MF 7) THE LONG WAIT (1)

If you have been following this series of notes you will realise this guidance has been on how to set up a protest group in response to a company indicating that it wants to submit a planning application for an opencast mine by asking for a Scoping Opinion from the local Mineral Planning Authority and holding Public Exhibitions. Setting up such a group, organising it and getting stories into the local media and recruiting new members builds a feeling of strength and achievement. People who join are usually angry at such a proposal and are eager to do something. However your group has entered the period of the ‘Long Wait’. Without a planning application being submitted your group has nothing specific to protest about.

Under current planning guidelines for England (it may be different in Scotland and Wales) the proposer of such a planning application is not under any time limit by when it has to submit the formal application in response to the Scoping Opinion given by the Local Mineral Planning Authority. Do not believe what the proposer necessarily says about when they will be submitting their planning application. In our case every two to three weeks UK Coal has been indicating the application will be submitted in two to three weeks time- or so it seems. It is now May 2009 and the submission was originally promised in December 2008! This has real implications for your group. How does it keep ‘in being’? How can you conserve your resources, especially your financial resources? 

If the proposer is aware that a protest group has already been formed – through newspaper stories and use of the internet, it may be part of a deliberate strategy of the proposer to delay the application, as one of our own members, a lawyer who deals with such applications told me. This is in order to give a false sense of security to local residents and hope that organised protest fades away. So now your groups energies, especially those of the small number of you charged with the responsibility of keeping the group ‘in being’ have to turn their attention to both how to prepare for the planning application when it comes and maintain group morale during the period of ‘The Long Wait’.

Steve Leary                                                                              12/5/09

UPDATE                                                                                    13/4/10

Our ‘Long Wait’ for the submission of a planning application went on for two more months, with a formal planning application being submitted in July 2009. This resulted in a flurry of activity until the first round of consultations had been completed in October 2009. Since then we have entered a 2^nd ‘Long Wait’ period whilst we wait for UK Coal plc to submit their supplementary evidence on how they plan to overcome the objections raised as a consequence of their 1^st application. In terms of the campaign it has been even harder to keep the momentum of the campaign going.