Dirty doings in windfarm battle

A local council rejects wind-farm application despite a police confirmation of fraudulent objections.

The village of Lubenham, near Market Harborough, is the kind of place where you would expect the Vicar of Dibley to turn up for tea and a scone, but when an energy co-operative proposed a small, 3-turbine wind farm nearby, the political dirty tricks campaign that emerged would be more at home in The West Wing.

The “Stop Gartree Windfarm” campaign was launched by local councillor Sir Bruce MacPhail, a former P&O director who could have been the template for Dibley’s David Horton. The Parish Council held an extraordinary public meeting for the purpose, shortly followed up by a publicity stunt at the popular “village scarecrow” day.

The 15,000 visitors to the scarecrow day, families from across Leicestershire, were confronted with a giant orange blimp flying at 125 meters from the ground, the height of the tip of the proposed wind turbine.

Faced with the day-glo airborne illustration, visitors were asked to sign up to a campaign to oppose the wind farm. MacPhail and other organisers did not, it seems, explain that the balloon was in fact tethered at one third of the distance from the village of the planned site, the visual effect resulting in the blimp appearing to be three times higher than the actual turbine.

Over 2,000 people signed up to oppose the wind farm on this basis, but it was only when the planning application was actually lodged that the extent of the NIMBY campaign’s ruthlessness would emerge.

The planning authority was immediately swamped with identical letters opposing the application, more letters in fact than the size of the population of the village, leading rapidly to a police investigation into how this could have occurred.

PC Andrew Cooper took on the task and discovered that the letters of objection were in fact the petition letters from the scarecrow day event – two years earlier - that had been retrospectively stamped with the planning application number and a date post the submission of the application. The stamping was done by associate of Sir Bruce, Shaughan Ferguson who admitted doing so under police interview.

PC Cooper said that although this was “highly unethical” he did not think that it was a crime that required police intervention.

In the mean time, Harborough Council accepted the objection letters as legitimate, despite scores of people spontaneously contacting the Council to dispute they had ever sent a letter of objection. Harborough’s Planning Committee rejected the application unanimously on January 26th.