In one corner of the room sat Nicky Wilson – a powerful advocate of what was once a powerful industry in Scotland. As President of the National Union of Mineworkers Scotland he is making an impassioned case for the few hundred remaining jobs in the industry – now exclusively opencast.
Nicky sat alongside representatives of companies, landowners, government, parliament, regulators, training bodies and more at the Coal Taskforce in the grand surroundings of Dumfries House to seek a way forward for the sector following its collapse earlier this year.
Driven by low world coal prices as a result of increased extraction of gas by fracking in the US two major players in the sector failed with sites across Scotland and the UK left derelict.
Just four years ago I sat in a modest hall in Saline, near Dunfermline, alongside residents of Kinneddar Park, Cowastrandburn and representatives of UK Coal. The residents were extremely anxious about the proposal to extract coal from the Blair House site within yards of their homes.
Repeatedly we were assured that lessons from mistakes of the opencast past would never reoccur. Despite this residents were suspicious – and it turns out they were right.
Now Blair House is derelict and the administrators now wish to disclaim or dump the site for others to deal with. The industry wants to cherry pick the good sites and leave the residents and the communities to pick up the tab for the rest. There is serious concern that the insurance bonds will be insufficient to restore this and other sites across the country. There is a danger the communities affected will be left environmentally bankrupt with polluted water and barren land.
On the one hand there is pressure to quickly revive the sector and on the other the pressure to restore the sites and ensure communities are spared this injustice in future. The two issues are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are jobs in restoration and it still can be profitable to extract coal but here is the cautionary note: in our desire to resurrect the industry we must not simply rebuild the shaky foundations for future failures.
That is why I am suspicious of a proposal to encourage companies and planning authorities to opt for a pay-as-you-extract scheme to replace financial restoration bonds or insurance. Although it may work in some circumstances it poses a risk and shifts the balance of that risk away from companies and onto others. It also depends on planning authorities forecasting the future success of the sector at a time when it is at best uncertain and at worst precarious.
With their new planning guidance published later this year I have urged the government to pursue this with caution. I am not sure they want to listen.
The SNP’s energy minister Fergus Ewing is not listening to reasonable requests for a public inquiry into the events that led to the failure of the coal sector. This is a surprise as at that meeting in Dumfries House, East Ayrshire Council announced they were conducting an independent review of their planning process relating to opencast coal.
They effectively contradicted Mr Ewing’s claim that an inquiry would be a “distraction” and believed a backward look would inform their work going forward. And in Fife, SNP Councillors have demanded a local inquiry into coal restoration bonds. They clearly don’t believe such an inquiry would be a “distraction”.
Mr Ewing seems increasingly isolated in his refusal to order an inquiry but I am ever hopeful that he will recognise the need to learn the lessons of the past in order to create a sustainable future.
For the sake of Nicky Wilson’s members and communities like Kinneddar Park we need to tread carefully and plan a future that can endure both environmentally and financially.