A collection of more than 80 reports and emails linked to the Scottish Borders Council waste management contract disaster have been released under Freedom of Information rules despite the local authority's best efforts to keep the documents from public view.
The latest disclosures, made after a ruling by acting Scottish Information Commissioner Margaret Keyse, provide strong evidence that the £80 million deal with contractors New Earth Solutions should have been ditched long before SBC dumped the firm in February 2015.
Details have emerged in this collection of files that NES notified the council in November 2013 of a two-year delay in the proposed construction of a £21 million facility at Easter Langlee, Galashiels, to treat and convert the region's household refuse into electricity.
A catalogue of hitches and hold-ups involving misfiring technology being developed for the Easter Langlee project in the south of England, and a list of excuses over the non-appearance of cash to bankroll the job from offshore funders have been laid bare.
Not Just Sheep & Rugby will be attempting to sort through the confidential files and publish relevant tracts in a series of articles over the coming days and weeks. It may help readers to better understand how a local authority managed to squander at least £2.4 million of other people's money pursuing an impossible dream of becoming Scotland's best at waste disposal and ending up close to the bottom of the rubbish recycling league.
Meanwhile council taxpayers across the Borders have yet to be told how landfill deadlines and other policies introduced by the Scottish Government to dramatically increase recycling targets can be implemented locally in the absence of a local strategy. The only decision taken by councillors since the failure of their New Earth venture has been to withdraw collections of garden refuse - hardly a vote winner or an aide to recycling.
Top brass at the council together with a clutch of expensive consultants commissioned in a bid to solve a waste treatment crisis were warning seven years ago that to 'do nothing' was not an option. But that is precisely what has happened up to now as the date for ending landfill looms ever larger.
Those who have kept up to speed with our revelations over the past two years will know that members of SBC were persuaded to radically vary the council's contract with New Earth in October 2012.
The so-called Deed of Variation (DoV) allowed for the inclusion of advanced thermal treatment (ATT) at Easter Langlee even though the so-called NEAT system of incineration had not been trialled and tested. The gamble would prove to be financially disastrous as the technology remained flawed while no-one was prepared to put up the money to install it in the Borders.
It is our intention to examine the new batch of evidence in chronological order, beginning in December 2012 - the month when the DoV between SBC and NES officials was signed.
According to a monthly report from NES in December 2012 there were issues with the fledgling technology system being developed at the company's research and development centre at Canford in the south of England.
That report states: "From the week commencing 12th November an endurance operation of 120 hours was planned. Unfortunately, when this operation started on Sunday 11th November it became apparent that there were technical issues that necessitated a shut-down of the plant.
"The plant was stripped down and investigations showed that where the plant had been shut-down on the previous run this had led to damage. Modifications to the plant were made to ensure that the syngas presented to the filter is at the correct temperature. This has caused a delay to the programme of approximately two weeks"
There were to be many similar negative results over the coming two years, as the files released last week show. In subsequent articles we will also demonstrate how different financiers for the multi-million pound Easter Langlee facility were being touted by New Earth on a month by month basis.
Potential bankers included The Co-op Bank, the Green Investment Bank, the Isle of Man based Premier New Earth Recycling & Renewables [Infrastructure] Fund (NERR), a New York fund and several other finance houses.
But there is not a shred of evidence that any of these parties, some of which had "shown great interest in the Scottish Borders project", according to the contractors, ever had any intention of bankrolling the Galashiels treatment centre.
In the wake of the catastrophe New Earth Solutions sank without trace, burdened by over £150 million worth of debt while NERR - the "funder of last resort" - is in the hands of liquidators. So far as the Easter Langlee contract is concerned the council looks pretty bankrupt too!
Little wonder those responsible for the fiasco at SBC repeatedly played the "commercially confidential" card in a bid to hide the evidence. Thankfully the country's information commissioner accepted there was widespread public interest in having the facts made public.
COMING NEXT: JUST SOME OF THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF 2013
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