A DOCUMENT marked “strictly confidential” has revealed that elected members of Scottish Borders Council agreed to alter a multi-million pound waste management contract before a programme of technological trials had even begun.

That high-risk and ill-fated strategy is exposed in a 34-page report which was submitted to a private meeting of councillors in October, 2012.

At that meeting, the die was cast for an amended deal between the council and New Earth Solutions (NES) to create an advanced thermal treatment (ATT) plant at Easter Langlee in Galashiels.

It all ended in tears, however, and the entire £21m contract was scrapped in February, 2015, forcing the council to write-off the £2.4m it had spent on the abortive procurement process.

Since then, the council has resisted Freedom of Information attempts by retired local journalist Bill Chisholm to provide key documents which would cast light on the costly fiasco.

SBC’s position was that publication of the requested paperwork could cause NES “commercial and reputational damage” even after the firm became insolvent last year.

But this was dramatically overruled in April by Scottish Information Commissioner Rosemary Agnew who ordered disclosure to Mr Chisholm.

The saga goes back to April, 2011, when SBC contracted NES to deliver a conventional mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plant at Easter Langlee, capable of dealing with 40,000 tonnes of household rubbish each year.

However, according to the newly-released report, just nine months later NES indicated that an MBT facility without the incineration-based ATT element, which would convert gas from waste into electricity, could no longer get bank funding.

The terms of the deal thus required to be altered so that a fully integrated MBT/ATT solution would be “delivered from day one”.

In the October, 2012 report recommending that the original contract be amended in those terms via a Deed of Variation, SBC’s director of environment and infrastructure Rob Dickson told councillors: “The viability of the project for NES now hinges on the successful delivery of an ATT technology that can create electricity from gas.
“NES have developed the technology…at their research and development site in Canford, Dorset.”
The report goes on to claim that this major step in technology development had allowed NES to invest tens of millions of pounds in their first commercial energy-from-waste site at Avonmouth, Bristol.

“This [Avonmouth] facility is different from the one proposed at Easter Langlee as it utilises the heat from gas generation to create steam which in turn is used to create electricity,” stated the report.

“The development of the gas-generated electricity has one final process to resolve by creating an effective gas clean-up solution to generate a consistent gas feed…this process has been designed and is under fabrication at the moment with operational trials programmed for late November 2012.”

Mr Chisholm, who received the document last week, was incredulous.

“It beggars belief that councillors were asked to seal this deal when the technology was not due to be trialled until the following month,” he told the Border Telegraph.

“As it turned out, the brand of technology recommended by council officials and approved by elected members was still not fit for purpose in February, 2015 when the Easter Langlee project was abandoned on ‘technological and financial grounds’ and £2.4m of public money was written off.”