19. The Changing Context
Despite the Canadian waste being on its way back home, August 1989 ended with no let-up in the campaigning against imports and with the new and energetic MACAT continuing to organise demonstrations and with a novel balloon-releasing initiative from the Women’s Council of Torfaen Labour Party. It proved to be an effective way of demonstrating the geographical range of material emitted from Rechem, since an unusual air current allowed balloons to be recovered in France and the Pyrenees. The sustained campaigning showed ReChem that the writ wasn’t having the desired effect on me or other campaigners but on 1st September, ReChem secured an injunction to stop the Council publishing PCB test results.Much to Rechem’s chagrin, at the end of July the Council’s case for an inquiry, which included contamination data, had been presented to the Secretary of State for Wales and Torfaen had planned to do the same with the European Commission. The gagging order made that impossible, so Llew Smith stepped into the breach and carried the case off to Europe. In his role as MEP for Blaenau Gwent, he met the EEC’s Carlo Ripa di Meana, to do what the Council now couldn’t do. He placed the test results before the Environment Commissioner whilst explaining the British Government’s dilatory position. The Commissioner went on to discover for himself the obstacles in the way of getting the truth on testing from our Government. As a consequence, Jonathan Calvert in the newspaper Wales on Sunday reported Carlo Ripa di Meana’s response as: “Britain accused of cover-up over ReChem probes” and the Commissioner spoke of possible action against the British Government for breaking fundamental EEC principles. September’s High Court Injunction that prevented the Council discussing the contents of its report on contamination and which prevented any more testing, was one of the most vicious twists in the whole topsy-turvy affair. It was described in the Western Mail of 2nd September:
Chemical Waste disposal experts ReChem International yesterday won a High Court order preventing Torfaen Borough Council from further discussing the contents of a report on alleged emission of PCBs from its waste plant at Pontypool, Gwent. ReChem claims the information in the report is inaccurate and was unlawfully obtained by the Council as part of a hostile campaign aimed at forcing the shutdown of the plant. Mr Alan Pardoe, QC for ReChem, told Mr. Justice Popplewhell in London that the company was genuinely fearful of the scaremongering tactics being employed by the Council, who had obtained widespread publicity for the contents of its report, and no planned to persuade the European Commission to take legal action against ReChem. The judge granted ReChem an injunction which prevents the Council from publishing or communicating by any means the contents of its written document “Presentation to the Secretary of State for Wales on the operation of ReChem International Limited and the Need for a Public Inquiry” The injunction also prevents the Council from carrying out any further measuring or recording of the emission of alleged pollutants into the air from ReChem’s plant. The judge also gave ReChem permission to seek a judicial review of the Council’s obtaining of the information and the publication of the report . . . Mr Pardoe told the judge that the Council’s behaviour in obtaining the alleged information was “quite scandalously” unfair.
The terms of this judgement, which by the judges own admission intended to prevent further damage to the company, were in keeping with the prevailing pattern. The South Wales Argus editorial saw it as a “hostile legal gag” and said that the company “may win this technical legal battle but they are losing the moral war.” The newspaper demonstrated its own impunity by publishing a large, provocative cartoon depicting the incinerator alongside a judge, with an ambiguous message about the identity of the real hooligan. With the injunction still in place, the government’s bizarre response to EEC pressure was an example of shooting the messenger. The Department of the Environment now claimed it was not the government who should be criticised over the monitoring of contamination, but the local authority. The Council must then have felt even more bewildered when the company refused to release details of a fresh explosion at the plant.
Whether there was real evidence of contamination or not, September’s events at last included a strong call for a ban on toxic waste imports from the trade unions at the Trade Union Congress in Blackpool. There, Canadian Union Leader Reg Basken praised British dockers for August’s action against the waste and the British Seamen’s John Allen wanted more of the same in the future. Sadly, the TUC general secretary admitted it was a really a token gesture, as legal barriers would prevent the call being carried out Environment Minister David Trippier warned that scaremongering was afoot and his stance seemed to support the surge in legal actions from ReChem. Legally, I now had more companions, with Bootle MP Alan Roberts, The Western Mail, Red Dragon Radio, the Daily Star, The Guardian and The Daily Mirror all newly on the receiving end of ReChem’s recourse to the High Court. All this provoked journalist John Sweeney to set about ReChem in his Pendennis column in the Observer. After penning his David and Goliath article about my predicament, he continued riskily by sniping at the company in a series of follow-ups. No others in the media were as bold as he was at that touchy time.
In October the shroud of suppression lifted a little when there was news of some legal progress. Torfaen had hotly contested the injunction and at the beginning of the month, our familiar High Court relaxed the ruling that had bound the Council to silence and it also lifted the ban on further monitoring for contamination. Having seen the ammunition I needed for my defence being silenced only weeks after I received the writ I was mightily relieved at the new ruling and I told Sarah straight away. The conditions for lifting the injunction were that, in future, Torfaen and ReChem would exchange environmental samples and that the Council would notify ReChem of its own test results prior to publication. At a press conference on 4th October, when Environmental Health Director David Thomas confirmed that testing would resume, Torfaen’s solicitor Chris Tindall also sounded up-beat about the prospects of a frequently requested public inquiry.
Appearing as if on cue, the day after the embargo on contamination data was lifted there was a new batch of contamination figures in the headlines though not from the Council’s tests. Funds that PEPA had left-over from the group’s legal challenge in the 1970’s had been used to finance further tests of samples taken from the Caldicott’s property. Unfortunately for ReChem, Ken Caldicott was himself an analytical chemist and unlike some people in the scientific community, Ken didn’t have total faith in the system that was supposed to be controlling the chemicals.Having their young children Andrew and Alex as well as horses, ducks and rabbits exposed to Rechem’s emissions, Ken and Shirley were becoming increasingly anxious. They’d already been advised not to eat their duck eggs because of the eggs’ high PCB content, though the PCBs in the eggs were not said to be from ReChem.For the PEPA tests, Ken designed his own survey of eighteen grass samples at varying distances from the incineration plant that loomed across the river from his home. The results showed PCB levels of up to 650 parts per million, which were similar to Torfaen’s own results. Ken graphed the new data and the pattern he produced pointed to Rechem. Barry Sanders, the City Analyst in Cardiff who conducted all the tests, quickly added his own voice to the call for a public inquiry.
Meanwhile, research sponsored by ReChem at the University of Wales was helping the company to divert attention to PCBs in different eggs, specifically the eggs of the Welsh river birds. The logic was that we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that just because a high level of PCB contamination is found then Rechem is responsible. In general that was a fair point, but I suspected that ReChem would have been happy for people to think that whatever was causing contamination of dippers eggs in Mid-Wales could also cause PCB contamination in Pontypool duck eggs. Ken Caldicott was incensed by the diversionary tactic and encouraged the dipper project’s leader to clarify the matter. In doing so he made the appropriate point, that due to the birds’ different diets, it was improper to compare dippers with ducks. The fact that the chemicals found in the local environment were so close to a global centre of PCB storage and processing didn’t seem be a factor in Rechem’s own connection of cause and effect. Characterising the company’s attitude to contamination, in a large spread in the November edition of the business magazine Director, ReChem’s managing director placed the company’s own environmental monitoring on a pedestal. The article quoted Malcolm Lee as saying “No one else does air monitoring or monitoring of the plant as we do. We’ve even embarrassed the government into starting to do it, because they didn’t have a clue.” He also acknowledged that the publicity surrounding our campaign had helped the company increase its prices and he described Rechem as the “Rolls Royce of the waste disposal industry”.Comparatively speaking, Lee’s analysis of the situation was hard to disagree with, but I wasn’t comparing Rechem to the rest of Britain’s waste disposal industry and if I’d been a Rolls Royce owner I wouldn’t have been happy.
At that time, just as we campaigners were having a hard time with both Italian waste and Italian attitudes, it came as little surprise when ReChem acknowledged the importation of a consignment of waste from the cargo of the notorious vessel the Zanoobia. When more local organisations and even other councils in the area joined the opposition to waste imports, ReChem bolstered its propaganda with a large newspaper advert arguing that Wales had a responsibility for PCB disposal, since in the 23 years up to 1977, Newport’s Monsanto plant had produced all 66,000 tonnes of PCBs ever made in the UK. Naturally I didn’t think the argument was that simplistic, particularly as Monsanto was an American company who had found that producing PCBs in the United States was inappropriate.
Perhaps as a reaction to our increasing pressure on UK ports, proposals to handle PCB imports were now being made to Pembroke Dock company Govan Davies. This prospect attracted Pembroke MP Nicholas Bennett, who expressed his delight when the docks’ management declined a lucrative docks deal with Canadian exporters. After the Pembroke boost, a long-term light appeared in the Labour Party’s environmental policy publication, “An Earthly Chance”, where a general ban on toxic waste imports was proposed. Unfortunately, our protest at Newport’s Bell Lines container dock didn’t produce a parallel outcome to the Pembroke victory. Though the Conservative government remained unmoved by repeated calls for a public inquiry and nothing positive came from Welsh Secretary Peter Walker following Torfaen Council’s presentation, following the lifting of the injunction on the Council, there was an additional breakthrough. After being delayed by the High Court, Torfaen Borough Council’s delegation finally went to the European Commissioner in Brussels with their case for an inquiry. ReChem predictably complained that the arrangement was unfair. It was clear that the company preferred British officialdom to the European administration, whereas we campaigners preferred the promise that lay with European procedures. The Europe-driven and long awaited improvements in data collection now meant that a previously piecemeal process was becoming systematic and this was evident when Environment Minister David Trippier released figures on the pre-notification of imports under the 1988 regulations. In the 12 months to October ‘89 a total of 36,789 tonnes of notifiable waste was listed for England & Wales. The amount for the calendar year later grew to over 40,000 tonnes.
With the Council’s PCB monitoring back on the rails, in the autumn of 1989 ReChem introduced further examples of PCBs’ omnipresence by publishing the results of another company survey, this time of soils in various parts of Wales. A particular location of soaring PCB contamination found far from the Pontypool plant’s range was highlighted. It was in grass on a Newport Industrial estate and it just happened to be near to the Monsanto factory. The use of the finding as a comparison didn’t improve my opinion of ReChem’s motivation in choosing their sampling locations. Then, after the Welsh Office had previously recommended that the Caldicott’s duck eggs should not be eaten, the same body announced conclusions on a recent investigation it had conducted on PCBs near the incinerator. The report was astonishing. In announcing the latest in a series of all-clears, a spokesman said: “All the recent tests undertaken on other hen and duck eggs and also samples of vegetables, milk and water have proved negative.” In the light of that conclusion, a new claim from ReChem was hardly surprising.With a headline “PCB levels fixed say firm” The South Wales Argus of 24th October reported that the company claimed that an air sampling device on the Caldicott’s ground had been tampered with to show high levels of contamination.Ken Caldicott had previously felt that he had been a subject of suspicion when Rechem’s list of possible causes of duck egg contamination was published, and the new allegation really tested his patience, though not as much as the Council’s temper was being tested. Doing that, ReChem’s chairman Richard Biffa wrote a 13 page letter to Torfaen Chief Executive, Manu Mehta. The company chairman lashed-out at the Council by expressing “serious doubts about the integrity of the call for a public inquiry”, by criticising the Council’s “spurious & unscientific” presentation to the European Commissioner and by asserting “We therefore find that the presentation has no scientific validity and serves only to emphasise the failure of Torfaen Borough in the performance of what is their statutory duty.” Point-by-point, the letter undermined the validity of Torfaen’s data, stated that ReChem had a data bank of 10,000 herbage tests supporting the company’s stance, claimed that The Council was usurping the role of the Pollution Inspectorate and attached 200 pages of additional information which would be submitted to the European Environment Commissioner as a challenge to Torfaen’s evidence.
At the end of October a tangential announcement was made on the topical subject of PCBs, this time by Monsanto. That company publicly confirmed that the British PCB production centre in Newport had been discharging the chemicals into the Severn estuary for decades.I’d always taken that for granted but it was yet another diversion from ReChem. It was unsurprising that the Monsanto news had taken so long to surface, a point the Argus editor noted in a renewal of attacks on secrecy. Whilst trying to convince myself that it was only a matter of time before there would also be clarity about contamination by in Pontypool, the waters around me were being muddied.
November 1989 began with a candlelit vigil outside ReChem’s plant, before the protests, petitions and the perseverance of Torfaen Borough Council were all rewarded with a dramatic intervention by the government. The pressure finally told and it was announced that there would be, not a public inquiry, but a Parliamentary inquiry. It was to be conducted by the Welsh Affairs Committee at Westminster and would take place quickly, in December. The new Torfaen/ReChem joint monitoring programme, which followed the lifting of the injunction, soon took off and the Council’s testing for PCBs in duck eggs revealed high levels whereas Rechem’s results were low. MACATw maintained the public face of the protest with another demonstration at Newport’s River Usk container terminal and the accompanying slogan “No PCBs from overseas”, which was a trade mark of the campaign, was carried by many more of us on the group’s march to the Pontypool plant soon after.
Before November ended there was a foretaste of the forthcoming parliamentary inquiry, when the chairman of the Welsh Affairs Committee, Gareth Wardell, took Welsh Office minister Ian Grist to task over information the minister had supplied on PCBs discharged to the sewers by ReChem. At the beginning of the year, the memo leaked from Welsh Water had told of ReChem breaching consent levels, but the minister’s reply to a question from Camarthen’s MP Alan Williams was different. The reply quoted an average figure, whereas Gareth Wardell pointed out that the average could conceal some high level discharges and he argued that closeting the facts might be taken as connivance. This was a small glimpse of the scrutiny that the Welsh MPs’ would place ReChem under in the inquiry itself and fortunately the Welsh office’s sleight of hand with sewage would have no bearing on later liquid effluent developments. It was also in November that I was finalising my defence submission, so I added the flare-up over sewage to my collection of evidence, without pretending that the previously leaked Welsh Water memo or the parliamentary dispute over sewage was enough to prove that contamination existed.
It wasn’t long before the restlessness of some Welsh Affairs Committee members over the sewage merged with Torfaen Council’s disputed test results to create a new argument, over honesty. That clash came on 13th December 1989, which was when the MP’s sat in the Welsh Affairs Committee at the House of Commons for the parliamentary inquiry. Delegations from the Council and from ReChem were grilled by the parliamentarians and our local media feasted on the intriguing clash. It was evident that ReChem had been given a rough ride by some MPs who were well versed in the facts. One headline summarising the suggestions of some MPs said “Waste study was fixed by ReChem” and the article added that the company had been accused of manipulating results. At first sight, the performance of the Welsh Affairs Committee appeared to have reflected the mood of the public and we rejoiced in the news reports. We would now have to wait for the full report of the proceedings before we could tell whether the whole inquiry had lived up to the promise seen in the media.
After I’d sent my provisional defence to Sarah, and with the end of the year approaching, a tragedy at the Pollution Inspectorate produced an unexpected piece of support for my BBC comments on regulation. It came with the leaking of a report written by the Inspectorate’s head and suicide victim, Brian Ponsford. The report revealed serious staff shortages and concern over re-organisation. It supported the view that at the time of his tragic death in the garage of his home in Cricklewood, Brian Ponsford had seen himself at the helm of an agency with insurmountable problems. The news of his suicide was coincidentally followed by a report of a drop in checks on emissions from factories in Gwent and next came further figures showing declining health and safety inspections combined with an increase in factory accidents.The information about regulatory demise was very useful for me but the circumstances in which it came to light reminded me of the seriousness of the subject I was involved in.
As 1990 approached I reflected that the writ against me had still not succeeded in diverting my efforts and that ReChem’s wrath was being countered by continued campaigning, political promise and a blossoming defence. When I was satisfied that I had put enough material together to make ReChem think, I sent it all off to Sarah. 1989 had been the worst and the best of campaigning years but at the turning of the year we recalled only the good bits as we sang our Christmas wishes at the gates of the incinerator.