After some presentations, Councillors then voted unanimously to refuse the application, to loud applause. We celebrate that 6.5 hectares of trees, hedgerows, and fields were spared destruction in the refusal of this application. As  Cllr Thomas said in the meeting, “Speaking as a farmer…nothing grows [after restoration], the structure is gone… History shows the land never comes back to what it was. I second this proposal to recommend refusal”. This refusal stops any further delay to the restoration of the area already opencast, and creates a commitment to a cleaner, greener Wales.

Cllr Peter Cooper said “We’ve had it for too many years to have the opencast. I’ve worked in opencast. Believe me, the dust - you clean your windows one day, and the next it’s bad again. It will affect them all. I don’t think it’s right that people should have to put up with this again, these people. It’s not necessary.”

Cllr Russell Sparks added “We have no alternative, given the evidence presented to us today to refuse the proposal.”

Coal Action Network will continue to monitor what happens next, but we hope Bryn Bach Coal Ltd will respect the expert conclusions about the local ecosystem destruction from an extension, local democracy, and the 826 written objections to the extension application from local residents. The company should begin work on restoring the site immediately to the specification promised.

Key facts and figures

What was at stake and CAN's action

Our analysis of the extension application

Term: 2 days/week (should be available Tuesdays)

Salary: £31,200 FTE (£12,480 pro-rata)/freelance £ 173 day rate

UK-based, work-from-home.

Application deadline: 0900 Mon 02^nd October 2023

Background to the role

The UK currently has four coal mines at varying points in the planning pipeline. In December 2022, the UK Government surprised the nation by approving a new coal mine in Whitehaven, West Cumbria. In the same year, a coal mine in South Wales was licenced to operate for nearly 20 years more and double in size. The spectre of new coal mines looms as the UK Government’s opposition to coal weakens with senior politicians in the UK and Welsh Government increasingly repeating industry lies and throwing support behind UK coal mining—a disastrous shift that’ll reverberate through the world.

Purpose

You will create and deliver a political strategy to secure a moratorium (ban) on all forms of coal mining in the UK Government by January 2026, and the Welsh Government as a secondary goal.

You will work in a team alongside two other coal campaigners. In our non-hierarchical structure you will hold equal agency in decisions affecting the organisation, and, after your probationary period is passed, you will have the option to become a voluntary Co-Director, sharing legal responsibility for the organisation.

If aspects of the Role Description are unfamiliar to you, please see the 'Non-essential' section of the Person Specification for details of what you can learn on the job.

Responsibilities

• Campaign Development
  • Create and deliver on a political strategy to deliver a ban on coal mining in the Senedd and Westminster.
  • Engage and network with allied organisations to increase our political leverage, impact, and opportunities.
• Media and press
  • Stay up-to-date on developments relating to political developments that create opportunities for coverage of our demands for a ban on coal mining.
  • Work with supporters taking action to gain local and national media coverage
  • Amplify related media and press gained by other groups where relevant
  • Produce blog posts and articles relevant to CAN’s campaigns
• Network building
  • Expand your network of allied MPs and convince those on the fence to support a ban on coal mining.
  • Work with frontline groups affected by coal mining to amplify their voices and lived experiences to guide political advocacy
  • Work across a network of allied organisations
  • Engage other allied organisations so that they might join our effort to secure a political ban on coal mining
  • Develop and engage CAN’s supporter base to sustain longer term pressure through regular emails, text messages, and social media posts
  • Attend meetings with allied organisations, movers, and shakers.
• Actions
  • Build a ground-swell of political support for a ban on coal mining in the Senedd and Westminster.
  • Run digital actions using a diverse range of tactics to both engage supporters, and apply pressure on our targets
  • Support other groups wanting to organise their own actions
  • Create resources that can be used by local and frontline groups, both to support specific actions, and as templates going forward
  • Occasional public speaking at events, actions, or media appearances
• Organisational
  • Participate in collective decision-making processes about strategy and the running of the organisation
  • Contribute to building funding bids and reporting back to funders
  • Take and/or share responsibility for a range of other short-term operational tasks which are shared and sometimes rotated among the CAN team e.g. organising an away day, improving internal comms, participating in hiring processes etc. These responsibilities can be tailored to your expertise and interests.
  • Any other appropriate tasks as agreed with the team

Person Specification

Essential

• Experience of securing political change at the national level in the UK or Welsh Government.
• Experience of inside-track engagement with Members of Parliament and their aides.
• Ability to speak to senior politicians confidently and convincingly.
• Experience of sustained campaigning and mobilising others to take action.
• Proven ability to write, copy-edit and proofread using clear, persuasive, and plain language with good command of written English for a variety of contexts.
• Ability to manage your own workload and use your initiative, working remotely, unsupervised with transparency
• A get it done approach, not 3 months to draw up a strategy.
• Experience of taking collective decisions or action in a non-hierarchical space such as a co-op, volunteer group, activist collective or flat-structured workplace
• Understanding of, and/or ability to teach us more about environmental justice, solidarity work, environmental racism, and just transition
• Willingness to learn new skills relevant to the job description
• Willingness to travel to meetings and events, and to work some flexible hours alongside regular core hours, including occasional weekends and evenings, to be agreed as a team.

Non-essential

These skills and knowledge will help you in the role, and if you don’t have them we can arrange training for you to learn them:

• Using Action Network to schedule email actions and events
• Knowledge of the current landscape of coal campaigning in the UK

How to Apply

Please read the Job Description and Person Specification before applying for this role.

• Provide a CV and up to two pages of text addressing point-by-point how you meet the person specification, giving examples of relevant experience (paid or voluntary).
• Complete and return an Equal Opportunities Monitoring form (this will be processed anonymously)

Deadline for applications is 0900 Mon 02^nd October 2023.

Please send all applications and queries to HR@coalaction.org.uk with the words ‘Policy Change Campaigner’ in the subject line.

Recruitment Process

1. You will be contacted by Wednesday 04^th October 2023 as to whether you have been shortlisted and offered an interview.
2. Interviews will take place on Monday 16^th and Tuesday 17^th October 2023.
3. If we are able to offer you the role will be notified by Friday 20^th October 2023.
4. Ideal start date for the role is ASAP.

Interviews will friendly and informal, taking no more than one hour and be held over Zoom. Please advise us if there are any accommodations you will require in order to attend the interview and participate fully in it.  We see the interview as a two-way process, so you’ll be invited to challenge us or ask questions at any point.

Inclusive Hiring Commitment

We particularly welcome applicants from backgrounds currently under-represented in paid roles in the UK environmental movement, including people from BAME and migrant backgrounds, refugee backgrounds, people who identify (or have identified in the past) as working class, gender diverse people, people with disabilities, and people from or based in the North of England, Wales and Scotland.

If our equal opportunities monitoring indicates that we have not received a diverse range of applications then we will re-open the application process, in which case you will be notified and your application will be automatically re-submitted.

If a final decision rests on two applications of equal standard, the principle of  ‘positive action’ will be applied with regard to protected characteristics.

Home and office working can be supported with equipment if necessary

We are committed to improving our commitment to diversity and inclusion, and to decolonising the environmental movement. We welcome applications from people who will challenge us to go further in doing this.

Please contact us if you have questions or comments regarding accessibility and inclusivity or about other aspects of the job advert or recruitment process.

Please inform us if you would need paid childcare cover or any adjustments relating to disability in order to attend an online interview.

Workplace details

We are a remote-working organisation of a 7-person staff team, becoming 8-people with this recruitment. This represents significant recent growth for us.

We meet on zoom once weekly as a whole team (Tue afternoon) and ad hoc regarding campaigns. In between we communicate using email and Signal. We meet in-person several times a year.

Apart from one staff member, we all work part time and are supportive of flexible working arrangements alongside core hours. We are sometimes required to work outside of normal office hours, for example to attend events.

We are a non-hierarchical organisation, so we do not have managers or bosses but make agreements and decisions by consensus, and direct our own workloads collectively and individually. We have equal say in decisions affecting our work.

We support our staff with a range of enhanced leave options and employment terms in our contract.

We are registered as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and as such are legally required to have directors who take legal responsibility for the organisation. To maintain a commitment to non-hierarchy, all employees are invited to become directors after passing probation, but this is entirely optional.

We recognise that non-hierarchical organisations are not immune to creating barriers to participation in the workplace, so we encourage people to challenge us to improve and adapt our workplace policies, structures, internal communications and working culture to become more inclusive.

Of the two existing UK steelworks using coal, Tata Steel alone could tolerate small amounts of coal from Whitehaven. Tata Steel is currently negotiating with government for subsidies to decarbonise, ending coal use, or it has threatened closure. If the project goes ahead, the Cumbrian coal would emit more than 200 million tonnes of CO₂, primarily from its use in blast furnaces. Its extraction would result in the release of around 334,000 tonnes of methane even if mine methane capture equipment is used (901,000 tonnes without capture).

So far, 2023 has seen the hottest global temperatures for June and July in recorded history. Hundreds of millions of people across the USA, Europe and Asia have been hit by extreme heat while deadly wildfires have raged through southern Europe, Canada, Russia, Hawaii and beyond.

Continues...

Even more scandalously, the Welsh Government has been profiteering by transporting this illegal coal along its railways over the past 11 months, to be burned by various customers in direct breach of its own climate commitments and policies against coal extraction.

Good Law Project has joined the fray, and are supporting us to finally stop the environmental onslaught of Ffos-y-fran with a judicial review. This has allowed us to assemble a crack legal team from Richard Buxton Solicitors, and Barristers’ Toby Fisher and James Maurici KC. Please share and donate to Good Law Project’s Crowdfunder (and check out their website, we could gush over all their work).

We are optimistic the legal pressure we’ve just heaped on will finally put a long-overdue end to what should never have happened in the first place. As with our judicial review (and now appeal!) of Aberpergwm deep coal mine, we shouldn’t have to undertake costly legal action to force the Welsh Government to fulfil its obligations to the current and future generations, in Wales and across the world.

See our Statement of Facts and Grounds (PDF) summarised below -

Coal Action Network is seeking to have judicially reviewed:

1. The ongoing failure of the First and Second Defendants to act with reasonable expedition to decide whether it is expedient to issue a stop notice to prevent the ongoing unlawful extraction of coal at the Ffos-y-Fran mine, East Of Merthyr Tydfil, CF48 4AE; alternatively
2. To the extent that it has made one, the decision of the First Defendant that it is not expedient to issue a stop notice to prevent the ongoing unlawful extraction of coal at the Ffos-y-Fran mine, East Of Merthyr Tydfil, CF48 4AE.

The grounds of claim are:

• Ground 1(a): The failure of the Council to decide whether it is expedient to serve a stop notice is unlawful.
  • The Council has not proceeded with "reasonable expedition" in making this decision, and maintains that is has no duty to do so; it has had (or ought to have had) knowledge of the ongoing unlawful activity since 30th January 2023 and has had ample opportunity to investigate.
  • Although the Council has discretion as to whether or not to take enforcement action (subject to the constraints of public law), it is implicit in the scheme set out by the 1990 Planning Act and 2017 Environmental Impact Assessment regulations that decisions on whether or not to take enforcement action must be taken soon enough to avoid the relevant planning harm; and this is heightened by the Council’s duties under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. In this case, the harm from coal extraction (likely to be prohibited under the EIA scheme) is serious, significant and ongoing.

• Ground 1(b): The failure of the Welsh Ministers to decide whether it is expedient to serve a stop notice is unlawful.
  • The Welsh Ministers' obligation to consider using their "reserve powers" was triggered by the failure of the Council to issue a Stop Notice immediately alongside the Enforcement Notice and/or on receipt of MSWL's appeal of the Enforcement Notice; and this is heightened by the Welsh Ministers’ duties under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015

• Ground 2: The decision of the Council to decide it was not expedient to serve a stop notice is unlawful.

Coal Action Network is seeking a hearing on the first available date after 20 August 2023 to determine the following remedies:

1. Urgent interim relief in the form of decision on whether it is expedient to serve a stop notice within 7 days;
2. A declaration that: (a) The Council and Welsh Ministers acted unlawfully by failing to proceed with reasonable expedition in deciding whether it was expedient to serve a stop notice to bring the ongoing unlawful activity at the Site to an end; further or alternatively (b) The Council acted unlawfully by deciding it was not expedient to serve a stop notice to bring the ongoing unlawful activity at the Site to an end.

After that, we’ll be campaigning for:

1. The Welsh Government to invite mine workers onto its Universal Basic Income pilot, as the mining company has totally failed to transition its workers, showing scant regard for their welfare. This is a demand we’ve had since the outset.
2. Merthyr Tydfil to get the original and full restoration it was promised when the Welsh Government forced this sprawling opencast coal mine on everyone living there. Anything less is unconscionable after failing to protect communities living there from 11 months of illegal coal mining.
3. The Welsh Government to move swiftly to ban any new coal mining on Welsh soil to rule out this ever happening again, and bring it in line with Scotland’s de facto ban on coal mining on Scottish soil.

But what we must do now is to stop the daily environmental onslaught of the coal mine, producing equivalent to c4,000 tonnes of CO2 every day – or the average daily emissions of 175,000 people living in Wales, which is around 3x the population of Merthyr Tydfil itself! Imagine burning 1.75 MILLION litres of petrol every single morning – that’s the amount of CO2e this coal mine has been allowed to add to our atmosphere every day so far, illegally and without consequence.

Together, you, us, local residents, Good Law Project, and a network of Welsh groups like FOE Cymru, Climate Cymru, and XR Wales will prevail and put an end to this climate calamity any way we can. Let’s show the Council and Welsh Government how it’s done – time to roll up our sleeves and shut this mine down.