Councillor Allan Andrews, Coventry Conservative Spokesman for City Services, has criticised the decision to postpone the July meeting when Councillors were to discuss Project Transform and called it a “cynical move.”

Project Transform is a partnership between Coventry City Council, Warwickshire County Council and Solihull MBC to examine options for the future of waste disposal, with an estimated cost of over £1bn. Plans for a new super incinerator at Whitley are due to be submitted in the autumn, but the postponed meeting will further delay specific details for public consultation being made available.

Commenting on the uncertainty, Councillor Allan Andrews said: "I am very disappointed that the next meeting for Councillors has been cancelled. It strikes me as being a cynical move to further delay announcing plans for public consultation. We were told early in June that the planning application had been withdrawn, when in fact it had only been postponed until the autumn. Now the July meeting has been cancelled it seems to me that they are doing everything they can to avoid letting us know what their plans are.”

Cllr Allan Andrews, Coventry Conservative Spokesman for City Services, has spoken of his disappointment and surprise that the Labour Group failed to send any representation to a vital meeting on the future of Project Transform, despite holding two of Coventry’s 3 seats on the Member Panel and making a number of public statements on this issue.

Project Transform is a partnership between Coventry City Council, Warwickshire County Council and Solihull MBC to examine options for the future of waste disposal. The Member Advisory Panel is made up of 3 elected members from each Authority. Coventry’s representation is Cllr Lindsley Harvard (Labour), Cllr Tony Skipper (Labour) and Cllr Allan Andrews (Conservative). Only Cllr Andrews attended the meeting held in Solihull today.

Cllr Kevin Foster, Deputy Leader of Coventry Conservatives, has today (Sunday 23rd May 2010) written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne MP, calling on him to scrap the previous Governments offer of £129m of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Credits for Project Transform.
 
Project Transform is a partnership between Coventry City Council, Warwickshire County Council and Solihull MBC to examine options for the future of waste disposal. The offer of PFI funding had been made by the previous Government and is based on providing a new facility to replace the Waste to Energy Plant in Whitley in 2015.