PLANNING POLICIES AND THE FUTURE OF MINERAL SUPPLIES

RICHARD BIRD, Executive Officer of the British Aggregates Association reports on the Planning Policies and the Future of Mineral Supplies in the United Kingdom.

FOR some time now I have noted the problems that many of your members have been experiencing in obtaining new planning consents for extracting and working mineral aggregates. In particular, in Issue 65 of Sand & Stone, the article “Where Will Our Future Quarry Products Come From?” explains it all. I also note from a couple of other articles in your magazine you say that the problems are very similar in the UK.

Fortunately for some of us in the UK this is not always the case. In Scotland mineral planning matters are a “devolved issue”. That means it is dealt with by the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, unlike in England, where planning is dealt with by the U.K. Government in London.

When the current SNP (Scottish National Party) led government came to power in Scotland a few years ago, they looked at national planning issues and decided to review the whole system as part of a new National Planning Framework. This was to be a policy document outlining where the country was going with regard to the provision of housing, industrial development and national infrastructure etc. Fortunately at that time the quarrying industry in Scotland, through the two trade associations, had been working closely with government on mineral planning issues, albeit fighting the many negative viewpoints on our industry that had been emanating from the authorities.

When a draft of this new framework document was published, the quarrying industry asked just where all of the aggregate was going to come from in order to feed this proposed national development? It was put quite simply that without aggregates you could not build the infrastructure and at that time few had any idea just how much consented reserves were left after the previous ten years of negative attitudes towards quarry development.

Th is seemed to strike a chord with many of the new politicians who realised that they would have egg on their faces if their promised development could not take place because there were no local supplies of aggregate.

As a result, a section concerning the supply of mineral aggregate was inserted into the new National Planning Framework document. This paragraph was quite short but it did make it clear that aggregates were of national importance and that there should be a presumption in favour of mineral planning unless there were overriding environmental reasons or similar that the development could not proceed.

Furthermore, the policy stated that each local planning authority must have a ten year land bank of hard rock and sand and gravel. The important thing was that this was a national policy document from central government, in other words it was law and it had clout.

The next step was to set up a national survey of the quarrying industry. Th e objective was to reveal just how much consented reserves were left , what the sales tonnages were and where the markets were for aggregates. Not surprisingly the operators were very wary of disclosing such confidential information; however, it was finally agreed with the backing of the two trade associations that the confidential survey would be handled by government civil servants rather than the local authority planners or the BGS (British Geological Survey). A seventy percent return on the survey was obtained and this was large enough to make the survey official and part of the national policy on mineral planning. Th e survey revealed where the shortfalls in consented reserves were, where the markets were and what distances the stone had to travel to the marketplace.

It also highlighted many other critical factors previously unknown to government and local authorities. The good news was that by now a new attitude towards quarrying and aggregate provisions was beginning to emerge from government and other circles; it was finally realised that aggregates were the key to future development of the national infrastructure. With no aggregates there would be no roads and few buildings.

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