That unsettling and unsatisfactory state of affairs has now prompted a new debate on the planned new waste incinerator to be built at La Collette in the most expensive capital project in Jersey’s history.
In proposing the rescindment of the £105m deal, Deputy Daniel Wimberley symbolically set fire to a pound note in the Royal Square, illustrating his view that much of that investment will literally be going up in smoke when there are other, better and inexplicably neglected alternative options for dealing with Jersey’s rubbish.
Worries over the incinerator deal, hastily signed by former Transport Minister Guy de Faye just before his emphatic rejection at the polls, are not merely financial, however. They are also aesthetic and environmental, with particular concern about the possible impact on the Island’s internationally protected south-east coast, designated a Ramsar site.
The States have a reputation for not being able to make up their minds, but there are sound reasons in this case why the new debate demanded by Deputy Wimberley and a group of fellow new Members collectively dubbed the Incinerator Gang is justified.
Firstly, it is right that a new House should be able to examine the issues soon after elections in which environmental matters featured more prominently than ever before. Secondly, all the assumptions on which the project were based are now more or less redundant because of the dramatic changes in the global economy, which affect everything from the rate at which we can buy the euros in which the deal was done to the future size of the population generating the rubbish that La Collette will burn.
Equally importantly, the rescindment debate will provide an opportunity to answer the niggling questions which remain in the minds of both politicians and members of the public and include: Why was the Bellozanne incinerator neglected until crisis point was reached? Why was there such resistance to a public inquiry on the La Collette project when the Planning Law had been recently amended to allow exactly that procedure? And why was the Ramsar organisation not consulted?
Such questions cannot be easily brushed aside when they are being put by politicians of the intellectual calibre of Deputy Wimberley, a veteran environmental campaigner, and the Constable of St Helier, another implacable opponent of the scheme. Even if they are unlikely to win a rescindment vote, the debate will still be of immense value if it succeeds in shedding light on some baffling and deeply worrying aspects of this curious project.
