The demolition wrecking ball was taken to Mepal Outdoor Centre last month by East Cambs District Council even though their crematorium planning application has still not been approved. Both the Lead Local Flood Authority and the Waste & Minerals Planning Authority are currently objecting to the proposed development and the latest deadline of 17 December 2021 to determine the application has been missed.

The secret plans to abandon the reopening of Mepal Outdoor Centre and to instead build a money-making crematorium on the site were first leaked to the Ely Standard in July 2020. It was claimed that the council had been working on the plans in secret for at least six months, keeping opposition councillors and the public in the dark. It was subsequently revealed that work on the plans had begun a full 18 months earlier.

A special council meeting was held behind closed doors on Friday 31 July 2020 to discuss the proposals and late on that same Friday evening East Cambs District Council published a press release which began “An outline business plan to transform a currently unused brownfield site in Mepal into a cutting edge, ecological crematorium…”. This was the first public confirmation of the leaked reports to abandon the reopening of Mepal Outdoor Centre as a community leisure and recreation facility and to instead build a crematorium.

More information has slowly been revealed by the district council. It is now publicly known that over a quarter of a million pounds has been spent to date on preparing the planning application and on the demolition work. The council estimates it will need to spend a further £6.54 million to develop the crematorium, leading to a total cost not far short of £7 million. A public consultation was held early in 2021 but the results were not revealed by the council until August. They showed a massive 85.4% of the public opposed the plans, with just 13% expressing support.

The council originally said that the formal planning application would be submitted by the end of 2020 but it was delayed a number of times before finally being published on the council’s planning portal on Friday 13 August 2021. A decision was due to be made by 18 November but then, a couple of days before that deadline, an extension to 17 December was agreed, however that date has come and gone and no decision has been made.

One statutory consultee to the planning application, the Waste & Minerals Planning Authority, have stated that they object to the application “because the applicant has failed to demonstrate that the proposed development would comply with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Minerals and Waste Local Plan (2021) (the MWLP) Policy 5: Mineral Safeguarding Areas (MSAS) and Policy 16: Consultation Areas (CAS).”

Another statutory consultee, the Lead Local Flood Authority, stated in their most recent published correspondence, that they continue to object to the grant of planning permission and provided a list of five separate reasons covering issues such as surface water drainage, adoption and maintenance of the drainage system, overland flood flow routes and lack of evidence of consultation with the Environment Agency.

There is no guarantee that these objections can be adequately resolved and the council should not be assuming with certainty that it can gain approval for the crematorium plans. It is therefore shocking, as evidenced in the photo above, that it has gone ahead with the destruction of all of the existing outdoor centre facilities. This makes revisiting the option of using the site for recreation and leisure much more difficult. Does the district council have a ‘Plan B’ should the crematorium planning application fail?

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