We have won an important change that will make it easier for planners in Hampshire to make good decisions on oil and gas development applications.
The County Council recently reviewed its Mineral & Waste Plan – which informs planning decisions on all kinds of minerals developments, including oil and gas.
We responded to the consultation. And campaigner Ann Stewart spoke at the Inspector’s Hearing into the Plan. She pointed out that two sentences in the old plan were misleading.
The previous Plan said that onshore oil and gas “makes an important contribution to supply. It also has the added advantage of proximity to demand and markets.”
This is plainly untrue. Any new wells in Hampshire would deliver around 0.02% of UK oil, hardly an “important contribution”.
And as oil from Hampshire joins a pool from all the sites and is exported from the Hamble oil terminal, while the UK imports more oil than we export, there is no “proximity to demand and markets”.
The Inspector and Council agreed to strike out the misleading words. The paragraph in the revised Plan (para 6.119) is now much more accurate: see below.
Lorraine Inglis of the Weald Action Group commented “This is proof that digging into the detail and challenging industry spin still works!”
See the revised Hampshire Minerals & Waste Plan here: https://documents.hants.gov.uk/mineralsandwaste/HMWP-PartialUpdate-Reg24-ModsConsultation.pdf