of the further information which it would be helpful to provide and to which the PINS published note refers.
“We have responded to the points raised by PINS in the note and provided the additional information within a resubmitted application on April 28. This will be contained within the DCO application and published once accepted for examination. We don’t believe it will have any impact on the overall timescales for the project.”
