North Devon Journal - 14th August 2008

If the Government had set up a working group to inquire into the health effects of smoking, would it be conceivable that the chairman of that group should be the paid employee of a tobacco company?
I do not believe so. Yet, that is exactly what the Government has appeared to do in setting up a working group to examine the possible health effects of the gigantic commercial wind turbines for which growing numbers of planning applications are pending in Torridge.
Low frequency noise from "aerodynamic modulation" in the ever larger machines that commercial developers aspire to build is a source of acute public interest and concern. However, I believe the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform's Noise Working Group is chaired by a senior employee on secondment from a commercial wind turbine developer whose salary is paid by her employer, and includes several other members who represent the interests of major wind industry companies.
That group recently reported to the Government that there were no health concerns about the thousands of onshore wind turbines it plans to build in the English countryside. One of the group, an independent noise expert, immediately resigned, complaining that the problem had been downplayed and misrepresented. All this comes at a time when the Government plans to remove the power of decision from local communities and councils on major projects such as commercial wind turbines and power stations in its Planning Bill now before parliament, and, in an unpublicised amendment inserted just before the recess, to confer legal immunity on developers should the installations cause adverse health effects.
I believe that these facts disclose a clear conflict of interest and require urgent explanation and justification from the Government.
I have tabled parliamentary questions and written to the Secretary of State calling on him to do so. However, it would seem that they are eloquent testimony to the government's desperate rush to fulfil renewable energy and climate change targets that is only necessary because it abjectly failed to take the hard but essential decisions on nuclear energy and renewables a decade ago.

©North Devon Journal