The other day, ST campaigner Nick MacKinnon was working on producing a fairly specialised map of the proposed wind farm site for use in advising a statutory consultee. This is bread and butter for Nick and he set out on what he thought would be a pretty mundane task. Because CEP had not provided a plain map of the infrastructure he used the map provided by CEP in the Preliminary Environmental Information Report (PEIR) showing where the peat slides would finish (if they were to happen).

This map is the cleanest of the maps provided. He was trying to transfer the locations of the turbines onto the map he was making for me but Turbine 28 (on the pristine peat of Wadsworth Moor) seemed out of place. He went the spreadsheet of turbine locations published in the PEIR, which are given as grid references to the nearest millimetre. The ‘spreadsheet’ turbines were not in the same place as the ‘map’ turbines. Three of them were 200m out. Nick plotted the ‘spreadsheet’ turbine locations on the PEIR map of the locations and the result is shown in the pdf attachment.

The PEIR spreadsheet is the only correct source of turbine locations for members of the public who are looking at the layout and the spreadsheet is WRONG.

In his capacity as editor of the Walshaw Turbines Research Group, one of the members of our mighty Stronger Together to Stop Calderdale Windfarm coalition, sent a formal notification to Project Director Christian Egal, Executive Chairman Christopher Wilson, to Dr Ghazi Osman, the sole director who represents the Saudi investors and to Katherine King who is the Planning Inspectorate’s point of contact for the development.

Then Nick went to the consultation at Hebden Bridge. The bad news had already reached the band of CEP consultants. The minor characters were very nervous about talking to him. He served Christian Egal and Ashley Robinson, CEP’s chief planning consultant, with the notification. The last time Nick had talked to Ashley Robinson (at Denholme) Robinson had told him that it was ‘not your job to check the PEIR’ and Nick had presciently said ‘I have to check it because you don’t’.

On returning from Hebden Bridge an email from Christian Egal was waiting in Nick’s inbox. After thanking Nick for bringing this error to his attention Egal promised that these errors would be corrected as soon as possible, that the corrected documents would be marked as errata and that he would take the following steps to ensure stakeholders are aware:

1. We will notify all prescribed consultees.
2. We will notify local MPs.
3. We will notify everyone who has already submitted feedback to the current statutory public consultation and draw their attention to the change, inviting them to submit further representations should they wish.

Egal does not intend to alter the statutory consultation process nor to re-run the Denholme and Oxenhope meetings (though they were of course based on incorrect information).

What this sorry episode shows is the incompetence of CWF Ltd around important but simple things.

None of us can have any confidence in what they do or so, and we wonder whether the Saudi investors are beginning to feel the same way…