🔵 The Council are seeking specialist monitoring and technical advice
🔵 The Council's environmental enforcement team is to become 24/7
🔵 Councillor Tagg and I are meeting with the Regional Director of the EA next month
I am hoping to be able to introduce app-based reporting soon. In the meantime, please report odour issues to the council and the EA using the following:
🟣 Telephone the EA on 0800 80 70 60
🟣 Email the EA ics@environment-agency.gov.uk
🟣 Tweet the EA @EnvAgencyMids
🟣 The dedicated EA website: https://tinyurl.com/y58xlt8t
🟣 The Council’s website: https://tinyurl.com/y5bhfwwk
The graphic shows that complaints to the council (as opposed to the EA) spiked enormously in September and have remained very high, with January set to break all records.
PRESS RELEASE
Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has allocated £50,000 to fund specialist technical advice and support that will enable more effective monitoring of the odours blighting large parts of the borough. The aim is to *legally* establish if the source of odours is Walley's Quarry.
Simon Tagg, the Leader of the Borough Council, said: “We are trying to address the issues that residents have been reporting for some considerable time with the Environment Agency and Red Industries.
“The Council doesn’t have the specialist expertise ‘in house’ so we are intending to allocate this funding from the Council’s budget in a bid to get adequate, scientifically measured readouts of the actual level of emissions. There is concern that the monitoring that has been done to date by the Environment Agency has been inadequate.
“Whilst the Council has no direct powers to close down operations at the landfill, the situation is so important to our communities – and not just the people living close to the site because complaints come from miles around - that we have to take swift, independent action and bring in specialist skills and the advice of industry experts.”
From next week the Council will be extending the hours of operation of its environmental enforcement team to include an on-call and out-of-hours response service in order to assist the investigation of odour complaints.
It is hoped that the service will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until further notice.