I did say that I would return to the subject of the Carthouse Lane Allotments, although the target date for this application is not until the middle of February. It won’t be heard at the planning meeting on Tuesday – the agenda for that is now published.

Horsell Residents Association met on Wednesday evening and briefly discussed the application. There were concerns about how allotments and warehouses could be built in close proximity to the Special Protection Area when homes themselves were restricted. This all stems to a useless EU directive that is designed to protect nightjars and Dartford Warblers in southern Spain but has wrecked the housing plans of local authorities throughout the Thames Valley.

Put simply, people keep pets and walk them near where they live. It is those dogs and cats that cause a potential hazard to the habitat of ground-nesting birds and the birds themselves. By comparison, a warehouse or industrial unit creates no similar threat. It’s a completely ridiculous directive but there we go.

The general consensus at HRA was that the application itself is no bad thing, even if it did highlight the silliness of the EU law.

Surrey County Council announced today that it was no longer pursuing Energy from Waste Plants, known to you and I as incinerators, in Surrey. Thus ends one of the most expensive and fiercely fought policy battles in the area’s history.

There will be no incinerators in Surrey - including Martyr's Lane

The county council has obviously come to the conclusion that residents in all affected areas would fight any proposals to the wire and they couldn’t justify the cost in terms of money and time in battling their own residents. It’s a message that should have got through a while ago – when you find yourself being taken to court by the people who fund your wages and pensions, something is not quite right.

There is an hint of new brush as well, with Cllr Andrew Povey making what I hope will be the first of many sensible and pragmatic decisions in his new regime and change of direction with what came before. Instead of the waste plants, there will be an Eco Park that will cost a quarter of the £200m Surrey wanted to spend on its incinerators and a gasifier and anaerobic digester will be among the “attractions”.

So that means that Martyr’s Lane will not be the site of an EfW plant, which is a relief following the recent good news about Heather Farm. Whether or not it’s the future of waste management, the authorities failed to convince residents of its need and there is no reason why a government should do anything to make its people sleep less easy at night.

And I’m delighted to see some common sense finally emanating from county hall.

One final thing though – the Surrey Joint Waste Management Strategy for 2006-2025 still says:

“Whilst acknowledging the concerns of some people, but with due regard to the waste hierarchy, we consider energy-from-waste recovery via incineration (with the most up to date controls on and effective monitoring of emissions by the Environment Agency as the most practicable (sic), financially viable and sustainable approach currently available for that residual part…[that cannot be dealt with any other way]“

Will this strategy now be changed? And won’t that require all 12 Surrey councils’ consent?

I haven't got a picture of a Woking bin, this one's from Peterborough

I saw Denzil Coulson after the executive in Brewery Road Car Park while I was chatting with the News and Mail’s excellent reporter Beth Woodger. He stopped to make some chat and it was good to exchange words after a few little storms in teacups over blog posts etc. He’s standing as the Lib Dem candidate in North East Hampshire, where he’ll be canvassing the leafy streets of Fleet trying to nab James Arbuthnot’s 12,500 majority away.

You’d have to be pretty optimistic to believe he’ll do it but it takes guts to slog away at the other side’s safe seats and it’s fighters like Denzil who keep politics interesting. While I wouldn’t like to think we’ll lose a seat like North East Hants, I’m sure Denzil will give a good account of himself and I’m pleased he’s standing for Goldsworth West again – we might not agree on much but he’s strong member and the council needs that on all sides.

Following our discussion, he walked off and looking at his website for the first time since the Queen’s Speech, I now realise why. He’s gone and posted a cheeky little piece about the rise in cost of the green bins for April 2010, claiming that it is about raising money rather than keeping the environment clean. Well, it’s only going up £2  for most people from £35 to £37, which isn’t exactly extortionate and from £15 to £20 for a second bin.

Denzil’s point is that concessionary charges are going up from £20 to £25 for the first bin and £10 to £15 for the second, which works out at a higher percentage than non-concessions. But obviously if you calculate it in percentage terms, you will get a higher percentage the lower the starting base – that’s just the way numbers work.

I don’t think it’s a big secret that the point of the new scheme is both environmental ie it will help more carbon-efficient collection and prevent 400,000 plastic bags going to landfill and budgetary ie it embraces the principle that residents who use the service should contribute to it rather than the cost being spread to everyone through council tax.

One of the beauties of the new waste scheme is that it introduces a small slice of free market economics into the service. It’s basic pricing theory – if the council charges too much for bins, people simply won’t take up the service and the council will be forced to reduce the price. If however take-up is huge and the council doesn’t test price elasticity at a higher level, it has done taxpayers – including those on lower incomes - a disservice by not attaining Best Value.

So if concessionary households are struggling to find the extra £5 a year, that is something that the market will tell us and I am sure will be examined further.

Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

I’ve never quite understood why a possible site for one of Surrey’s two required energy-from-waste plants was smack bang in the middle of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Horsell Common is a precious resource – a haven for wildlife and rare plants, a respite from the bustling town life all around, a place for walking dogs and riding horses and somewhere of cultural importance to Woking being identified so clearly in HG Wells’s War of The Worlds. It stretches much farther than the width of Shores Road and cuts across the majority of the west and east Horsell areas. It is generally undervalued within Woking but has a number of staunch supporters who are dedicated to protecting it and its natural beauty and preserving it for others to enjoy.

What it is not is the correct place to site a large industrial building for generating power. It is not a place where large vehicles can enter and exit easily and it should be protected from the noise, odours and detritus of medium-scale industrial activity. To me, this is plainly obvious; but two sets of local authority officers have worked in such a way as to make exactly such an industrial eyesore a realistic possibility. Thankfully, it now looks unlikely.

Horsell Common Preservation Society has successfully argued to overturn a Woking Borough Council planning decision against a change of use for the site to include small-scale industrial and storage buildings. The borough council refused the application on the basis that the Surrey Waste Plan had set aside the site as a possible location for one of its two energy-from-waste plants. But the inspector decided there were compelling reasons – not least of them concerning HCPS’s control over access to the site – that meant Heather Farm was unlikely to be viable prospect as a EFW location and he granted the original application.

His report is pretty clear and it won’t make for comforting reading at county hall. But it should do in Horsell; if a buyer can be found to take on the operation of the site, we should have seen off the bizarre prospect of a waste plant on the doorstep of one of the county’s most environmentally sensitive areas.

Is it me or is Gordon Brown’s spiel about the environment particularly uninspiring? All the stuff about “no plan B“, warning us of “catastrophe” and calling on the world to achieve a “momentous” agreement?

We’ve been hearing this kind of rhetoric for years – first from Tony Blair and then from the PM. To be fair, John Major’s government did practically nothing to bring the green agenda to the fore and Labour has pushed European legislation to force recycling and better environmental standards. I’m heartened that DC sees this as a plank of his manifesto.

But really, is tired cliches all the PM can manage on this subject? Where are the ideas, the suggestions, the commitments? If he can’t get excited – or exciting – on this subject, what hope is there for him?

Or perhaps he realises that without the rapidly-developing nations on board, the Copenhagen gathering is little more than a fortnight of lame talk.

If my blogging gets a little thin over the next couple of days, I apologise – there are a few things at work that need sorting out and as you can imagine in this climate, it’s not all as good as it could be.

Anyway, I thought the DC’s keynote speech on harnessing the power of profit and the conscience of the consumer to create a ”green consumerism” was the first significant environmental contribution from his since the “Vote Blue, Go Green” strapline was quietly dropped a few years ago. Undoubtedly, DC knows that his environmental credentials might just be enough to swing some ex-Conservative Lib Dem voters who can put up with no electoral reform if the Conservatives can show a genuine desire to help the less well-off and a commitment to environmental action.

But it  has to be credible. And I think this is – there’s no point setting out a vision for an economy run along green lines. The economy will always win over environmental considerations if allowed to go unchecked. What you need to do is use economic imperatives such as profit and efficiency to drive the environmental agenda forward. I don’t think the Liberal Democrats have demonstrated that they understand that in practical sense – for them, business behaviour must be re-built around environmental concerns.

DC knows that business behaviour revolves around money and believes that he can channel that motivation for the benefit of all of us. I hope he’s prepared to take it forward with gusto and resist the inevitable pressure that will come from the most unsustainable parts of the economy. They are also some of the largest and loudest parts – but he needs to make them understand that size and volume will not redress the planet’s problems. It is often those without a voice who are pointing to the moral path.

Update: A quick peak at Tim Dodds’s blog has revealed this article by the BBC News Climate Correspondent. I subscribe to environmental action because of the problems of a growing population and the potential for conflict as well as the unpleasant effects of unfettered industrial expansion and ecological decline. But it makes you think…