Following a report in last month\'s NSS that a planning application by Albion Stone to mine Portland limestone from Jordan\'s Quarry had been rejected, Dorset County Council have written to NSS to dispute the fact. They say no decision has been reached.

While Michael Poultney, the managing director of Albion, concedes that the planning authority has not reached a decision, he regards it as a moot point whether returning the application to him for more information and asking him to relinquish other planning consents on the island constitutes rejection or not. Certainly his application as it stands has not been accepted.

The council want noise information on what Michael describes as "the 20 seconds" when the "one lorry a day that will take stone from the mine leaves the site".

English Nature have also asked for other quarrying permissions on Portland to be relinquished by Albion in mitigation for mining Jordans. "What\'s that got to do with changing over from quarrying to mining?" asks Michael.

What particularly irritates Albion is that they already have planning permission to quarry the site and had presumed mining it would be considered more environmentally friendly, although Albion\'s main reason for wanting to mine is that more stone will be yielded than if the site is quarried.

"As far as I\'m concerened I put in a perfectly good planning application and I\'m now finding out how easy it is to thread a camel through the eye of a needle."

Michael says if he does not receive permission to mine Jordans by the end of the summer he will resume quarrying on the site.

In the letter to NSS from Dorset County Council, Andrew Price, head of planning, states: "It should be noted that whilst an old permission exists for quarrying the site, Albion Stone signed a legal agreement some time ago in which the Company agreed that it would relinquish that permission for open cast quarrying."

However, when NSS contacted the council they conceded that Albion could legally start quarrying Jordans.

The council say that Jordans is partly in a Conservation Area, partly in an SSSI, near to the Grade I listed St George\'s Church, and only about 50m from houses. They say they are only asking for a normal level of information about the impacts of the operation.

Michael Poultney is deputy chairman of Stone Federation\'s Quarry Forum, which is concerned to see local planning authorities implement the guidance in Annex Three of MPS1 (the government guidelines on planning to local authorities) that says a distinction should be made between small-scale building stone quarries and aggregates quarries extracting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stone a year.

"Nobody has the balls to say we don\'t actually need to count the butterflies on this one. Whatever standard was set on the previous application they want to go 10 stages further on the next one.""