A “business-friendly” council has approved plans for controversial production units for 300,000 broiler chickens despite hearing residents could face having to live with the stench of ammonia and being warned the area is already a pollution hotspot for the highly irritating gas.
The final meeting of Hambleton District Council’s planning committee saw a narrow majority of councillors agree Dinsdale Farming’s plan to create six 126m-long buildings for the chickens close to Raskelf, near Easingwold, was acceptable.
The council’s officers had recommended the proposal be rejected, after concluding trucks travelling to and from the site would disturb residents’ sleep and that the chicken production facility would result in “a very substantial increase in ammonia release to the atmosphere”.
The meeting heard officers warn there was already one of the UK’s high concentrations of ammonia in the atmosphere in the stretch of low-lying land between the North York Moors and the Hambleton Hills to the east and the Yorkshire Dales.
The authority’s development manager, Tim Wood, told the meeting the council had only recently become aware of ammonia pollution affecting the area’s environment and as Hambleton area was not in a position where it could be complacent about impacts of the gas the council’s recently adopted Local Plan had a policy specifically addressing air quality issues.
After viewing maps showing ammonia pollution across Hambleton district Councillor Nigel Knapton said: “There’s something significant going on in the Vale of York and the Vale of Mowbray and I don’t think we should be adding to that problem.”
Local councillors said proposed measures to mitigate ammonia pollution at the site were represented a cheap and ineffective answer to genuine concerns.
A spokesman for residents of the nearby villages of Tholthorpe, Tollerton and Flawith told the meeting the poultry farm represented “quasi-industrial development in the countryside”.
He said hundreds of extra HGV journeys through villages and on narrow lanes would exacerbate road safety issues on a route for the HGVs where there had been 95 accidents resulting in injuries, three of which were fatal, over the past 22 years.
An agent for Dinsdale Farming told members there was a massive difference in the sensitivity of the site near Raskelf and another proposed large-scale chicken farm 15 miles to the north-west, outside Thornton le beans, which the committee had rejected, as it was much further from the North York Moors.
He added: “The air quality impacts of this development are not particularly great. We’re talking about a level of ammonia that the best ammonia-detecting system in the world would be unable to detect it’s so small.”
Other councillors said highways and environmental health officers and the Environment Agency had not objected over the impact on roads or pollution.
Hutton Rudby councillor Bridget Fortune said residents would “learn to adjust” to HGVs passing their cottages.
She added despite being seven miles from a slurry pit she could “taste it in her kitchen”, but added: “It is one of those things if you live in the countryside. You’ve got the narrow roads, you’ve got awkward situations and you’ve got agriculture.”
Referring to the large-scale poultry farm, Coun Fortune added: “People say it’s well it’s terrible, it shouldn’t happen. Well what are we going to live on? Cardboard?
“You cannot penalise people setting up a business in open space… you can’t do it in a town. As for smells, there’s smells everywhere.”
Thirsk councillor Dave Elders added: “We have got to make our minds up as a country. Do we want to eat food or don’t we want to eat food? We want it sustainable for this country. That means we need to put up larger units to produce larger amounts of food.”
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