With the doom and gloom over Brexit there are one or two little rays of sunshine. The dry mild weather has allowed work to begin in our clients’ quarries and housing developments around the north of England. The weather has been kind to excavation and quarrying for building stone, as no frost means stone can be stored near the saws without being damaged by below zero temperatures. Consequently we have been assisting our quarry clients with planning for 2019 production and reserves for the 2020’s.
Building stone quarries
We are pleased that four planning permissions for quarries have been granted over the past three months for aggregate and building stone.
Currently we are working on another 3 planning applications for building stone quarries which hopefully should be granted by May.
Housing schemes, investigations, and land assessments
We have also been advising clients on housing schemes and have recently completed two coal mine investigations and contaminated land assessments. Thankfully there are no shallow mining problems as the seams are intact and no contamination, so the housing developments can proceed.
One of the sites we have been project managing the remediation of has been completed by filling with good engineered fill and the foundations have now been laid.
Fireclay reserves
We have been auditing our files for coal and fireclay reserves and are currently working on bringing a clay quarry back into production to supply fireclay over the next 10 years.
Clay for flood defences and capping
We have a number of sites with suitable clay for flood defence work and capping contaminated sites, so if anyone needs up to 30,000 tonnes of good quality clay please contact us.
Relaunching Fennell Green & Bates
Finally, we are relaunching our Chartered Surveyors business, Fennell Green & Bates, to advise clients on land ownership, estate management, mineral and waste surveying, valuation and working agreements, due to an identified workload of advice required in surveying matters.
Fennells also carry out building surveys, project management, topographical surveys, drone surveys and negotiations for acquiring an interest in land.