Complete and Utter Zebu

Do you ever feel you aren’t being told the whole truth by government and civil servants? That was the feeling of residents opposing a wind farm application in Devon. They had heard so many stories about the nightmares suffered by those living near wind farms that they found fishy the permitted noise levels set out in a 2006 report.

This study, carried out by consultants Hayes McKenzie Partnership into three existing wind farms, apparently saw nothing wrong with government guidelines of 43 decibels, originally set in 1997. It was commissioned by the Department for Trade and Industry, now the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Yet Jane David, who lived half a mile from the Deeping St. Nicholas wind farm in Lincolnshire has had to leave her home because of the incessant beating noise, particularly bad at night:

“This is our fourth Christmas out of our own home. We couldn’t sleep. It is torture…On a bad night it’s like three or four helicopters circling around.”

The Devon objectors asked to see the earlier drafts of the HMP report. Civil servants refused, claiming it was not in the public interest. The Information Commissioner disagreed. Releasing the drafts, the campaigners discovered that the consultants had found the actual noise from wind farms to be far higher than anticipated in the earlier guidelines. They recommended that the maximum sound level at night should be not 43 decibels, but 38, reducing to just 33 if the turbine blades made a helicopter-like beating noise, as the noise can penetrate walls. Decibels being measured on a logarithmic scale, their recommendation was for just a tenth of the current permitted noise.

It appears that the warning about noise levels was somehow mysteriously removed from the final report, on which all subsequent wind farm planning applications have depended.

Again and again, reports that produce inconvenient results are censored or suppressed. One of the most egregious examples in Complete and Utter Zebu related to the objections the public raised to refuse collections going fortnightly, believing it would lead to an increased rodent problem. Nonsense, said Ben Bradshaw, Minister for State at DEFRA: “There is no evidence in published studies to indicate a causal link between an increase in flies or rodents as a result of alternate week collection.”

Technically, he was right. But only because they did not publish the government study that had looked into it. It had found that stopping weekly collections would “significantly alter the pest infestation rates and hence the disease transmission at source” and an increase in “pest species being encouraged into the home.” They didn’t publish it and so fortnightly bin collections spread throughout the land.