Coventry Conservative Council’s plan to replace the city's incinerator at Whitley, using the PFI model, is coming under increasing attack not least because of the additional costs local people will have to bear to pay the profit to the eventually successful private contractor. That was one of the reasons, in continuing our long opposition to this proposal, that Socialist councillors moved the following motion at the City Council meeting on December 8th 2009: 

"This Council believes that the current evaluation criteria being proposed for Project Transform - Sub Regional Residual Waste Treatment Solution would not allow major potential increases in recycling in Coventry or the flexible use of cheaper or newer green technologies; recognises that the inbuilt affordability gap would be too great given the current financial climate; and, therefore, agrees to notify our partners in Solihull and Warwickshire that we wish to defer for one year in the making of the decision on this matter". 

The motion was necessary because otherwise the detailed criteria to be used to evaluate the private firms submitting a tender to replace the Whitley incinerator would only have been discussed amongst Tory councillors themselves, at a Cabinet meeting. 

The project to replace the 30-year-old incinerator is a £1 billion commitment to a flawed PFI process. It would lock the city into a fixed strategy of dealing with non-recyclable waste for the next two generations. 

Firstly, the criteria (which were agreed by the Cabinet in December) can't be changed during the two year process of deciding on the final contract. That process only invites organisations with expertise in similar projects, and therefore reinforces the technology of the past, as those firms who could prove expertise in similar large-scale projects (dealing with 300,000 tonnes of waste a year) would almost certainly have used incineration. Green and possibly cheaper technology, based on current rising levels of recycling, would effectively be excluded. 

Secondly, the amount of refuse that Coventry would be financially committed to processing is declining. In fact, both in order to keep the burners going and because of the money it raises, Coventry is currently importing waste from as far away as Bedford. The original figure given to firms quoting for the contract was 350,000 tonnes of waste a year. But with the recent rollout of blue top recycle bins across the city there has been a "significant decrease in the residual waste collected". If the Council is locked into a scheme to process even the (new) figure of 305,000 tonnes a year, the more successful recycling becomes the more lorries will have to come from far away bringing waste into Coventry for processing. 

Thirdly, the composition of refuse is changing. Like many families we can now easily fill the blue top recycling bin, and the amount of rubbish which would otherwise need disposal (in Warwickshire by landfill, in Coventry and Solihull by incineration) is falling. We have recently seen an almost 20% cut in land filled rubbish in Warwickshire amounting to some 37,000 tonnes. That's more than a 10% change in the new target for the replacement of the Whitley plant. 

The balance of recycling and residual waste is shifting. We should be waiting to see how that develops, and what new technologies are maturing.  But the current process for inviting private tenders, and rushing forward with the replacement at Whitley, assumes we will get no better than 46% recycling: yet other councils have much higher targets.  Surrey County Council for example has a target of 70% recycling by 2013 and an end to use of landfill. It has also recently decided to scrap plans for any future incinerators. 

Finally, there is the cost.  Like all PFI schemes (from Walsgrave Hospital to the recently agreed plan to appoint a private firm to replace all 28,000 lampposts in Coventry and then charge us an arm and a leg to run the city's lighting system) there are huge profits being made. In the next 12 months half a million pounds will be spent by the Council on consultants during the tender process, in the following two years a further £4 million is to be set aside for decommissioning costs of the current incinerator, and if the work begins from 2015 onwards a further £4 1/2 million a year(!) has to be found out of city resources for what is called the "affordability gap". That's the difference between the money (bribe) given by the government, and the money we would otherwise spend on dealing with waste (at an incinerator that we now own and is paid for) and the total charge likely to be made by the successful tenderer. Over the lifetime of the project that would be well over £100 million that could otherwise be spent on essential local services, but which instead will have to be found from cuts or increased charges to pay the successful firm’s profits. 

So the main purpose of the motion (which was defeated) was to argue that on the basis of developing technology, on the reduction of the amount of waste needed to be incinerated, on the changing composition of that waste itself, and on the huge financial savings in not going ahead with PFI, to ask councillors to decide on a one year's delay to the decision on Whitley's possible replacement and in fact to follow Nottingham in refurbishing the existing facility whilst actively looking for new technologies to replace it.