LEGAL action aimed at halting the construction of a mass burn incinerator at Javelin Park has failed.

Lib Dem county councillors opposed to the facility near Haresfield had mounted a legal challenge - known as a ‘call-in’ - in the hope of derailing the scheme late last year.

But members sitting on Gloucestershire County Council's overview and scrutiny management committee – comprised mainly of Conservatives - found no grounds to suspend the project and voted to dismiss 11 points of concern raised by the Lib Dems at a meeting on Friday.

Campaigners from protest group GlosVAIN, who had assembled on the steps of Shire Hall prior to the committee session, pledged to continue their fight despite the unsuccessful legal bid.

Fears of a possible link between incinerator fumes and child deaths were once again voiced at the meeting when two councillors - Brian Oosthuysen (Lab, Rodborough) and Ceri Jones (Lib Dem, Cleeve) - referred to the Health Protection Agency’s decision to launch a major new study assessing the health impact of incinerators.

Responding to the pair’s concerns, Stan Waddington, GCC’s cabinet champion for waste, repeated statements made by the HPA’s chief executive Justin McCracken, who last week said that incinerators do not pose a significant risk to public health and that the agency’s position remained unchanged in spite of the new study.

The week previously Cllr Waddington had drawn attention to an application for a similar incinerator in Shropshire, which a planning inspector approved despite knowledge of the forthcoming HPA study.

Conservative MP for Shrewsbury Daniel Kawczynski has since vowed to lie in the road to prevent work from starting on that project.

Although ruling out a similar stunt for the time being, Stroud MP Neil Carmichael has said that he is very concerned by ‘the scale of opposition’ to the Javelin Park incinerator.

The Tory administration, who are determined to press ahead with the incinerator project, had a clear majority on the committee in question, allowing them to easily fend off the legal challenge.

Calling-in the project did, however, present county councillors with an opportunity to grill their Conservative counterparts about the proposed incinerator.

One objection raised by dissenting councillors during the committee related to worries that waste would be imported from other counties to be burned in the incinerator.

Cllr Diane Hibbert, of the party People Against Bureaucracy Group, asked whether a contractual clause should have been put in place to prevent waste from being transported to the Haresfield facility from elsewhere.

In response, Cllr Waddington, the county council’s cabinet champion for waste, said that inserting such a stipulation into the contract was not desirable because it would increase the cost of the project.

He did, however, insist that the incinerator was only a solution for Gloucestershire’s waste.

Another matter raised at the committee centred on requests from Stroud District Council and Cheltenham Borough Council, who have both asked for the project to be halted whilst alternative waste disposal technologies are evaluated.

Cllr Waddington said that other options, such as an MBT plant, had already been looked at and were adjudged to be unsuitable for Gloucestershire.

One other point of concern discussed as part of the call-in focused on material distributed by the county council during a recent event at Javelin Park.

Leaflets emblazoned with the slogan ‘Zero Waste to Landfill’ were circulated to those in attendance, yet opposition councillors said this was misleading because fly ash from the incinerator would in fact have to be landfilled.

Cllr Waddington, who has been accused by GlosVAIN of making misleading statements in the past, said the phrase ‘Zero Waste to Landfill’ was simply an ‘aspiration’ that would ‘become more and more familiar to people as time goes by’.

But this, Cllr Ceri Jones, argued was ‘disingenuous’ because the general public, whom these leaflets were issued to, were likely to take the claim on face value.

The language used by the county council has also attracted the ire of GlosVAIN in recent weeks.

Before the meeting last Friday, a spokesman for the group, Ian Richens, criticised GCC for calling the incinerator an ‘energy from waste facility’ or ‘the residual waste project’ in their public pronouncements.

These phrases, Mr Richens said, were designed to disguise the fact the council was building an incinerator.

"Recent press coverage has shattered the myth that ‘energy from waste’ is some kind of magic formula," he said.

"People I spoke to did not realise what energy from waste meant, they did not know that it was actually a massive burner."

Mr Richens also said he felt the protest movement was beginning to gain momentum and that the tide of public opinion was starting to turn in their favour.

An online poll, posted on the SNJ website last Wednesday, January 25, does indicate strong opposition to the project, with 79 per cent of the 112 respondents calling for the scheme to be halted while the HPA study is carried out.