How we stopped the drillers: 10 lessons from Leith Hill

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The following post is from Vicki Elcoate from A Voice for Leith Hill community group.

Protestors at Leith Hill.

The battle to stop oil drilling on Leith Hill near Dorking lasted ten years and inspired a huge number of people to join in.

They fought for various reasons: to protect the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Green Belt; because of fears about pollution of groundwater and climate change; love of the trees on sunken Coldharbour Lane.

After 10 years, in 2018, the Environment Secretary Michael Gove MP refused to renew the Forestry Commission lease to the oil company, Europa Oil and Gas, and they pulled out.

It was public opinion that shifted the politics so this was possible.

These are ten lessons I learned from the campaign which are now helping us fight other oil proposals in Surrey, like the ones at Horse Hill and Dunsfold:

  1. Don’t give up and don’t listen to those who say you will never win
  2. Everyone needs to get together – the NIMBYs, the wider local community, people who live in camps, politicians, artists, musicians, actors – all these groups supported the campaign in their own ways!
  3. Form an action group – the Leith Hill Action Group did an amazing job over 10 years of the campaign and A Voice for Leith Hill came in later to amplify the campaign and appeal to a new mass audience
  4. Get a bank account
  5. Raise lots of money as you will need it to fight them in the courts – the Leith Hill Action Group raised about £100,000. Lush is a good funder of campaigns that are climate related.
  6. Work effectively with the planning system and the other regulators. You will quickly become expert in dealing with complex applications. Cultivate contacts within your local planning authority and the Environment Agency and speak up at planning meetings. Local councillors were against this proposal, but a Planning Inspector over ruled them.
  7. Be creative and accepting of all styles of campaigning. Some locals weren’t delighted when a protection camp arrived at the drill site. The camp provided a huge opportunity for raising the profile of the campaign and providing information to people – dedicated people who sacrificed their livelihoods and home comforts for a cause they believed in passionately. They had to put up with an aggressive security company paid for by the oil company too.
  8. Take lots of photos and use social media well – get some professional photographers and video makers on board if you can
  9. Knock on doors, get into the press.
  10. Celebrate when you win – when we got the news that Europa had withdrawn from the site we could hardly believe it and might have opened a bottle of bubbly or two! Although the plan to drill on Leith Hill at this site has gone away another oil company, UK Oil and Gas, bought the licence and is now planning to drill into the same geology from a different location.

Please help us fight the oil companies who want to expand across Surrey and Sussex. Sign up to the Frack Free Surrey newsletters here: http://frackfreesurrey.com/

We’ve recently had the Judgment in our case challenging planning permission at Horse Hill, near Charlwood. You can read more about that here.