‘In Avonmouth, we don’t matter’

For many years, Ian Robinson from the Avonmouth Community Action Group has been telling anybody who will listen to him about some of the dangers within his local area.

Before they were both elected, he gave Bristol mayor, Marvin Rees, and Bristol North West MP, Darren Jones, tours around Avonmouth in his car, with one of the stops being the sewage treatment plant on Kings Weston Lane owned by Wessex Water.

It was the location of the explosion on Thursday morning that killed four people.

“First and foremost, nobody deserves to go to work and die,” Robinson told Bristol24/7 the day after the explosion.

“Avonmouth, Lawrence Weston, the north end of Bristol, we don’t matter. We’re there to service the great and good of Bristol and the surrounding areas.

“We bear a disproportionate amount of the negative impacts of initiatives in Bristol to do with recycling, the Green Crapital (sic), all of that rubbish. It’s basically, where can we put it? South Gloucestershire. Avonmouth.”

Bristol Bioresources & Renewable Energy Park on Kings Weston Lane in Avonmouth is home to Wessex Water’s renewable energy company GENeco – photo: Bristol Open Doors

In November, Robinson took Bristol24/7 around Avonmouth in his car, pointing out sights such as Viridor’s new £252m Avonmouth Resource Recovery Centre – which he still calls an incinerator – almost ready to be turned on just over the Bristol City Council boundary in Chittening, but only a few hundred yards from where the council has currently moved dozens of van dwellers.

He also pointed out where previous fires and explosions have taken place, perilously close to residents’ front doors.

“I take no pleasure in being right, no pleasure whatsoever, it’s an unmitigated tragedy,” Ian said on Friday.

“I had been warning that that site… was releasing methane emissions. You can smell it all over Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston at times. It just reeks.

“Who knows how many near misses they have had down there?”

Robinson alleged that YTL-owned Wessex Water were operating with questionable health and safety regulations on the site on Kings Weston Lane, run by a subsidiary company, GENeco.

GENeco managing director, Mohammed Sadiq, was named in 2018 on the inaugural BME Power List, published by the University of Bristol, Bristol Students’ Union and Bristol24/7. In 2016, Sadiq was appointed chair of the Bristol Green Capital Partnership.

Sadiq and Wessex Water CEO, Colin Skellett (also chief executive of YTL UK, director of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce & Initiative and a member of the Society of Merchant Venturers) are listed as ‘supporters’ of Avon Mutual, the proposed regional mutual bank which was recently given £250,000 by Bristol City Council after cabinet members approved the next wave of funding despite opposition councillors’ caution.

Bristol24/7 has asked Bristol City Council how many complaints over the last 12 months there have been to the council from local residents about the GENeco site.

The fuel for First’s fleet of biogas buses does not come from GENeco.

“Unfortunately with the prevalence of the lax health and safety laws being applied by the regulatory authorities, by the Environment Agency, by Bristol City Council, who have all been notified of the Wessex site amongst others, I did expect that we could have a major incident, and tragically we have lost four people,” said Robinson.

“As I said, I take no pleasure in being right, or being prescient or seeing it coming. But it’s the natural progression when you have got those lax (regulations). Our public servants are supposed to keep us safe on our behalf, and they’re not doing it.”

He added: “What needs to happen is that there needs to be a systemic root and branch review of the regulatory framework and the actions of the Environment Agency within that regulatory framework. The Health & Safety Executive are an absolute joke… nothing seems to change…

“We certainly need to look at the way the planning framework is applied within Avonmouth and the surrounding areas, because WECA have deemed Avonmouth to be the waste recycling capital of certainly the west of England, if not Europe if they get their way.

“That’s why there is millions and millions of pounds of public money that is being funnelled to these companies under the auspices of green technologies. It’s basically taking public money, putting it in private hands and the taxpayer is paying for it.”

Robinson said that these public-private partnerships (PPPs) “are a mafia game”. PPPs are defined by the government as long-term contracts where the private sector designs, builds, finances and operates an infrastructure project.

But to Robinson, PPPs “just mean cartel, where the great and the good agree with their mates in the business community who gets a nice big fat contract, how long you get them for and how much public money you can funnel into their pockets…

“It’s the public purse that suffers because the councils are committed under their agreed ecological and climate emergency plans to mitigate their production of waste, but that’s a business opportunity as far as the people who are in Avonmouth are concerned, hence why we have got 110,000 tonnes coming up from London boroughs and we’ve got 80,000 tonnes coming out of Welsh boroughs, and none of it is included in our clean air plan.”

The explosion on Thursday happened in a silo – photo: Ellie Pipe

Robinson thinks that even after the tragic events of Thursday, nothing will seriously change in Avonmouth “because there isn’t the political will there to make it happen”.

“We are expendable. People in Avonmouth and north Bristol are expendable as far as our political leaders are concerned.”

One aspect of much of the media reporting about last week’s explosion on Kings Weston Lane was that it happened in Avonmouth, ‘near Bristol’, and for Robinson, that is emblematic of Avonmouth being mostly forgotten, out-of-sight out-of-mind.

“People don’t get down here unless you’ve got business in Avonmouth. You either work there or you live there. You won’t get people coming out of the cosseted boroughs into Avonmouth, and therefore they don’t see the scale of things, and therefore it’s just a warehouse fire as far as they’re concerned, or it’s just a fire here or a bad accident.

“I can guarantee you that it will be pitched that the people who died (on Thursday) were the people that caused the problem… and I don’t think it was, certainly not from the reports that I’ve heard. I believe they were told to get up and do the job that they had to do, and there were corners cut around health and safety.

“Because industrial plants don’t just explode. They explode because somebody either did something they shouldn’t have done, or didn’t do something they should have done.”

Wessex Water have been contacted to ask if health and safety procedures were being followed at the GENeco site on Kings Weston Lane. Main photo of Ian Robinson by Martin Booth

Read more: Lockdown 2.0 Diaries: BS11 – Avonmouth, Kingsweston and Shirehampton