UNITED Utilities and Peel Holdings have recently applied to DEFRA for permission to build a 65 MegaWatt wind farm on land at Scout Moor, straddling the border between Rossendale and Rochdale.
The development will comprise 26 turbines, each of them 100 metres high and will cover an area of more than five square kilometres. All of this land is urban common -- and all of it is subject to section 194 of the 1925 Law of Property Act, a protective provision which DEFRA has committed itself to widen and strengthen.
A development of this kind would normally require the consent of the Secretary of State, who would need to consider the "benefit of the neighbourhood" in coming to her decision. In the event of objections from members of the public, the consent would be subject to a public inquiry.
None of this will happen in the present case. What the developers are proposing and DEFRA is now considering, is an exchange of land under Section 147 of the 1845 Enclosure Act. Under this archaic piece of legislation, the only condition of any ministerial consent is the agreement of the private interests involved.
In the case of Scout Moor Wind Farm, the application is based on the fiction that the turbines themselves, together with the associated infrastructure, will have a 'footprint' of only some 8.3 hectares (or 1.52 per cent of the development site).
The public interest in the four commons is to be ignored. This monumental subterfuge is apparently considered by DEFRA to be compatible with its 2002 Policy Statement.
The first concerted action to protect and preserve the commons in the public interest and the first protective legislation, dates from the 1860s (the Open Spaces Society was formed in 1865).
If the 1845 Act is allowed to be used now in the way that is proposed it would return us to the era of the Inclosures --overturning the public interest values embodied in the C19th and C20th centuries legislation that followed.
The official spin on all of this is the Common Land Policy Statement. The actuality is a privatisation of the commons.
The only beneficiaries are the developers and the venture capitalists.
STEVE BYRNE, Elder Court, Huncoat.
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