When are two options not really two options? Well when Derby City Council and Derbyshire County Council are involved it is usually when the councils are claiming to the public there are only two options to be considered for the controversial Sinfin incinerator - the Derby and Derbyshire Waste Treatment Centre on Sinfin Lane in Derby.
The councils claimed as follows in November 2021.
"Cabinet members at Derby City Council and Derbyshire County Council will be asked to approve a recommendation to develop a business case for the future of the waste treatment facility in Sinfin at their respective Council Cabinet meetings later today.
The business case compares two options:
• To rectify and use the facility and,
• To close the facility and dispose of the councils’ waste using a third party.
The business case will be developed over the next few months. Once complete, both councils will reconvene to review and decide how to proceed."
So it was fix it and use it, or dump it. No more than that, no suggestion that there was a raft of alternative options! options that could be considered as an alternative for the site in Sinfin Lane. The reality however was rather different to the picture the councils painted to the public back in November 2021 when they were considering the future of the site.
Now us mere resident nobodies were excluded from the meetings of the council cabinets and had at the time no access to the cabinet documents or in the case of Derby City also access to the documents provided to the councils Executive Scrutiny Board which met the day before the cabinet meetings in question. Obviously they had nothing to hide being so open and transparent as this - it is perfectly normal to hide all the documents on the subject from residents because come on there are two options being considered, the councils said so and so that must be true right?
WRONG!
THERE WERE SIX OPTIONS THAT WERE BEING CONSIDERED !
Clearly in the interests of being open and transparent the councils decided to only tell the public they were considering TWO options. Maybe the councils thought that the public could not handle all this information that they would face so wanted to protect the public from this - or maybe they just set out to mislead the public into thinking there were only two options being considered!
As a resident of Derby and also a member of the Sinfin plants Community Liaison Group (CLG) personally I consider that the councils set out to mislead the public when issuing their statements because the councils clearly want to pitch repairing and using the plant - which just so happens to tick all of the boxes in the strategic aims against complete closure which ticked almost none of the boxes. We all know that it is very easy to formulate a set of tests to gain the result you want which in my view is why it was important for the councils to keep the other options hidden from the public because some of them could be considered to be better options in the public eye than the councils want - and obviously that would never do!
A Freedom of Information / Environmental Information request was submitted in November 2021 for the documents from the meeting to Derby City Council. The council managed to fob off my request for far longer than is usually considered acceptable by blaming issues around work levels at the council department in question. Finally they had to issue the documents to me - although in a redacted state there was enough left un redacted for readers to identify that unlike the claimed two options considered there were actually SIX options being considered. Ranging from full repair to closure but also including use of specific sections of the plant to produce refuse derived fuel or to act as a waste transfer site and also even an option considering leasing or selling the site off to a third party.
So what could possibly be the reason for the councils only telling the public there were two options being considered? Surely from past experience they would know that some members of the public would cast their eye over the situation and even make a Freedom Of Information request - FOI or its Environmental brother the EIR. It is not clear why someone somewhere decided to make a public statement that they were to consider two options because surely it would be better to admit to six options while saying two would be considered further. By doing so they would be open and transparent and this would encourage public trust.
So obviously I had to make a request to Derby City Council for the documents from the November 2021 Scrutiny Board meeting and Council Cabinet meetings which took place in an attempt to help the councils to be open and transparent because clearly it is something they struggle with! So that is where it became clear scattered between the heavily redacted texts that there was a broader series of options.
Option ONE was to fix and use the full plant - but on that option the councils redacted all the text relating to RISK