A fortnight is a long time in politics, to slightly misquote former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Allerdale Working Group came out of the shadows to meet a Stakeholder group on 17 August. That was the beginning of a chaotic fortnight. At that meeting, Andy Ross, the individual who volunteered the whole of Allerdale excluding the Lake District (where he lives) as a site to bury the nation’s nuclear waste, was questioned. He was asked why he had chosen to exclude the Lake District National Park (LDNP), but not to exclude the Solway Coast AONB. He said that he had chosen to exclude the LDNP as Copeland had done the same, but that it may become part of the search area again in the next stage of the process, known as the Community Partnership. This was a hugely controversial statement. It went against everything said previously, but the rest of Allerdale Working Group did not seek to correct it, they all listened and accepted the statement without comment. The next week, members of Cumbria Trust questioned the Chair of Allerdale Working Group, Jocelyn Manners-Armstrong about the possible re-inclusion of the LDNP. Rather than seek to correct this, she complained that Cumbria Trust were not respecting the privacy of that earlier meeting, which in itself was an absurd comment. You cannot announce a major change in policy – the re-inclusion of the LDNP as a potential site to bury nuclear waste, and expect that to remain a secret. RWM set about fabricating an excuse for what was said. RWM’s response was entirely disingenuous and intentionally misleading. Eddie Martin, former Leader of Cumbria County Council has written to RWM to challenge their behaviour. Here is the text of that letter: “We were frequently promised an ’open and transparent’ process by RWM and I’m afraid your email to me on 27 August falls a long way short of that goal, as do the responses from others in your organisation to Colin Wales and your emails to the Allerdale Stakeholder Group … This may be a 20 year search process. For it to succeed, the public has to develop and maintain a high level of trust and yet RWM have fallen at the first hurdle.”
Cumbria Trust 31st Aug 2021 read more »