SOMETHING FISHY

So - in the week when it was revealed that anti-wind farm campaigners could cost England (not the UK - England) £1.3 billion in lost investments, lost business rates, lost community funds and lost job opportunities ... that's right, the twerps of VVASP and others like them continue to prove their profound lack of patriotism and social conscience ... what else have we learnt?

Well, representatives of the political wing of VVASP, otherwise known as the Windfarm Working Party (Copyright: Church Lench Parish Council and Nimbies-R-Us), held a meeting with the Head of Environmental Services at Wychavon District Council.

Some details of this meeting were given by the chair of the WWP and Church Lench PC on Thursday 21st January 2010, after the Parish Council had finished its meeting. Didn't want the public hearing about it, we suppose.

Now, the decision to hire a noise consultant on the basis of his repeated, though not very coherent, criticisms of the government's guidelines on wind farms and noise was taken on or around 30 December 2009 by a member of the Environmental Services Department.

The meeting between the Council officers and the representatives of the Provisional VVASP must have taken place sometime between 9 November 2009 and 21 January 2010.

For reasons best known to himself, the Council officer who took the decision to hire a noise consultant beloved of the nimbies but not taken very seriously by everyone else did so having declared that there was "general concern" in the acoustic industry that ETSU-R-97 (the government's guidelines on wind farms and noise) is "unfit for purpose".

We asked a professional noise consultant about this, and he told us that it's not true. There is not general concern in the industry about ETSU-R-97. So somebody must have convinced the Council officer that there was.

Who might that have been, we wonder.

And then, perhaps, that same person suggested that there was a noise consultant who specialised in making garbled statements about ETSU-R-97, so why didn't the Council hire him?

Hmmnn ... Unsurprisingly, our very own Men-in-Black (BLoW) tell us that the Council is proving rather coy at the moment where this issue is concerned. We do know that three noise consultants were invited by Wychavon to submit their tenders in early December. We know that, at the end of December, a Council officer decided to hire the one without academic qualifications, the one whose reports tend to be all the same, the one who keeps quoting research that no one has ever seen, the one who routinely picks holes in every aspect of an Environmental Statement and the one whose testimony is generally ignored by planning inspectors.

We also know that representatives of the Windfarm Working Party held a meeting with the very guys who chose to appoint the said noise consultant. Sometime roundabout the time that the decision to hire him was taken.

Bet the WWP representatives were absolutely delighted when Wychavon retained the very noise consultant they would have wanted them to hire, don't you think?

Strange, though, that the sort of people who usually rail against wastes of public money were quite happy to see our council taxes frittered away on a noise consultant whose report won't stand up to analysis at the planning appeals stage ... and are just as happy to see England (not the UK - just England) lose out on £1.3 billion, all because of their stupid, nonsensical, illogical and irrational opposition to those lovely windfarms.