SMART was originally set up in November 2013 in order to fight the Wind Ventures proposal for 5 wind turbines of 130m height to be built on the Great Dalby airfield and, in addition,to question similar large scale proposals in the local area. It is now a comfortable 6 months since the last correspondence that Melton Borough Council sent to Wind Ventures since when it has received absolutely no response. Wind Ventures also failed to provide Melton Borough Council with required further information (archaeology) which had been requested in June or July 2014. On 1 October 2015, Melton Borough Council therefore "deemed" the Wind Ventures planning application as withdrawn.

Everyone interested will be well aware of the slightly uncertain outcome of this proposal through one or more of the publishing networks we set up to challenge the application, for example our web site, Face book and Twitter accounts or our regular News Letters. Although the result was not ideal, in that the case was never heard by the Melton Borough Council, it is quite clear that the tactic adopted by Wind Ventures to ignore completely all correspondence for over 9 months has confined the project to the waste bin, and rightly so. With the deplorable business practices adopted by Wind Ventures finally removing any conceivable confidence of the public or the council in the company, coupled with the government's withdrawal of the enormous subsidies that were originally on offer at the time of the initial application, we at SMART do not believe that Wind Ventures could realistically resurrect the project in the foreseeable future. We thank all our supporters for their key inputs to our case and the financial contributions and pledges they have made, and to allow SMART to maintain those funds and pledges in these recent uncertain times. These funds have been returned, less a small amount to reflect costs. Should the need arise, we are confident of our support base to deal with any new challenge.

Crown Hill Windfarm Ltd [Company number 08250014] - the company set up by Wind Ventures and which submitted the planning application - is still in existence. Its officers are Michael John Dix and Peter Jonathan Lewin.

The Future

Although we are pleased with the outcome, a note of caution is required. Following recent changes to national planning policy guidance, for a wind farm proposal to succeed it must be located in an area allocated in a local or neighbourhood plan. The new Melton Local Plan includes in policy EN10 a proposal to allocate much of the surrounding area as suitable for wind farm development. Under the plan, once an area of land has been allocated in a local plan it is then extremely difficult to resist a planning application for that land use. We have decided to keep this website going, albeit on a reduced scale (as we no longer have any funds), as a way of monitoring local planning events that may have an impact on our landscape and heritage.

In October 2020, the Prime Minister announced that he wanted to make Britain the world leader in offshore wind technology. The Conservative Party's obsession with inefficient wind turbine technology is astonishing. The future for UK lies in exploiting the tidal power generating capacity we have from our 7,000 mile coastline, which can produce power 24/7 and can be seamlessly and safely integrated into the grid. Unfortunately, the Conservative Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has decided that the Planning rules are to be changed to make it easier to give the go-ahead to new on-shore turbines in a bid to avoid a 'bruising' Commons defeat. So the divisive and costly community battles fought previously are likely to return.

The Melton Local Plan was submitted by the Council to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on 4th October, 2017 for independent examination. Copies of Representations received during both Pre submission Draft Plan and Addendum of Focused Changes Consultations were also included. For more up-to-date information, please visit the Local News page.