The Barry Biomass Incinerator

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 2:15 pm on 9 May 2018.

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Photo of Mr Simon Thomas Mr Simon Thomas Plaid Cymru 2:15, 9 May 2018

There are real lessons for all of Wales in what's happened in Barry. It is frankly astonishing that such a major project in such a built-up area with such potential health effects could have got a go-ahead, or got so far, without an environmental impact assessment being done. I'm grateful for the letter I received from you this morning around this, which, more or less, repeats what you've just told the Chamber. Well, that's fine, but what I do want to understand, because there are lots of concerns in other parts of Wales that are facing similar biomass plant applications at the moment, is if it does transpire that this whole process should have had environmental impact assessment work done a lot earlier, will you ensure that that is done, even though the process has gone a considerable way along the route? And bearing in mind here what does sometimes happen in planning terms, in that people can do retrospective planning applications or they can disallow what should have happened because they say things have gone too far, if it does turn out, under the EU directive—which we still have, of course—that this project, with all the additions and changes that have been done to it, should have been done under the directive that requires environmental impact assessments, will that happen regardless of the fact that the project has got, as Jane Hutt mentioned, to a stage where the developers are already giving dates for it to begin?