Representation by Tim Rogers
- Date submitted
- 30 September 2020
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I have lived in Darsham since June 2020 and am the Rector of the Yoxmere benefice, which includes Theberton and Eastbridge. Immediately on arrival I have been struck by an enormous issue of pastoral care for these communities, which is the plans for Sizewell C. I have already met with people whose lives are overshadowed by the fear that this will destroy their homes and their villages, destroy the peace of the region, fracture communities, and put intolerable stress on the infrastructure. As bad as all of this, is that I am picking up the sense that EDF have used their enormous weight and power to bully and manipulate the process: for example using their great financial power to produce consultation documents that cannot easily be read and countered by the (necessarily) small volunteer band of those who wish to hold them to account, and having the temerity to push through at a time when such people were unable to meet together in numbers due to coronavirus restrictions. In short: this is a democratic nation, we believe that all voices — and particularly the voice of the underdog — matter and we are ideologically opposed to dishonesty and unfair play — are we not? I am particularly struck by Peter Wilkinson’s summary of the situation, which ably captures my view as a new resident of this region: "Anyone new to Suffolk, ignorant of EDF’s nuclear plans, would be forgiven for laughing out loud. An untried reactor, labelled ‘technically complicated to construct’ by its own designers, a cost of £20billion-plus, taking at least 10 years to build, producing waste which is not only lethal to living tissue but which remains so for thousands of years and for which there is no agreed or proven disposal or management route, to be built in the middle of a community of 5,000, which will not produce electricity for at least 10 years by which time its output will be redundant to needs, built on an eroding coast? Yeah, sure: pull the other one. You really couldn’t make it up. Yet this is what residents up and down the East Suffolk are facing. They have been led to believe that the destruction of their environment on a massive scale, the compulsory purchases, the roads, the workers’ campuses, the borrow pits, the huge water demand in the driest county is inevitable – and to make the best of it.” Please heed the voices of these communities, resist the pressure and bullying of EDF and their claim that this is the only solution to the nation's energy needs, and to brook no bullying, dissembling, or underhand tactics, when seeking to build something so massive, complex, potentially dangerous, and costly on so many levels. In particular, I am dismayed at the attitude of forging ahead while the enemy – i.e. residents of East Suffolk – are down.