Newcastle-under-Lyme’s MP, Adam Jogee, has told Parliament that the Walleys Quarry landfill site ‘reveals a fundamental gap in the UK’s planning system’, warning that the failures at the site show the need for stronger planning safeguards.
Speaking during a Westminster Hall debate on quarry planning policy, he described hydrogen sulphide emissions at Walleys Quarry as ‘public health crisis’ and a ‘disgraceful situation’ which had ‘tarnished’ Newcastle ‘for far too long’.
The MP highlighted that between 2021 and 2024 the Environment Agency undertook more than 180 inspections and recorded repeated breaches by the operator.
Adam said: “Walley’s quarry reveals a fundamental gap in the UK’s planning system. Even when technically compliant, planning permission does not guarantee that a waste site in a former quarry will remain safe or tolerable for those who live around it. Too much trust was placed in conditions that lacked enforceability and, in our case, an operator who consistently failed to do the right thing.
“In my working life I have never seen cowboy operators as irresponsible, as greedy, as reckless and – to put it bluntly – as criminal as those in the details I shall share with the House today.”
He called for stronger safeguards to prevent similar crises in the future and urged Ministers to introduce stricter rules on the location and design of landfill sites.
Adam said: “Local planning authorities must require far more vigorous assessments of the long-term environmental and public health risks associated with converting quarries into waste sites. Before any waste site is granted permission, operators must provide fully protected bonds or trust funds that are capable of covering decades of aftercare. When companies collapse, the public must not inherit their liabilities.”
He continued: “No quarry with the potential to become a landfill site should be opened within 500 metres of any homes, and no planning application should be approved. All planning permissions for landfills should require separate stable non-reactive hazardous material cells to be constructed, because this will help to deter the mixing and misclassifying of such waste. What happened at WalleysQuarry must never be allowed to happen again.”
The MP also said had ‘received reports’ that the former operators of Walley Quarry ‘owe in the region of £80 million’, which he said he had raised with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
Daily Focus reported in February this year that landfill operator Walleys Quarry Ltd had gone into liquidation.
