Former Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Jonathon Porritt,has objected to the latest application to delay the restoration of Wicklesham Quarry in Oxfordshire. Porritt, President of The Conservation Volunteers and a World Wide Fund for Nature Ambassador, who was awarded a CBE in 2000 for his work in environmental protection, reminds Oxfordshire County Council of the National Planning Policy Framework policies on the Sustainable Use of Minerals and states: “Timely restoration should reflect the importance, uniqueness and protected status of this site for both geodiversity and biodiversity.” Wicklesham Quarry is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for earth sciences. Natural England calls it “one of Britain’s richest palaeontological sites”. Fossil sponges found here are known to occur nowhere else, and ‘Faringdon fossils’ have been in museum collections from the 17th century. It is the only surviving exposure of the Faringdon Greensands geology, where millions of years ago, warm seas deposited an abundance of marine life that helped create the Corallian Ridge. Earth scientists, to whom Wicklesham Quarry is internationally famous, are calling for its restoration. Wicklesham is also one of Oxfordshire’s 36 Conservation Target Areas (CTAs), linked to the UK’s action plan under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Once restored, it is expected to regenerate into an outstanding site of biodiversity. “It would be ridiculous to go to the expense of restoring the site, only for it to be ripped up for employment building purposes.” Local supporters of the campaign to Protect Wicklesham Quarry from Development believe the applications to delay restoration since 2010 have an ulterior motive, which is to avoid restoration altogether in order to turn it into a logistics site. They point to Council Minutes of January 2014 where the above statement was made at a ‘Wicklesham Quarry Stakeholders Meeting’ not attended by members of the public. Since 2008 the Vale of White Horse District Council has rejected the landowner’s bid to include Wicklesham Quarry in the Local Plan as an industrial warehousing site. But Faringdon Town Council believes it is a “prime site for employment”, and has included the quarry in the Neighbourhood Plan for B2/B8 use. If passed, this could mean a passport through the planning system, in spite of its status and existing planning conditions. Jonathon Porritt has written to Oxfordshire County Council: “There is no justification for further delaying the restoration of this unique, protected site. The series of applications since 2010 to repeatedly delay or avoid restoration apparently seeks to serve the landowner’s bid, since 2008, to obtain planning permission for industrial use; if so this would constitute an abuse of process, even more serious in view of the overriding public and environmental interest in seeing this site restored.”