Some of these requests are truly pathetic, and it makes one really angry to read of the wicked assaults that the Government and local councils are attempting to perpetrate on local communities across the country.

Rather than reply to every request individually, I have tried to summarize below what we have learned and the advice that we would pass on to other campaigners.  

Buy this book

There is an excellent book “How to Stop and Influence Planning Permission” by Roy Speer and Michael Dade, published by Stonepound Books. 

The easiest way to get hold of a copy is to phone the publisher on 01273 842155. I recommend that anyone fighting any sort of planning or environmental campaign should get hold of a copy of this book and read it carefully. 

The authors are also available for hire as planning consultants. You might consider hiring them as advisers to help you prepare and present your case – if their book is anything to go by they would do an excellent job.

Seven key things

I think the key things that helped in our campaign were:

· Getting the right strategy and tactics
· Hard work
· Establishing a broad base of support
· Employing high-calibre professionals
· Effective fund-raising
- Getting the press on your side
- Using the Internet

Getting the right strategy and tactics

If you want to win a battle, first choose your battleground. 

The main reason that many people object to incinerators is because they are worried about the possible health effects of having an incinerator near them. Yet, banging on about the health problems would have been a bad strategy for us – bad because it wouldn’t have helped us to win. 

All incinerators have to be built within the latest strict environmental guidelines and the plans have to be signed off as safe by the Environment Agency. You may not agree with this (we don’t agree with it either), but the fact is it makes the health argument a poor battleground to fight on. 

In your campaign, you need to identify not the points that personally get you excited, but the tactics that will actually win.

Hard work

If you are fighting a big campaign, there will be lots of documents. Someone needs to actually read them and analyze them in detail. 

You will find plenty of flaws and weaknesses in your opponents proposals. But you probably won’t find them by reading press releases or newspaper articles. 

Get hold of copies of actual source documents and go through them line by line. 

If there are maps, walk them on the ground. If there are “facts” in the documents, check them (the authorities said there were x lorries per hour on a certain road; we carried out our own traffic survey). 

Even if you employ professionals, don’t rely on them to do this sort of thing for you. They don’t know the local conditions like you do

Establishing a broad base of support

You will probably find that the vast majority of the hard work is done by a core of 6 – 12 people. 

But you don’t want to get to a Public Inquiry and find the opposing barrister making a fool of you by proving that Bogcaster Against Nuclear Dumping is just a group of less than a dozen people. 

You need to be able to prove that you actually represent 10,000 people, or whatever.

Employing high-calibre professionals

If you are fighting a big campaign, then your opponents, the council or big business or whatever, will be employing professionals. In this case you probably need professionals who are as good or better. 

One of the success points in our campaign was employing Tom Hill, barrister, to represent us at the Public Inquiry. Without Tom’s presentation of our case, many people doubt that we would have won. We later found out that the council, our opponents, tried to employ him, but we got him first. 

Not everyone calling themselves a planning consultant is actually any good. I would ask two questions: have they fought – and won – a similar case to yours?; and, if they say yes, do you believe then: do they come across as fighters? 

The best consultants not only know their stuff but they have a winning attitude. Interview them and don’t be afraid to reject them if you don’t feel they are going to be a big help. 

It might be worth contacting the authors of the book mentioned above, Roy Speer and Michael Dade. They can be contacted on 01273 843737 or 01825 890870. Judging from their book, they could be pretty useful people to have on your professional team.

Effective fund-raising

If you are going to employ professionals, you will need to raise money. We raised and spent about £40,000 during our campaign (which lasted over 5 years). 

One of the most successful fund-raising events for us was a £25-a-head black tie dinner, with a professionally run auction at the end (when everyone had had plenty to drink). 

The auction had really good prizes, all donated, and having a proper auctioneer, who really succeeded in getting the tables to compete with each other, was a huge help too. 

In this way it is possible to raise several thousand pounds in a single evening (get local businesses to sponsor the food and venue). 

This kind of thing can be perceived as elitist, so probably needs to be balanced by other less expensive forms of fund-raising. 

Getting the press on your side

Get to know the reporters on all your local newspapers.  Meet them, explain your cause, and spoon-feed them with interesting information whenever possible.  Be your own spin-doctor.  Letters to the local papers, too, can help to build momentum for the campaign.  

Using the internet

This really covers 3 distinct areas.

- building a web site to put your case and act as a focus of support

- sending out an email newsletter to your supporters

- using the Internet as a research tool to get facts in support of your case.

When you have built a web site you feel like you have finished, but actually you have only started. It’s not so much like writing a book as like publishing a magazine. 

In other words, you need to keep on investing time updating it, adding new material, and removing obsolete stuff. It’s probably not a good idea to be over-ambitious to start with, as you will then get overwhelmed by the task of updating it later. 

I would suggest a simple web log format would be a good start, ie a diary format where you just add new stuff at the beginning. It would be a good idea if you can get someone who knows how to build a web site to be on your “core team.” Web addresses (domains) and the computer space to host them can be obtained for next to nothing these days.

Email is an excellent way of keeping in touch with your supporters. Put the list in the bcc box rather than the cc box, so that the recipients can’t see each others’ email addresses (this respects their privacy). 

Bear in mind that your web site and email communications will probably be viewed by your opponents as well as your supporters.

The Internet is not only a powerful tool for putting out information, of course, it's also an incredibly powerful research tool.  There is masses of stuff on there: all the minutes of local council meetings, Acts of Parliament, Government policies, information from other campaigns such as this one, newspaper archives, scientific research papers and so on.  If you haven't got someone spending a fair bit of time on the Internet doing research, then you probably aren't maximizing your campaign's effectiveness.  

Reflections

We won a battle, but we have certainly not won the war, We may indeed have made very little contribution to winning the overall war against the government’s policy of incineration, let alone any wider environmental objectives. 

In other words, our objective was to stop the building of an incinerator in Mountfield, and in that objective we have succeeded (for the time being). 

But we did it, essentially, by saying “Mountfield is the wrong place for an incinerator”, rather than saying “building incinerators is the wrong thing to do.” 

The reasons are obvious: by focusing on the location argument, we created a fight we could win. Had we put forward a more principled argument, we would probably have lost. 

But the limitations of this approach are obvious. In particular it exposes us to accusations of Nimbyism. 

The best way to refute such accusations, in my opinion, is to point out that if we all looked after our own backyards, the world would probably be a better place. 

Nevertheless, this still leaves one with a feeling of regret that we were not able to make a bigger contribution to the wider environmental issues. The best that can probably be said is that by ensuring that the council gets a hard time when they propose an incinerator, councils here and elsewhere will be a little bit more wary of proposing incineration in the future.  

Put something back

One way of assuaging one's conscience about the wider environmental issues is to join the following organizations:

Friends of the Earth
Greenpeace
Campaign to Protect of Rural England

They are all excellent organizations.  Join them all.  Do it now, Apart from anything else, they may help with your campaign.

And finally...it's all rubbish

It is most instructive to spend 10 or 15 minutes morning standing and watching the folk at the Household Waste Dump on a Saturday morning.  

People love getting rid of their rubbish.  You can see the looks of relief on their faces as they heave their load into the skip.  

All those lovely shiny new toys, which looked so lovely in the shop, or in the TV advert.  After a year or two, here they are: broken, scratched, rusty, obsolete.  

It's not about recycling (although that is a good thing).  

It's not about reducing packaging (although packaging certainly should be reduced).  

What it's really about is this: do we need all this  STUFF in the first place?  

As long as we measure economic progress in terms of material goods we will continue to produce more and more stuff, just to keep the economy going, and nearly all of it is rubbish.  

If you don't believe it, go down to the Household Waste dump and watch once-precious possessions  being turned into rubbish before your very eyes. 

Andrew Wedmore, 3 Feb 2005