The real cost of restoring the Ashby Canal

The press release " The real cost of restoring the Ashby Canal to Measham" (PR 74) provides detailed information about the real cost of restoring the Ashby Canal to Measham in order to contradict the implied claim in the MACE poster that £2.5m will bring the Ashby Canal into the heart of Measham. It also includes an assessed 'carbon' if UK Coal's offer is accepted

MOPG PR 74 26/8/10

THE REAL COST OF RESTORING THE ASHBY CANAL TO MEASHAM

Posters around the Measham area are advertising that UK Coal plc will contribute over £2.5m in cash and kind towards restoring the Ashby Canal, should they be granted planning permission for opencasting coal on the Minorca site. The posters imply that the Canal will be bought right into Measham by illustrating it with pictures of the exiting youth club area being transformed into Measham Wharf when the Canal arrives.

Hopes are one thing; the real situation is somewhat different. On its own, UK Coal’s contribution will not bring the Ashby Canal to Measham. It is even very unlikely that they will, for that outlay, be able to restore the canal to Ilott’s Wharf, a spot just west of Bosworth Grange, still a long way from Measham.
Canal restoration is expensive, approximately normally £1000 a metre so the initial offer of cash and work in kind of £1.28m should, in theory, be enough to bring the canal from its present terminus north of Snarestone the 1250m to Ilott Wharf.

However there is a major problem. To restore the canal to Ilott Wharf will mean building an aqueduct over the Gilwiskaw Brook. According to Geoff Pursglove, Leicestershire County Council’s Project Officer for the Ashby Canal Restoration Project ,UK Coal’s offer does not include providing the £500,000 estimated cost of building the Gilwiskaw Brook aqueduct. So even if UK Coal were granted permission, the restored section of the Ashby Canal could just end at Bosworth Grange, since one assumes that because money is now so tight, one of the main arguments used by the supporters of the Minorca Surface Mine application in the first place, this is where it would stop for the foreseeable future. The total cost for restoring the Canal to Measham was put at £14m in 2009 by Leicestershire County Council. (1)

The other proposed £1.2m worth of benefit is for canal related infrastructural work which although necessary, will not extend the canal any further.

There is another price we will all be paying if this application is successful. That price is the contribution that restoring the Ashby Canal by means of the ‘bribe’, the word used by Mr Bricknell, the instigator M.A.C.E. and the poster, from UK Coal plc will mean the release of over 2,700,000 tonnes of Carbon forDioxide into the atmosphere (2). For every restored metre of the canal the other cost is the release of 2,160 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. This is because this is the amount of CO2 that will be released when Minorca’s coal is burnt.

MOPG would like M.A.C.E. to either confirm or deny these facts:

That without further ‘hard to get finance’ the UK Coal offer will only fully restore the Ashby Canal to Bosworth Grange.

That the total cost of restoring the Ashby Canal to Measham is approximately £14m.

That UK Coal’s offer will also result in the release of 2,700,000 tonnes of CO2, one of the most harmful of the green house gasses
.
Most of us in MOPG do want the canal restored, but the current method being proposed would impose a major loss on the quality of life for those living near the site, destruction of habitats and would also, unnecessarily, link the restoration of the Ashby Canal to the pollution of our atmosphere and the risks associated with global warming. We consider that too high a price to pay.

Steve Leary for MOPG commented

“Those responsible for raising peoples hopes that at one stroke Measham’s fortunes will be transformed as a result of UK Coal gaining permission to work the Minorca site owe it to their supporters to be more transparent about the offer. Otherwise they may find that having raised peoples’ hopes in this way, they face a degree of resentment for misleading people with their advertisement. In any case this proposed development is not without its other costs and do the supporters of the Ashby Canal restoration project utilising UK Coal’s offer want the restoration then to always be associated with global warming?”

REFERENCES

1) Ashby Canal Restoration Snarestone to Measham Business Plan Summary , Leicestershire County Council, July 2009.

2) Amount of CO2 gas produced by burning 1.25m tonnes of coal is based on calculations already provided in the following source “Ref 2010 Guidelines to Defra / DECC’s GHQ Conversion Factors for Company Reporting, Annex 1 p 7, August 2010 @