Firm seeks five-year extension for mining-related activity at mine that shut in 2023
Martin Shipton
A company owned by a controversial businessman has applied for a five-year extension to planning consent to engage in activities related to coal mining – even though permission for mining itself ran out more than three years ago.
Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd has asked Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council to allow it to continue to use what it describes as “Cwmbargoed Disposal Point for the duration of related operations at the Ffos y Fran Land Reclamation Scheme [in fact an opencast mine] and the provision of additional facilities (mineral processing and preparation plant, coal washing plant, coal haulage vehicle workshop, water storage tank, information and advertisement hoardings, coal stacking and preparation facilities and other ancillary works).”
At the same time the company is applying for permission to go ahead with a scaled-down reclamation plan that a campaigning organisation believes could let it off the hook for mediation costs totalling around £100m.
In 2024 the Senedd’s Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure Committee published a report that described the “epic mismanagement” of the Ffos-y-Fran mine at Merthyr Tydfil, saying nothing similar must be allowed to happen in any community in Wales.
The licence to extract coal from Ffos-y-Fran expired in September 2022 but local residents reported that the mine was still operating – illegally – many months after this before the site was closed in November 2023.
When it first opened, the company running the mine, Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd, pledged to fully restore the site after it finished operations.
The committee heard evidence that since 2017, the company has paid out nearly £50m in dividends and royalties out of the business.
But with current restoration costs estimated at between £50m to £120m, and despite the original restoration promises, the company has since claimed that it was unable to afford this.
There are therefore concerns that the company will seek to evade its financial responsibilities and the cost of restoring the land will fall on the public sector.
Conviction
Earlier this year Nation.Cymru revealed how David Lewis, the sole director of Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd, had a conviction for defrauding a bank of £88,000 to fund his gambling addiction and how recently he had assaulted an elderly solicitor outside his Newport office.
The Coal Action Network (CAN), an organisation that campaigns against harm to the environment and communities caused by extractive industries, has called for the scaled-down reclamation scheme to be rejected.
A briefing document produced by CAN states: “If Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council approves Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd’s new application, the 58,000 residents of Merthyr Tydfil will lose nearly £100m in restoration works promised to them, and allow that to be siphoned into windfall profits for a private company that would leave behind three more coal tips to blight South Wales’ landscape, burden the tax payer, and drive fear into the communities living close by.”
Referring to windfall profits made by the company, the briefing document states: “Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd’s most recent, publicly available, financial report states: “During the year the directors again reassessed the restoration provision based on current operating costs in particular diesel prices which have decreased significantly and increased plant hire costs, which as a result increased the restoration provision by £0.2m to £91.2m”, by December 31 2023, indicating record profits the year before.
Budgeted
Its ultimate parent company, Gwent Holdings Ltd, whose two directors are David Lewis’s wife Jayne and brother Andrew, reported “The average coal price achieved increased by 94% to £151.66 per tonne” in its 2022 filing. For the complete avoidance of doubt that Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd fully budgeted to fund the agreed restoration, its 2022 financial report states: “The total costs of reinstatement of soil excavation and of surface restoration are recognised as a provision at site commissioning when the obligation arises. The amount provided represents the present value of the expected costs.”
The briefing document states: “The funding for Ffos-y-fran’s restoration was based on the sales of coal up until the end of its planning permission in September 2022 – but Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd continued illegally mining and selling coal for over a year after that, even outside its licensed area, profiting from an extra 640,000 tonnes of coal. It is therefore, even less credible that the company is unable to fund the standard of restoration it agreed to deliver.
“In the face of all this, and with no evidence made public, Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd’s representative claims: ‘It was established that there are insufficient funds available to achieve the 2015 restoration strategy and therefore an alternative scheme is required.’
“In an attempt to greenwash the new application to evade the cost of returning the coal tips to fill in the mining void, the company points to the emissions saved by earth-moving HGVs burning diesel. However, the emissions spared by leaving behind three colossal coal tips overshadowing 58,000 people would amount to just 2% of the illegal coal mining Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd did over 15 months after its planning permission expired. If the void is filled in with the coal tips, as per the agreed restoration plan, it would also provide a greater carbon sink cancelling out the CO2 of these earthworks even more.”
Downgrade
The briefing document concludes: “The new downgrade proposes to permanently leave huge health and safety hazards in a landscape that is in easy walking distance from the population of Merthyr Tydfil, even encouraging the public into this area.
“There are tangible risks to life and limb from a very deep flooded void, to a sheer cliff edge and massive coal tips, one of which has already suffered a large slip.”
It is not clear why the company is seeking a five-year extension to its coal mining-related activities. Mr Lewis does not respond to our invitations to comment.
A decision on whether or not to grant the extension will be taken at officer level, according to a note on Merthyr council’s planning portal.
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This is dreadful news for Merthyr, especially the people who live there, including myself.
Why are only the officers of the council involved and not the councillors,who are supposed to represent the people f Merthyr?????
This “‘Dubious person “” is well known to care little for the people of Merthyr , who will again have to suffer coal dust, black wall and further chest ailments.
This is a toxic subject in many ways.
A call to the people of Merthyr give their councillors, and the decision makers i.e. head of planning a very hard time.
KD
The Officers should not be allowed to approve any more coal mining in the area. If we have a Government declared Climate Emergency surely one of its powers must be to ban any such proposals. So lets hear it from the Senedd!
Doesn’t work that way. Coal isn’t always used for burning.
There is legislation however… Environment (Wales) Act 2016, (net zero by 2050), and the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (sustainability by design).
Yet neither of these permit the arbitrary shutting down of coal mining. The Climate Emergency declaration is just that, a declaration, it doesn’t actually have any powers. It’s quite possible for coal mining to be in line with net zero by 2050 and even beyond.
This has been kicked back and forth between MTCBC and WG, with MCC officers massively under-resourced and WG seeking to avoid blame for mismanagement. The Climate Committee report lays out the egregious exploitation of this in its report. If WG fails to step in again, that should cause outrage. The company history relating to Ffos-y-Fran should also be cause for concern. Frequent changes of company name, dissolution and reformation, changes to persons with controlling interest, are all recorded in Companies House records. This may well be completely innocent, but it begs the question as to why they might go to… Read more »
“The legacy of mining in South Wales is a massive financial and environmental burden for the current generation” . South Wales was built on coal mining, it accounted for 70% of employment and associated employment for more than 100yrs. Now South Wales is a low wage economy full of food banks and dying valleys because industry is viewed as contrary to the WG view that the world is going to catch fire, in fact the largest threat to the world is overpopulation and the CO2 emitted every time 8 billion people breathe out.
Whilst I would agree that world over population is the second largest threat after Climate break down I think that your view of the WG is somewhat jaundiced. They are positive towards industry and I suspect would like more of it in Cymru. However, mining and burning coal is not the sort of industry that Cymru needs. We have the people with plenty of skills who could be employed making stuff. What seems to be lacking is the funding to set up businesses that can make stuff that we are currently importing from China. The WG is not rally funded… Read more »
If we weren’t polluting in other ways, say via internal combustion engines (which have frankly revolutionized the world into all the mod cons we live with today) or cutting down vast swathes of forests to feed animal farming… humanity could frankly be sustainable at least for as much as 20bn. The problem is not the number of us, never has been, the problem has always been 1. Inequality and 2. Exploitation for Profit. The world produces enough food to feed everyone three times over. Malthusian theories have always been consistently proven to be wrong and they’ll remain wrong, because this… Read more »
It is time for that mine to be shut and restored as was promised. Stick a few wind turbines on it instead.