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By ROB PARSONS - August 4 2022
A low carbon oil refinery sounds like a contradiction in terms but that's what energy firm Essar is promising at its Stanlow site in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. And it's installing the UK's first furnace capable of running on 100% hydrogen to achieve the aim.
But there's one problem as the largest part of the £45m furnace - a structure 26.5 metres long and five times higher than a double decker bus - has to come from 6,000 miles away in Thailand.
So far it's made it by ship to the Port of Liverpool before being transferred to a barge for the short trip across the River Mersey, through the locks into the Manchester Ship Canal and onto a holding bay near National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port.
But as CheshireLive reports the next step might be even more challenging, as it's moved from the canal onto the M53 motorway and then slowly and carefully for three miles to the Stanlow site.
It's been described as one of the biggest objects to be moved on UK roads and to help with the delivery National Highways is closing the M53 for a night next week.
Gordon Beattie, National Highways’ abnormal loads manager for the North West said: “There are abnormal loads and there are abnormal loads – and this one will completely fill the motorway. The module will be mounted on two wheeled platforms - one on each carriageway - and will look a bit like the bridge of a container ship gliding down the motorway."
A UK-first project to protect North's 'beautiful and fragile' natural world
Home to world-renowned natural landscapes from the rugged coastlines of Northumberland to the sprawling Yorkshire Dales, the natural environment of the North is hugely diverse and distinctive.
But unlike other areas of the country, Northern England now has a consortium of leading environmental organisations who have joined forces to aid nature recovery at a strategic scale. Nature North, made up of the likes of the Environment Agency and National Parks authorities, is the first known initiative of its kind in the UK working at this magnitude.
And today it was announced that the group is getting £500,000 of funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation so it can move forward with ambitious plans to halt the decline in nature so that everyone across the North can benefit.
It's already working on two existing projects, the Northern Forest and the Great North Bog, but will now focus on five other schemes including 'healthy Northern rivers', which includes reconnecting flood plains to rivers and reintroducing key species.
Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England, said: "Collaboration on this sort of scale is absolutely vital, if we are to mount an effective response to climate change and restore the natural world by creating a Nature Recovery Network across this beautiful and fragile part of England.
“No one organisation can do what’s necessary on its own, but each can bring its own specialist expertise, experience and evidence to this partnership and start to turn our national targets and ambitions into practical action on the ground.”
'North needs more than hanging baskets to restore civic pride'
They're a common sight in many Northern towns, villages and cities and according to Rachel Wolf, the co-author of the Conservative 2019 manifesto, a sign of levelling up in action as a symbol of somewhere that is being looked after.
But in a new report out today, experts from Cambridge University say a narrow focus on cosmetic, short-term measures such as hanging baskets on the high street is misplaced.
The Bennett Institute for Public Policy says levelling the playing field requires that communities have access to a broader set of amenities necessary to sustain themselves – from pubs and football clubs to heritage and green spaces.
They also challenge the established view held in the Levelling Up White Paper that the poorest places suffer from a deficit of civic pride. Instead, there is a mixed record across the country, with one of the most deprived regions, the North East, exhibiting higher levels of pride than London in government polling.
They say that if leadership candidates are serious about enhancing civic pride, the next Prime Minister must increase the size of the Community Ownership Fund to £1 billion – a seven-fold increase, up from its current £150 million.
Jack Shaw, co-author of the report, said: "Communities want good quality public services, they want to make decisions over the things that affect their lives, and they want their histories to be celebrated and stories told."
The soul-destroying North-South divide on drugs deaths
The number of people dying due to drugs in the North has hit its highest level in almost 30 years, prompting fears of a 'soul-destroying' North-South divide.
The rising numbers of deaths were described as “deeply concerning” by drug treatment charities, with the rise reflecting the impact of the pandemic, as Claire Miller of Reach's Data Unit reports.
Across the North there were 1,878 deaths relating to drug poisoning registered in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics. That was a rise from 1,710 in 2020, and the highest number recorded since records began in 1993 (when there were 674 deaths).
While the number of drug misuse deaths dropped from 258 in 2020 to 255 in 2021, the North East is still the region with the highest rate of deaths due to drug misuse with 104.1 deaths per million people. People in the region were more than three times more likely to die due to drugs misuse than people in the East.
Nuno Albuquerque of the UK Addiction Treatment Group said: “The regional disparity between drug related deaths is soul-destroying to see as it only highlights and emphasises the North/South divide is as strong as ever.
“These are unnecessary deaths, these are lives that can be saved with the right kind of help, empathy and professional support. Unfortunately these are things that our Government isn't forthcoming with."
'Our wounds are bleeding again': Afghan refugee's year in a hotel
A year on from Kabul falling to the Taliban, refugees minister Lord Harrington has this month appealed to councils to help house the 10,500 Afghans currently staying at hotels across the UK.
And one Afghan evacuee who's lived in a hotel in Yorkshire for almost a year has described feeling like her family’s “lives are paused” as they await news of permanent accommodation from the Home Office.
Marwa Koofi, 21, fled Kabul, Afghanistan when the city fell to the Taliban in August last year and has lived in two hotels over the last 12 months. She said the year has felt “wasted” and has recently been split up from family members after three of them were moved from a hotel in Selby to one near Crawley, West Sussex.
Her 35-year-old sister remains at the hotel a few miles from Leeds whereas Ms Koofi’s two brothers, aged 23 and 26, were sent to a hotel in Manchester.
She said being separated from her family has reopened psychological wounds inflicted after leaving their home in Afghanistan. “With Leeds, all of us were together and we were there for each other,” she told Lily Ford of Press Association.
“We had a wound from leaving Afghanistan and with each other, we tried to bandage it and we were fine and the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore. But after splitting the families, it’s like the bandages are removed and they’ve started bleeding."
Uncertain future for town's vacant Debenhams building
It closed its doors last year when the firm ceased trading after more than 200 years on UK high streets, with some 12,000 staff losing their jobs.
But the future of the empty Debenhams store in Middlesbrough remains uncertain after the local council chief executive has played down the prospect of the local authority buying up the vacant building.
Previously Middlesbrough Mayor Andy Preston said of the town centre property that “if and when it comes on the market, if it’s a good investment we will buy it at the drop of a hat”.
But Middlesbrough Council chief executive Tony Parkinson said the valuation placed on the building, in Newport Road, was “unrealistic” and suggested there was nothing currently doing in terms of potentially snapping it up.
The local authority previously bought the art-deco style House of Fraser building a short hop away for £1m in July 2020, but has yet to find anybody to occupy it, as Local Democracy Reporter Stuart Arnold reports.
Mr Parkinson told a recent council scrutiny meeting that there were “three potential solutions there which we are evaluating”, but it could be 12 to 18 months before any progress was made.
Defence Secretary argues against controversial mosque plans
It's been six months since Preston City Council’s planning committee granted permission for a mosque in the village of Broughton, with a distinctive design borne out of a worldwide contest by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
But the Government will now get the final say over whether the structure ever springs up after Wyre and Preston North MP - and Defence Secretary - Ben Wallace joined a local councillor in asking for the application to be ‘called in’ by Ministers.
Supporters and opponents each claimed planning policy was on their side during the first day of a public inquiry into the controversial scheme. There were also allegations of fearmongering and double standards – as well as disputes over the need for the planned place of worship, as Local Democracy Reporter Paul Faulkner reports.
More than two dozen people spoke to make the case for and against the Brick Veil Mosque as the inquiry began at Preston Town Hall. Representing Mr Wallace at the inquiry, his senior parliamentary assistant, Alf Clempson, said that the MP believed that planning matters “should always be about following the rules”.
“The designation of the land in question as open countryside is intended to protect the open nature of the site by preventing any sort of development – this is important to Mr Wallace’s constituents in Broughton.
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Northern Stories
More than 830 chippies across the North West could close as rising inflation and supply issues hit their businesses, Labour has claimed. Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary MP Jim McMahon issued the warning after visiting a potato farm in Garstang and a fish and chip restaurant in Blackpool to hear first hand about the problems facing the sector. The price of key fish and chip ingredients has risen by an average of 13.3% over the past year.
Transport for the North has launched a campaign in support of the four shortlisted locations in our region bidding to be the new home of Britain’s railways. The public vote has already begun to decide Great British Railways’ HQ and will go until 15 August with the Transport Secretary making the final decision later this year. Of the six shortlisted potential locations, four are in the North: Crewe, Doncaster, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and York. And TfN chief executive Martin Tugwell said: “The new Great British Railways’ headquarters can be anywhere, as long as it’s here in the North." For what it's worth in a small poll run by The Northern Agenda, York came out on top.
A new steel bridge over the Tees has been backed to go ahead after a decade-long planning battle. Yarm School’s long-awaited bridge was given permission to be moved six metres to the south at Stockton Council planning committee. The school won a planning appeal to create a bridge to its raft of sports pitches in 2018 after Stockton Council rejected its proposals. More than 200 objections were lodged against the original pitches.
Liverpool Council has shelved plans worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to charge private landlords for pest control. As part of its budget setting process for this year, the local authority had agreed a plan to ask private landlords and social housing providers to pay for treatments in a bid to raise £200,000 a year. Emails seen by Local Democracy Reporter David Humphreys from Liverpool Council show that the scheme has now quietly been dropped.
An estimated 32,500 families in Bolton and Bury are in serious financial difficulties as energy and fuel costs soar and wages stagnate, a Citizen’s Advice chief has said. Nationally wages adjusted for inflation for the average worker have dropped by 3.7% in the past year. Kevin Peel, a Labour councillor in Bury who is also a trustee of Citizens Advice locally is calling on residents of Bolton and Bury to sign an open letter to the five MPs across the two towns seeking extra help for those most in need across the two boroughs this winter.
Leeds planning officers have backed the proposed demolition of the city’s Yorkshire Bank HQ, which could see a conference centre built in its place. A final decision on the plans, which would also result in two new blocks of student accommodation being put up, is due to be made by councillors next week. But the council’s planning team has said building a conference centre would fulfil a “long-term aspiration” for Leeds and that it would complement The Leeds Arena next door.
