MAY I join the current fray on Nightingale Hall Farm which I summarise to be the burning issue - the ideal and the reality.

As a nearby resident as well as a councillor on the Environmental Health Committee can I firstly say that I am as passionate about relocating the plant as fellow suffering residents, which is the ideal solution. The reality of course is that we need sound legal reason to do so and when the operators recently applied to burn tallow we were advised there was absolutely no scientific reason or otherwise to refuse permission on this issue alone. There are others we are pursuing.

It dismays me that some members of the 'Fight the Furnace' Campaign have taken this as the council 'going soft' on Nightingale Farm. The result is an unnecessary division in our opposition which can only render the farm's position stronger - does it not.

As a curious parallel, I would doubt that a prototype petrol burning car with its emissions, known to affect out health (as smog-bound Parisians will tell you) would get an operating licence using the same stringent criteria but there again as car users we hesitate to form a 'fight the car campaign' as well.

Cllr Andrew Kay,

Windermere Road,

Lancaster.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.