Blain’s Morning Porridge Oct 17^th 2025 – Hamble Quarry Decision Highlights Corporate Greed and Planning Failure

“Fight, Fight, Fight…”

Every day we are reminded of injustice in the UK – the fight of postmasters against the Post Office, or haemophiliacs against the medical indifference are just  the tip of an iceberg of a justice system loaded against the people. It’s only when it impacts directly do you realise just how lopsided UK planning has become. There is no social justice – just the jackboot of corporate greed being crushed into the face of humanity… forever.

Yesterday was a very bad day. My village is going to be sacrificed to make foreign investors rich. So much for a restful retirement…

I have written many times about the insanity of the Hamble Quarry – digging a dirty great hole right in the middle of a prosperous village to quarry gravel which nobody needs right next to homes, shops, schools and businesses. It was approved by the planning inspectorate yesterday. It’s a slap in the face for over 20,000 citizens in the area, who will see their home values impacted, and futures blighted. Already young people are leaving because they don’t want their kids trying to learn just meters away from a working quarry. The local economy will be decimated and the environment compromised.

Cemex, a Mexican firm specialising in Cement and Waste Management, has been given permission to quarry 1.7 million tonnes of gravel and sand from the very heart of the pretty seaside village of Hamble-le-Rice. Every single home in the village is within 500 meters of the site. The three schools are all in touching distance. Many homes will be blighted by massive berms put up to shield the quarry work. A schoolkid asked the planning inspector at the appeal: “You would not build a school next to a quarry, so why dig a quarry next to a school?” He never answered her.

Why?

The decision to allow a rich foreign company to turn the former WW2 airfield at the centre of Hamble into a quarry, and it becoming a landfill site is a classic tale of corporate greed vs the rights of people. Shareholders get rich, stakeholders see their lives destroyed. Corporate greed triumphs.

Home prices and the quality of life for Hamble residents will plummet – they will receive not a penny in compensation. Shareholders in UK homebuilder Persimmon (which owns the land) and Cemex will receive higher dividends. Their boards will pocket huge bonuses. These firms stand to make millions from the misery they will inflict on local residents.

No one denies the village will suffer massive disruption for the next 20-30 years. Cemex say the “inconvenience” will ensure there will be plenty of construction materials available to build up the local economy, but there is no regional or national shortage of gravel or sand. Instead, by digging the quarry the only thing that is certain is the local economy will be crushed! Cemex are proud the quarry will create a handful of low-skilled jobs.

The residents provided evidence, direct from the businesses involved, that the quarry will put the local £200mm marine-based economy employing thousands of highly skilled marine engineers, boatbuilders, sailmakers, and other professionals at serious risk as increased traffic congestion and dust falling on boats makes their careers untenable. Thousands more jobs in pubs and restaurants catering for the hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting the area, and the yachtsmen that moor on the river, will also be impacted. The largest local business, the UK’s biggest contact lens manufacturer, has stated it will have to transfer production from the village because of dust control issues the quarry will raise.

Cemex has won the appeal because its successfully exploited the sheer d**bf***ery of the UK’s unfit-for-purpose Planning System. Big firms like Persimmon and Cemex know exactly how it works, and how to make it work in their interest. That’s because Planning is chronically under-funded and is notionally a local matter. Planning departments are run by local authorities – which across the UK are functionally bankrupt. The vast majority of their limited cash is focused on statutory welfare provision, and anything left is sprinkled on the other mandatory functions.

You would think planning would be a priority to ensure the UK has enough homes, or functional transport – but no. It comes well down the list. Planning departments are staffed by extremely well trained and knowledgeable planning officers, but they are engaged the bureaucratic goal of arse covering to protect the council and their department.

Rather than take pragmatic decisions on the rights and wrongs of proposal, or spend time asking how plans could be improved to facilitate a stronger community, the Planning nomenklatura go through the motions of tick-boxing to minimise the risk councils are sued. It is about process not reason, fairness or economic benefit. The goal is dodge the costs of going to court to fight appeals or judicial reviews where rejected planning applications could cost the council millions they don’t have.

Which is exactly what happened in the case of Hampshire County Council (HCC). After the council rejected the initial application on the three grounds of flooding, highways and health, Cemex tweaked the pitchbook, made some minor changes, and announced these changes were carefully considered mitigants to the council’s concerns. Bish, bosh, job done – a few days before the appeal HCC changed their objection to approved. They didn’t bother to tell the democratically elected council, or the local MP.

“Phew, that could have got costly”, must have been the thought of the planning officer who signed off on the deal. She later said: “we could no longer resist the appeal because the evidence was showing the reasons for refusal has been addressed.” They didn’t tell the residents that either – they just left the locals to face down Cemex’s expensive legal team on their own at the appeal. A small village of amateurs fighting an expensively lawyered up multi-billion global corporate…. Bollchocks to the reasons for refusal being addressed.

Cemex and Persimmon gamed the appeal process. They knew the planning authority would likely cave, and the law was on their side because of obsolete rules about the provision of “strategic materials” (which includes sand and gravel for construction.) They also knew the appeal could only consider the reasons Hampshire objected: i) flood risk, ii) impact on the highway network and, iii) effects on air quality. Essentially, they knew anything else, including local home prices and the local economy, would be ultra-vires – outside the scope of the appeal.

Even if the villagers can raise the millions that will be required to fight a judicial review, that will only consider the decisions made and process, not the inputs to the decision that are considered accepted.

During the appeal the villagers demonstrated that much of the data being used to justify the quarry was bogus. In order to show how traffic on the only road in and out of Hamble was falling, they used data from a day the road was blocked! They fooled the inspector by citing particulate risks as minimal, deliberately ignoring the high base load caused by local marine traffic – which means Hamble’s air quality is already poor. Cemex’s data to the appeal took the baseline it was pristine. They used their bogus report to dismiss evidence of the extreme risk to schoolchildren from the UK’s leading expert on particulate health risks…

I could go on, but what’s the point.

The planning inspectors letter justifying the decision to allow the appeal is extremely detailed. He goes through each argument and dismisses them in the same weasel-word terms that planners use to cover their backsides, such as: “not compelling”, “insufficient evidence”, “some limited impact”, “unproven”, or “no conflict”. The letter is a classic of lots of words to cover-up a disgrace.

The appeal report was planning in a nutshell – biased. It was about the need to prove Cemex will do harm, rather than Cemex having to prove they won’t. The assumption throughout is the villagers are wrong. The planning inspector dismissed the air quality evidence, accepting earlier comments from HCC that it was “not significant”. Although silica-dust will be a recognised hazard for personel working in the quarry, it apparently isn’t for the children at the 3 schools within 100 meters of the site! (That’s from the report!)

During the appeal, Cemex told the inquiry there will be no risks of dust and contamination because of the weather patterns in Hamble. A local resident destroyed that notion – showing how Cemex used data from the inland Southampton airport, which is 10 miles away, inland and in a depression. He showed how the prevailing winds in Hamble are much stronger and very different, and are likely to blow pollution right over the village and moored yachts most days. It’s not mentioned in the appeal letter.

The real question is why do Cemex want to dig the quarry?

The usual reasons – Greed and Avarice. And to meet Hampshire’s need for landfill and waste treatment.

I’d raised the issue of Cemex’s promise to infill the quarry with “inert waste” at the inquiry. I said it would likely prove undeliverable – construction waste and demolition rubble are increasingly recycled into new building materials, and even cement is increasingly made from reclaimed waste. There was a time when waste operators would collect a significant gate fee to landfill construction waste, but now there is a market for such waste where the cost of a tonne of rubble is roughly the same as a tonne of quarried gravel.

I asked the inspector what possible economic justification there was for the quarry as it would run at a loss. Over the last 10-years we’ve seen the amount of construction waste being recycled raise from 0% to 40% and its increasing.

The appeal judgement said 1.8 million tonnes of inert waste will be needed to be imported into Hamble to backfill the quarry, and “there is no evidence to suggest the availability of inert material would be an issue ” Not according to my sources who are funding more construction recycling projects to invest in and finance.

I also pointed out the real value of the quarry is not what will be dug of it, but what will eventually be put back into it….

At present a tonne of gravel from the quarry will sell at £30 a tonne. It will cost around £20 a tonne to buy inert waste to back fill it. Essentially zero profit after costs. But, it was able to fill the site with “low-risk” domestic waste, it could earn £125 per tonne – ie nearly £200 million of profit! When you start dropping the really dirty waste like asbestos and discard batteries, the returns are £700 per tonne plus.

I asked the rhetorical question: Why would Cemex want to dig a quarry and fill it with inert waste that will make no profit? Because they will make hundreds of millions if it was redesignated a landfill waste. Cemex could make even more by building a processing and incinerator site on the airfield, solving a massive problem for Hampshire County Council faces getting rid of household wastes. These questions were inadmissable, pure speculation… I am going to keep asking them.

Whatever… the key for Cemex and Persimmon to make massive windfall profits is what they persuade HCC to let them put back into the quarry. And Hampshire’s high waste disposal costs means they will be motivated to let them…

Cemex has said it will be inert waste.. and that is what the planning inspectors accepts they will do. Of course I have no proof Cemex secretly intends to build a landfill dump or an incinerator, but waste management and waste-to-energy incinerators are the firm’s most profitable businesses. Seeking forgiveness later from the planning authority (which stands to benefit) by making Hamble Airfield a household waste landfill site looks inevitable.

I am currently writing a book, The Battle for Hamble Airfield, which will dig deeper into the sheer injustice of shareholders vs stakeholders in detail, the broken planning process and how to balance the needs of the economy vs the rights of the people…

Out of time and very, very angry today…

Bill Blain

CEO – Windshift Capital

Author – The Morning Porridge

Partner – Shard Capital