Local people are studying the Examiner's report on Faringdon Neighbourhood Plan, published late yesterday, in which Andrew Ashcroft gives a green light to Faringdon Council's plan to turn Wicklesham Quarry SSSI into a 20 acre industrial warehousing site- a use that all independent assessments to date have found is neither needed nor sustainable. Our campaign, fought for the past two years, has attracted the attention and active support of prominent environmental lawyers and former Chair of the UK Sustainability Commission, Jonathon Porritt. We are currently looking at our options to continue our fight to PROTECT WICKLESHAM QUARRY FROM DEVELOPMENT. We believe that this is an important test case for: - * the protection of a nationally designated site with a "unique" fossil record; * Local Plan policies for landscape, biodiversity and the Corallian Ridge; * local and national planning principles for the environmental restoration of mineral workings, through the application of planning conditions. If the owners of Wicklesham Quarry, "one of Britain's richest palaeontological sites", are allowed to avoid their commitments to restore the site - as they have sought to do for eight years since quarrying finished- then no protected site is safe. The verdict of the Independent Examiner undermines the principle that 'county matters' are 'excluded development' for neighbourhood planning, and is set to turn the planning system into a tool for local influence. We would warn any local community facing proposals for quarrying to fight against them, since it now appears that the planning conditions landowners agree to are worthless, once quarrying is finished. Mineral working can only be seen as a back-door to industrializing the countryside, regardless of Local Plan policies or independent Employment Land Assessments. Once legal opinion on this report has been received, we shall update our supporters again. Thank you again for your support. This would be a great moment to boost the petition by sharing it with friends, neighbours, journalists, environmentalists and scientists, and help keep it in the news!