As outlined on Friday, Ebbsfleet United Football Club are obviously disappointed with the Secretary of State’s decision to refuse planning permission for the Northfleet Harbourside development, on land surrounding our own stadium on Stonebridge Road.

Our initial reaction to specific points raised in that Report are as below. A separate statement regarding the ownership and funding of the club, which of course we understand our supporters will be eager and anxious to hear about, will follow either later tonight or tomorrow.

Having reviewed the report in full, we feel the weight of some points and arguments were given more focus than the weight of the many positive aspects of the proposal, together with the great need for regeneration of our local community. 

We are issuing this statement, however, with a profound sense of shock and anger on behalf of our players, staff, supporters and the wider Northfleet and Gravesham Borough community around one particular claim and argument against the development that was made on the record.

The Inspector’s Report states clearly, on the basis of the only detailed scientific evidence tested at the Inquiry, that this area sits among the most lead-contaminated environments in the country — with airborne lead concentrations found to be 10 to 19 times higher than those typically experienced in London and the South East. The Report is unambiguous: there is no safe level of lead exposure. It is a toxic, cumulative substance that damages the neurological, cardiovascular, renal and immune systems, with children and young people most vulnerable to irreversible harm. The World Health Organisation’s own guidance, cited directly in the Report, could not be clearer on this point.

What makes these findings so shocking is not simply the scale of the contamination, but how long it has gone unspoken. The Britannia Refined Metals lead refinery has operated at this site, immediately adjacent to our community, processing up to 160,000 tonnes of crude lead a year, for decades. Yet it took Britannia Refined Metals’ own opposition to a planning application nearby to their site, and their own evidence to a planning inquiry, for these findings to surface. And here they are in black and white, that residents, employees and families living and working in its shadow have been purportedly breathing and absorbing dangerous levels of lead this entire time — without ever being told.

We are left asking the obvious question: if this level of contamination is only now being acknowledged through a planning inquiry, what did the refinery’s operators know, and when? And why did successive layers of regulation and government — the very bodies charged with protecting public health — allow this to remain unspoken for so long? A regulatory permit that keeps a site “compliant” is not the same thing as a site that is safe, and the Inspector’s Report says so explicitly. Communities were entitled to that information years ago, not buried in the appendices of an unrelated planning process.

Ebbsfleet United exists to serve this community. Our stadium, our staff, and thousands of supporters who have walked through these streets for generations have done so without the risk now claimed  in this Report. That is not acceptable, and it should not have taken this long to come to light.

We are especially concerned that the area identified within the Report as being exposed to these adverse lead levels is not confined to a future scheme, but takes in people living here right now. Residents in and around Wallis Park, those in the homes immediately neighbouring our football club, residents in the apartment blocks on the opposite side of Stonebridge Road, and the 650 employees of businesses within the affected zone, all sit within the area identified in the evidence before the Inquiry. These are our neighbours, our fellow residents, and in many cases our own supporters — and none of them were ever told what the air around their homes contained.

We call on the Government, the Environment Agency and Britannia Refined Metals to:

• Publish full, historic air and soil lead monitoring data for the area without further delay;
• Commission an independent public health assessment of long-term exposure for existing residents, employees and workers in the vicinity — not only future occupants of proposed developments;
• Explain, transparently, why this information was not proactively disclosed to the community sooner;
• Set out immediate steps to protect those currently living and working in the affected area, not just safeguards for future housing schemes.

Our community deserves the truth, and it deserves it urgently. Ebbsfleet United will continue to press for full transparency and accountability on behalf of everyone who calls this area home.

— Ebbsfleet United Football Club