news story

4th January 2010

Local MP to Meet with Infrastructure Planning Commission over Proposals for Oldbury Power Station

MP Steve Webb will be meeting a representative from the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) to discuss proposals for a new nuclear power station at Oldbury.

The IPC was established last year and will play a major role in the final decision on the proposed plant - one of the 10 sites approved by the government for development late last year.  Created to speed up the planning process of large scale national infrastructure projects, the IPC takes away the planning powers of local authorities over major projects. Instead, final decisions are taken by the Commission, though local authorities and local residents may make representations as part of the process.

Steve Webb has already registered his opposition in Parliament to the way that this new process is less democratic than the current planning system. He said: "For major decisions such as the site of a new power station, it simply cannot be right that the final decision is taken by a body that no-one elected and which is not accountable to local people".

Although Oldbury has been identified as a preferred site, the planning process still has many stages to run. The company promoting the development, Eon, told Steve Webb that they had yet to decide on fundamental issues such as which design of reactor they would be choosing. This in turn will have implications for the site design and the detailed planning application, which is not expected for several months.

In anticipation of the meeting, Steve Webb commented that:

"The IPC has been created to slash the time it takes to get planning approval but I am determined that local people will not lose out because of a fast-tracked process.

"Whether or not people support new nuclear power plants in general, local residents will inevitably have a range of concerns about a huge project of this sort. Local people have already contacted me to let me know that they are worried about the visual impact of up to four large cooling towers and about the impact of up to 5,000 construction workers when building work is at its peak.

"These are the sorts of issues I will be raising with the IPC, to ensure that local concerns are fed in to the process at an early stage. I will also be seeking to make sure that local people know how they can best make their views known".