UPDATE: The Developers have now submitted both of their applications:
- The Concrete Processing and Road Access application to Gwynedd Council
- The Gas-fired, Peaking Plant application to PEDW
The Concrete Processing and Road Access application, although submitted, is not yet available on the Gwynedd website as it is still awaiting the Council Planning Team’s ‘Validation’. Validation is needed before their application documents can be made public and before the formal consultation on the proposals can go live. The validation work appears to be taking a long time - the Council acknowledged at the end of April that they had received the application from Jones Brothers and that once it was validated they would start the public consultation.
Until the application documents are made public our Committee and Group Members will be unable to discover what changes they have made to the pre-consultation material that we have based our Draft Objection Document on.
We had hoped and expected that the Concrete Processing and Road Access change application would be decided on by the full Planning Committee and not delegated to Council Officers. Sian Gwenllian, our MS wrote to the chief Executive of Cyngor Gwynedd asking for assurance on that point and, thankfully, his reply gave her that assurance.
- The final Gas-fired, Peaking Plant application has been submitted to PEDW in Welsh Government for approval by a Welsh Government Minister and PEDW have written to Gwynedd Council requiring them to submit their Local Impact Report (the purpose of which we explained in one of our earlier updates) by the 27/6/2024.
Although the Council do not have the power to decide on this application, their Local Impact Report will strongly influence PEDW in its investigation; so we were very worried to discover on Friday that the Council have now opened up a very short local consultation on their own website, presumably to inform the Local Impact Report - the deadline for any of us to comment being the 14/6/24!
We then discovered that ‘Decision’ on the case is listed on the Gwynedd site as being ‘Delegated’, meaning, apparently, that our elected representatives on the Council will have little or no influence on the content of the report that their Planning Officers produce for PEDW. We are in the process of investigating this aspect of the process.
Our Draft Objection Document covering this application is complete, but it will need reviewing and probably updating once we have identified any changes that Jones Brothers have made from their original, pre-consultation papers, on which our draft objections were based.
Now that the consultation has gone live, please do put in your own objection, in your own words, on the Gwynedd site. Your objection can be as short or long as you please, but please don’t directly copy the wording from our website or documents.
Please do also send your comments on the gas-fired peaking plant proposal directly to PEDW - PEDW.Infrastructure@gov.wales.
We shall also write to PEDW to request a public hearing as part of their investigation; the more signatures we have on our petition, (click to access) the stronger will be the case for a public hearing- so do please get as many as possible of your own contacts to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
- Here’s the link to Jones Brothers' entry on the PEDW portal:
( https://planningcasework.service.gov.wales )
- To find the correct entry and the application documents (the same set as are now on the Gwynedd Council site) copy and paste the CAS Reference: CAS-02628-Y1D2Z7 (for ‘Seiont Quarry Gas Peaking Plant’) into their search line ;
- Click on the underlined Application Name that comes up, for more details.
- You should opt to view only the ‘Main Party - Submission Document', to avoid getting distracted by the pre-submission documents also left on this site.
Over the next few days and weeks, we will be sending copies of our two DRAFT Objection Documents out to all the supportive politicians, Local and National, all the relevant statutory consultees, such as NRW and the Health Board etc and other National and Local Groups, Charities and NGOs with a likely supportive interest in our efforts.
And please - help spread the word on the two sets of proposals and our objections to them, to:
- people who you know will be affected by them;
- people on wider social networks and beyond, who will care about the important issues that we are objecting to;
- groups, charities and organisations who you know will have an interest in and care about the effects of Jones Brothers’ proposals.
If each of you could spread the word and the links above to one or more of the potential groups of recipients listed above, that will help the cause enormously.