A council leader has vowed to raise the handling of Walleys Quarry issues with the Prime Minister following a recent surge in complaints about foul odours.

Simon Tagg is continuing to call for a public enquiry after it emerged hydrogen sulphide emissions had been under-recorded around the Silverdale landfill site.

On Tuesday (December 5) Councillor Tagg said that he planned to write to Rishi Sunak about the issues. The Government has previously rejected calls for a public enquiry into the Environment Agency's handling of the situation.

At Tuesday's Newcastle Borough Council cabinet meeting members also heard that the number of odour complaints sent to the authority had surged last in recent weeks. Councillors said they had even tasted the foul stench in the air.

Councillor Simon Tagg is calling for a public enquiry into Walleys Quarry (Image supplied).

The council's chief executive Martin Hamilton said: "There has been a marked increase in complaints in November. The complaint levels we received – 194 – is round about double the level we saw in October and is higher than in November last year.

"That is borne out by the information from the monitoring stations, where we've seen the percentage of the time the hydrogen sulphide has been above the World Health Organisation annoyance threshold is just over 14% at MMF9 between the 20th and 26th November. In the winter time – and in particular when it's cold and still – those are the times when we get the least dispersion of the gases coming off the site and therefore the most prevalence of odours in the community and complaints.

"We have been responding to that by more deployment of officers out into the community to try and witness the odours. For us to take action, while the complaint information and data from monitoring stations is useful, there is nothing quite as impactful as being able to directly witness this by qualified officers who have the requisite training and assessments for nasal acuity.

"We have had officers doing out of hours assessments during the times we've had particular spikes of complaints and continue to have. We have colleagues out tonight and again in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

"We're also sharing complaint data in as close to real time as we can with Walleys Quarry. We have a meeting scheduled for Friday.

"We'll be discussing previous spikes we've seen, but particularly the November experience, with the leadership team at Walleys so that we can understand more about what's happened on site. They have indicated that they're doing their own assessment of what's happening at the moment and they'll feed that back to us once it's completed."

It recently emerged that hydrogen sulphide emissions had been under-recorded at the Silverdale landfill site (LDRS).

Councillor Andrew Fear said: "These are disappointing figures. I cycle to work and I come down Keele Bank pretty much every day – I came down this morning at about half past 10.

"Towards the roundabout on Keele Bank, not only are you smelling this but as a cyclist I'm afraid you are tasting it. It really isn't very pleasant."

Councillor Tagg said: "It's great that we're responding to the rise in complaints by going out and doing some of our own staff odour monitoring in traditional style through the nose. It's a good way to gauge it and I think a lot of people who haven't had the issues with odours recently are now experiencing it again.

"You could put that down to the weather at this time of year but I think we are talking around two miles plus around now, which we haven't seen for a number of years. People in areas such as Westbury Park, Seabridge, down into Knutton and other areas are experiencing this pretty hard at the moment.

"At our full meeting a week or two ago, the council asked me to put a letter together and write to the new Secretary of State relating to some of the issues relating to the EA. As we know they recently announced monitoring equipment hadn't been calibrated right and we're still awaiting an update on any recalibration.

"I will write that letter and I think I will also write to the Prime Minister and escalate it up to him. I feel we have been let down by the ministers as well, who have let this borough down on their response to this."

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