On Sunday, 16th February, Community Matters on Forest FM featured an insightful interview with Councillor Spencer Flower, focusing on the Hampshire County Council (HCC) Minerals and Waste Examination in Public (EIP).
During the discussion, Councillor Flower shed light on the key issues surrounding the plan, its potential impact on local communities, and the steps being taken to address public concerns.
Listen to Cllr Flower’s interview here:
Audio Transcript of the Interview
Steve Saville
(00:00) Forrest FM, this is Steve Saville. The saga of the Purple Haze Minerals Extraction Site has been going on for some years now, or at least it seems like it. The proposed gravel extraction site would be in Hampshire, but right on Verwood’s back doorstep, with potential to adversely affect the B3081 between Verwood and Ringwood, and also Moores Valley Country Park.
Legally, Dorset Council doesn’t have much say in the matter, but some councillors and others are fighting against it. One of those councillors is Spencer Flower, former leader of Dorset Council, and currently a Verwood Town Councillor, as well as a County Councillor. Hello, Spence, how are you?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(00:33) Hello, Steve. Good to see you.
Steve Saville
(00:35) And you too. Now, on Thursday, you attended the EIP, which is an examination in public for the Hampshire County Council Minerals and Waste Plan, in order to speak against it. So, tell us what happened.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(00:48) Well, it was interesting, because sometimes you go to these events, and they can be quite formal. I think the thing that impressed me most of all, and my colleagues that were with me, was the way in which the Inspector went about it. He said, it’s a hearing, I’m here to listen to you and the concerns you’ve got, and obviously I’ll also listen to Hampshire County Council and their reasons for bringing forward a Minerals and Waste Plan, which includes Purple Haze and a number of other sites. So that was a really interesting session.
Steve Saville
(01:19) Right. Do you think Hampshire County Council would have carried out this review if there hadn’t have been such an uproar?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(01:25) I think they would have done. I mean, bearing in mind that I looked back the other day and I found a letter that I wrote in objecting to Purple Haze being part of the then Minerals and Waste Plan from Hampshire County Council. Believe it or not, that was 2011.
Steve Saville
(01:40) Wow, it was 2011?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(01:41) Yeah, and I think it got adopted in 2013. So here we are, twelve years later.
Steve Saville
(01:48) Yeah.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(01:48) They’re doing a partial review because some of the changes in legislation and it got a bit out of date. And so they had a need to do a partial review.
Steve Saville
(01:57) Right. OK. So you saw the inspector yesterday. Tell us a bit about what he was like. And did you have to submit statements to the inspector before you went along to the hearing?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(02:06) Yes, we did. Yeah. All of us that participated or previously objected to Purple Haze in particular. And I’ll talk about that. We all submitted statements. Myself and another Verwood town councillor put the statement together. So I went yesterday and represented Verwood Town Council and its objection and the inspector made it clear to all of us and thanked us that he’d read all the statements so I didn’t need to rehearse the statement again and we were there to add other things to or enhance certain points that we’d made in those statements.
Steve Saville
(02:45) And did they listen? That’s the question.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(02:47) Well that’s a really good point because the inspector made it clear that we weren’t going to get any indication whether he was for or against anything in the plan yesterday but I thought he was very fair and he asked some extremely good questions both of Hampshire County Council in particular and of us and I think he I felt that he had acknowledged the, I keep saying us, and I ought to say that we had the chairman of the East Dorset Environment Partnership with us yesterday who was excellent, he’d done a huge amount of work in preparation for the week.
This was a six day event. This was the last of the six days. And this was just, this particular session was about the actual allocation of sites. And obviously prior to that, the other four or five days was based on some of the more technical aspects of minerals and waste. And we had Britt Points, who’s the mainstay of the Friends of Ringwood Forest. And the No to Purple Haze campaign, if you recall, goes back many, many years. Britt was, again, really, really good and obviously spent a lot of time preparing statements which were submitted and what they both said yesterday. It was really good. So Verwood was well represented yesterday.
Steve Saville
(04:03) Yes, so much support from Verwood as well for the No to Purple Haze campaign. So, can you give us some idea of the key concerns that you actually put to the Planning Inspector?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(04:13) Well, I’ll talk about what I put in. I mean, the main thing for us was the hydrology and the ecology issues around the impact on Ebb Lake Bog. You might not think that a bog is particularly important, but Ebb Lake Bog is an acid mire of international importance. It’s a Ramsar site, it’s SSSI, it’s got loads of other designations, and it’s very rare. And the thing is that they talk about mitigation. When you do something like mineral extraction, you can mitigate against some of the impact.
You can’t eliminate that impact. And the worry we’ve got, and I expressed that yesterday, is that mitigation is not elimination. You can’t remove harm. You can only reduce the effect of harm. When you damage Ebb Lake Bog, it’ll be damaged forever.
Steve Saville
(05:04) You can’t replace wildlife.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(05:05) You can’t replace it. So very, very important. That was the bit I particularly focused on when I spoke anyway.
Steve Saville
(05:14) Yeah. There’s also the traffic as well that would go along the B3081, the heavy lorries.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(05:19) There is, but there’s ways in which they can mitigate that reasonably well, if they wanted they could use conveyors and all sorts of other things to improve the road network, to make that less of an impact.
And one of the other things which came out quite strongly yesterday, were there to be extraction, then it’s the restoration aspects of the heath. You can’t just dig a hole, take the minerals out and just throw everything, all the spoil back in again, because you completely ruin it. And the view expressed by the partnership, the environment partnership, was that it’s almost impossible to do it properly, so that you restore it back to its original state. Almost impossible.
Steve Saville
(06:02) Right. So, what are the next steps then, and when are we going to see the Planning Inspector publish his decisions?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(06:07) Well, it’s interesting, that’s a really good question, because one of the things he made clear yesterday, he asked some very, very detailed questions of Hampshire County Council, and he then stressed to us and them that because of the amendments he’s expecting to see in the proposed plan that we’re looking at at the moment, it’s probable that it’ll have to go out to public consultation again. So, so big are the changes. So, we’ll have to wait and see what that looks like. But one thing that’s very clear, I think he will be very thorough in the way he goes about this particular examination in public, and he won’t be hurried. He’ll get it right, and he’ll come back out again. It’ll be interesting to see, obviously we’re keen to see, what he comes out with, you know.
Steve Saville
(06:54) Right, so we’ll probably have to wait a few more years yet before this whole thing’s resolved.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(06:58) These things are never done overnight. It might be months, maybe, he didn’t give a timeline, but it could be that sometime later this year we might see a further iteration of the Minerals and Waste Plan that’ll have to go out to be consulted on, but we’ll have to wait and see on that.
Steve Saville
(07:18) Right. Well, Spencer, thanks ever so much indeed for coming in and updating us. Do you know of anywhere that the public can go to? Is there a website in Hampshire or Dorset that has the updates on Purple Haze?
Councillor Spencer Flower
(07:29) Yeah, you can get onto the Hampshire County Council website. Just type in the Minerals and Waste Plan Partial Review. It should give you the links. And I think there’s a recording of the events that took place this week and yesterday, if anyone’s particularly interested. They can actually watch some of the, listen to some of the questions and points. One point I did make at the very end was I stressed, I probably didn’t need to stress this to the inspector but I thought I’d say it anyway, that our generation are the caretakers of our environment and just because there’s a human need for minerals shouldn’t be the reason why we destroy something for future generations. I made that point really clear because I felt that, I believe that the impact on Ebb Lake Bog is one of the most significant negative aspects of extracting minerals from what is called purple haze.
Steve Saville
(08:28) Yes, you’re absolutely right and we appreciate what you’ve done. So, Spencer, once again, thank you very much indeed.
Councillor Spencer Flower
(08:32) Thank you, Steve.