Ban the Burn rep to the Stronger Together to Stop Calderdale WIndfarm campaign group. On behalf of the group, named creator of the Parliamentary Petition, Ban WIndfarms on Protected Peatland in England – click here . Tend to carry a Grandmothers Against Bullshit placard – covers so much in so few words.
Short walks along streets that flood (and roads not taken)
For days Christine has been walking door to door in a South Pennines hilltop village above Hebden Bridge, to collect residents’ signatures to a letter to the Calder Valley MP . It asks him to support the Parliamentary petition – click here -that calls on the government to ban windfarms on protected peatland in England.
Her sense is that around 80% of hilltop residents get it.
This isn’t surprising. For the last 20 years or so the Walshaw Moor catchment has experienced a sequence of supposedly ‘unprecedented’ floods that have coincided with the intensification of Richard Bannister’s driven grouse shooting business.
Usually floods in the catchment have been ‘fluvial’ – the result of valley rivers breaking their banks. But in the summer of 2012 the third of three floods in a few months was a pluvial flood – rainstorm runoff flashed off the tops in torrents that rolled rocks and pebbles down the hillside roads into Hebden Bridge.
Public attention started to turn to the role of upland mismanagement in increasing the flood risk in the catchment. And it has stayed there, thanks to the stubborn efforts of a various local environmental groups.
This is why many people who would otherwise support onshore windfarms – like Stronger Together to Stop Calderdale Windfarm activists and supporters – are asking the government to ban windfarms on protected peatland.
A walk on the inglorious 12th August 2012, Hebden Bridge to Heather Hill
In August 2012 a group called Ban the Burn was launched by about 90 people walking together from St George’s Square in Hebden Bridge to Heather Hill on Walshaw Moor grouse-shooting estate.
We saw for ourselves how burning and draining had damaged the blanket bog and wet heathland – despite the highest possible environmental protections for the area.
On the walk, and in an action planning meeting that evening at Hebden Bridge Trades Club, environmental consultant and research scientist Dr Aidan Foley informed us how damage to the moor’s blanket bog leads to:
• increased flood risk in Hebden Water
• very significant carbon emissions
• adverse impacts on water quality
• the destruction of a globally significant habitat type
We learnt that we can be part of a local and totally achievable answer to the global warming issue – Aidan encouraged us that,
“The global warming issue often seems beyond the scale of anything that we can do. And here is a local manifestation of it, it terms of high precipitation and flooding, but the answer is local and totally achievable. So people really need to understand that they can have an effect, they can have an impact and be part of the solution to this problem.”
Over the next 11 years people tried doggedly by various means to bring about this local, totally achievable solution. What has stood in our way is successive governments, their under-resourced quangos that have been unable to carry out their environmental protection functions, the owner of Walshaw Moor Estate, and the driven grouse shooting business lobby. All intermeshed.
We want the new government to listen and take effective action to protect upland peatland. Mark Avery has said the issue of banning wind farms on protected peatland is a test of whether the new government gets the environment or not. If they don’t, we’re all in deep sh*t.
A walk from the Hebden Bridge Coop to the Packhorse Bridge, sometime last week
Last week I walked along Market Street from the Coop to the bench on Old Gate next to the 500 year old Packhorse Bridge over Hebden Water. This entire stretch was under water after the 2015 Boxing Day flood.
Hebden Bridge lies at the foot of the mismanaged Walshaw Moor blanket bog plateau, and repeatedly suffers the flooding consequences.
Mismanagement is set to continue if planning permission is given for a wheeler dealer’s proposal to turn Walshaw Moor into a huge windfarm on a scale usually seen offshore.
The driven grouse shooters have drained and damaged the blanket bog to breed more grouse. Now the wind farm developer wants to drain it so they can build, operate, maintain and decommission all the necessary infrastructure.
As far as we can see, the flood risk consequences of draining and damaging the blanket bog are going to be the same, whatever the different reasons for it. And the consequence for Hebden Bridge is the difference between people’s flood doors overtopping or not.
Protected peatlands across England are similarly inappropriate for windfarm developments. As well as increased flood risk, other harms could include making the blanket bog emit more C02 than it captures and stores, damaging water quality, depleting the peatland carbon store and causing biodiversity loss.
NONE of these protected peatlands is needed for windfarm development – an RSPB study last year – click here – found there’s plenty of appropriate land for all the windfarm development the government needs to meet its net zero targets, even when protected sites and other environmentally sensitive categories of land are excluded.
So here we are, at the foot of a mismanaged blanket bog plateau. Trying to convince the government to exclude protected peatland as an allowable site for wind farms in its Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
The bench by the Packhorse Bridge used to be shaded by a weeping willow tree – now felled to make way for a flood barrier to be installed as part of the Environment Agency’s forthcoming £4m Flood Alleviation Scheme. Hard flood barriers lining the town’s rivers and canal should contain future floodwaters.
For now, but not much longer, the bench is my resting place when lugging shopping back home from the Coop. It faces across the duck quacking river to the wavy steps – a social space in the centre of town, often alive with buskers’ tunes and the first place to flood during rainstorms.
Walshaw Moor’s rainstorm run-off flashes into Hebden Water, causing flooding that spills through this part of the town and merges along the main valley bottom road with flooding that rises up from the Rochdale Canal and the River Calder. When this is imminent a World War 2 air raid siren wails eerily round the valley.
The two rivers join in a whirlpool next to Riverside Primary School, just before flowing together under the canal aqueduct. In 2015 the force of the flood swept a parked car off the street and smashed it into the upstream side of the aqueduct. Walking along the towpath on the aqueduct, you often would see a kingfisher darting over the whirlpool but I’ve not seen one for years now.
A dark walk from home to Hebden Bridge Town Hall, 6th March 2025
The Town Hall is on the right bank of Hebden Water, almost immediately upstream from the Packhorse Bridge and accessed by a road across St George’s Bridge – the next bridge upstream from the Packhorse Bridge.
You used to be able to hang over St George’s Bridge and watch trout shimmying in sun-sparkled peaty water above the rocky river bed. They’ve vanished since the pebbles and rocks were concreted over.
In the muddy, squalid but purposeful days following the 2015 Boxing Day flood – the worst of many over the past 15 years – the Town Hall was the centre for the mutual aid flood relief operation. Among many other practical activities like feeding the 5,000 and charging people’s mobile phones, the People’s Republic of Hebden Bridge Ministry of Propaganda ran the social media information campaign that networked people who needed help clearing up the flood mess in their houses and shops, with people who were willing and able to provide it.
Hebden Bridge people might have tried to make light of it and put on a brave face, but the flood was dreadful. Literally. For months afterwards, every time it rained hard we felt existential dread. And it rained hard a lot.
Aiming to avert any more such floods, the Environment Agency – the Government quango responsible for water quality and resources – has recently been holding drop in events in the Town Hall for the public to get our heads round the £4m Hebden Bridge Flood Alleviation Scheme plans.
The Environment Agency are not keen on the windfarm proposal. Their official response to the Scoping Report is that Walshaw Moor is “the wrong site for a windfarm and there are other more suitable ones which would not damage irreplaceable habitats and internationally important sites.”
But their flood risk modelling for the Hebden Bridge Flood Alleviation Scheme hasn’t taken account of the likely increased flood risk from building a wind farm on peatland above the town. According to an Environment Agency worker, this is because it’s entirely the developer’s responsibility to ensure that the run-off from the site would be no greater than existing conditions, so there was no need for the Environment Agency to accommodate additional run-off in their scheme.
Just how the developer would do this is a moot point. If they started messing around with large attenuation ponds, this would involve large areas of peat disturbance and the peat may not be suitable for embankment construction.
So we can sit around waiting to see what impossible flood mitigation measures the developers come up with. (That is, if the petition doesn’t work. And after Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd has started over and produced its new Scoping Report for a revised proposal to go through the new fast track Nationally Significant onshore wind planning process. Because last October, it said this is what it’s doing.)
Alternatively, we could re-run the 2013 participatory Flood Risk Modelling Workshops – click here – for Hebden Bridge “stakeholders”, that the Environment Agency and a PhD student held in the wake of the 2012 floods.
The starting point for these experimental – click here – workshops – click here – was that local as well as expert knowledge and objectives are vital for flood risk management, and that it’s essential to take account of uncertainties and knowledge controversies. Such as: how different types of upland management affect flood risk, how this varies according to the specific moorland context, and whether a windfarm developer can ensure that the run-off from a peatland site would be no greater than existing conditions, without creating a vicious circle of further harm to the peat .
The resulting flood risk model would provide a useful reality check to the flood mitigation measures in Calderdale Wind Farm’s planning application, The process could create public discussion about knowledge controversies such as contested scientific evidence about the impacts of windfarms on peatland. and serve as a “generative political event” – click here. Grit in the oyster of public discussion and decisions. We could do with this. According to our MP, Calder Valley opinion on the scheme is split 50:50, and the 50% who support the windfarm on protected peatland don’t want to talk about it.
The 116 mile road from Hebden Bridge to the Port of Blyth won’t be taken
There’s no point taking this road, although it leads to a very large stream of investment loan funding that’s channelled through Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd from Algihaz Contracting – a subsidiary of Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd’s ultimate controlling party, the massive Saudi investment company and World Economic Forum partner, Al Gihaz Holding.
Calderdale Wind Farm’s sole director Dr Ghazi Osman won’t be in his Enshore Subsea Ltd office in the Port of Blyth, he’ll be in Riyadh in his Algihaz Contracting office. From there, by September 2023 he he had channelled around £4m Algihaz Contracting loan funding through Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd to pay for the Scoping Report costs.
Some people say none of this matters – the money has to come from somewhere.
We think it does matter, even if we’re not going to walk to Port of Blyth to prove the point. The government is increasingly surrendering power to global private equity companies that vanish into overseas tax havens at the drop of a hat – and increasingly, into free ports and special exclusion zones in the UK. If this scheme goes ahead, we want to know who will own the moor. And how we can get hold of them.
The £4m Scoping Report cost is not all that Algihaz Contracting took on at that time. Calderdale Wind Farm Ltd accounts for 2022 and 2023 show the company owes the Walshaw Moor Estate landowner £4.4m in annual land option agreement fees. (The 2023 accounts list these annual fees under ‘Other debtors’. The amended 2022 accounts show a further land option payment as ‘Due after more than one year’). This is a fee that developers pay landowners for the exclusive right to purchase the land at a pre-agreed price within a specific time-frame.
These £4.4m payments are staggeringly high when apparently reliable information is that land option payments – click here – for wind farm developments are somewhere between £5,000 to £30,000.
We know there is a signed contract to activate the sale of the land if and when the windfarm is granted planning permission. The buyer is apparently the dormant Malmesbury-based residents property management company whose sole director is Christopher Wilson. Its nominal value is a single £1 share.
Christopher Wilson was previously also sole director of Calderdale Windfarm Ltd, before resigning in March 2022 to be replaced by Dr Ghazi Osman. Dr Ghazi Osman has a quite dizzying set of other interlocking corporate responsibilities:
Director, Enshore Subsea Ltd
Deputy CEO of Al Gihaz Holding (Energy),
Acting Chairman of Lamprell, a UAE-based subsidiary of Al Gihaz Holding that’s a “leading provider of contracting services to the international energy sector”, specialising in offshore wind turbine foundations, and
Director of Lamprell Energy (UK) Ltd.
I would walk 500 miles – but Hebden Bridge to Riyadh is 4K miles
Our campaign is all about the peatland. So we need to know who is to be its custodian if the wind farm gets planning permission. With such a cat’s cradle of corporate players, most in Saudi Arabia, how do we even begin to find out?
We can satisfactorily unravel the whole tangled web by a simple ban on windfarms on protected peatland in England. What are we waiting for?
More permanent and productive local jobs and income could be created through a landscape scale restoration project for Calderdale’s blanket bog – click here.