Wisbech incinerator may cost us jobs as well

The Incinerator people MVV are at it again! I expect most residents have now received a leaflet about the non-statutory public consultation they are having in various venues over the coming month.

Whether they’ll go ahead now there is a Rule of 6, who knows?

On the front of the leaflet is a picture of a happy young mum with a happy young child being given a piggy-back.

An incinerator with a seemingly mile high chimney burning waste and hundreds of lorries loaded with smelly waste and belching diesel or petrol fumes coming in and out of Wisbech daily are obviously just the sort of thing that make a young mum and her young child happy! Though in my mind’s eye, I can imagine this image as a picture of an MVV executive’s daughter and grandchild as they watch him laugh all the way to the bank with the money he’s going to make out of Wisbech with his planned waste burning plant.

The leaflet states that the reasons for the consultation are “to understand the issues that are important to you” and to provide ‘document inspection venues’ – that’s if any of us can make head or tail of such documents.

It does occur to me that once they have discovered all the objections by grilling local residents or stakeholders, as they like to call us, they can then construct a set of promises and platitudes to present to the government to appear to address them all.

It’s like joining Alice in Wonderland or going Through the Looking Glass or finding the world turned upside down.

They know and we know they know that having a huge chimney towering over Wisbech and the aforesaid lorries and the risk of water table pollution and the risk of pollution to our fertile farmland are things we want nothing to do with, yet they pretend that somehow, someway we are going to turn up at the consultation meetings and say all we want for Christmas is a polluting eyesore that will blight Wisbech for years!

The proposed hotel and restaurant and garage on the unused land on the outskirts of Wisbech will provide far more jobs and will add something to the community, yet they haven’t started and I worry they never will because of the threat of the incinerator coming.

I am sure they are waiting to see what will happen and may repurpose the land or sell it to MVV as a last resort. Thus MVV may end up costing Wisbech far more jobs than it says it will create.

David Silver

Wisbech