Hinkley Point is glowing on my doorstep, but that won't help us get a bus into town
Popping out last thing at night to let Cyrus the hound have a late evening sniff and give myself a breath of air before bed – and the skies above Exmoor are clear.
If I climb a steep little path, up and into a field, I can gaze up at the heavens and on a cloudless night enjoy the most fabulous view of the stars. The dark skies and lack of light pollution is one of the reasons individuals from the Virgin Galactic Future Astronauts programme spend a night or two on Exmoor. They can look up and contemplate the journey they’ll be on in a few years.
As I attempt to identify clusters of stars, notice a satellite and spot the reddish tint of Mars, there’s just one annoyance east of me. It’s a white glow nudging over Willett Hill that seems to have been burning slightly brighter recently. When we first moved here three years ago, I wondered if this was Minehead. Was this light the heat of Butlins? The glow of a thousand stout tattooed Welshmen vaping?
One night, we were driving home over the Quantocks and we saw exactly what that light was. Down by the edge of the Bristol Channel was what looked like a small city, lit up as if by the thousand floodlights of a football stadium. This was Hinkley Point. For those of us who haven’t managed to wangle a tour of this nuclear power facility, it remains as mysterious and off-limits as Nevada’s Area 51.
And the facts around it are staggering. Some 10,000 people work on site there (with another 12,000 associated jobs elsewhere). Lifting the 245-tonne steel roof onto the first reactor, a few weeks ago, utilised the world’s largest land-based crane. Hinkley Point C (next to the original facilities A and B) will power some six million homes and what I lie in bed at night wondering about is how the hell they feed the 10,000. The Chinese state-owned CGN has a one-third stake in Hinkley and the French state-controlled energy company EDF controls the rest. It’s due to start generating power in 2030 and is the world’s most expensive power station.
Then this week EDF announced that, whoops, they need another £10 billion. Prices have increased since 2015, design changes require more steel and concrete and, I imagine, given the French contingent at the facility, increases in the price of butter have skyrocketed the projected costs of croissants.
The final costs could be around £46 billion with the project looking at a four-year delay. All of which is great if you’ve got a job there, be it in security, catering or nuclear fission, but otherwise this futurist megalith rather clashes with the neighbouring muddy fields of Exmoor.
These fabulous sums and figures might perk up geeks and politicians who love to laud an out-of-control infrastructure project, but you still can’t get a bus from Wiveliscombe to Wellington.
For the good, ordinary people of west Somerset, Hinkley Point is like the school whizz who gets a sports scholarship to the US. Great for them and the school, but it means bugger all to those who can’t enjoy that flight of fancy.
And that’s the very real problem for this part of the world. Indeed, west Somerset is the worst performing area for social mobility in the whole of England. Which means that as the glow of Hinkley Point brightens, those with disadvantaged backgrounds find it even harder to build a better life for themselves.
And there are three key stumbling blocks here: childcare is scarce, broadband is patchy and there are no buses.
Which leaves people feeling that these infrastructure projects – Hinkley Point, HS2 – are like the huge sewage pipes that run through the slums of Mumbai. They carve up and disrupt the landscape and lives of those who exist around it, but it’s only the comfortable middle classes who benefit.
I’m involved with Visit Exmoor, in a project called The Centre of Excellence, to encourage young people to get into hospitality, a career with infinite options, from baker to sommelier, front of house to pastry chef. At its heart is a wonderful man called Werner Hartholt, group development chef at Butlins (you learn catering skills for life when you have to cook breakfast for a thousand tattooed Welshmen).
The career possibilities that he dangles are exhilarating. But it’s a fat lot of good when you, as a young person from Exmoor farming stock, realise there’s no bus to get you there, the fuel’s too expensive for the car you can’t afford and your dad can’t drive you there because he’s out in the tractor driving in fence posts.
There’s one bus in this area, just the one: a mythical thing called Number 25. The service is limited between a few villages on the main route between Dulverton and Taunton and it’s operated with the spirit of a 1980s print union worker. “You can’t rely on it to get you to work or back home in the evening,” a local tells me. “Some days we wonder if the drivers have actually forgotten to leave Taunton or Dulverton at the correct time. The bus is often, literally, over an hour late and some days it doesn’t come at all. If the bus company bothered then the service would be used more, but as it is, our rural community is left with no hope.”
No surprise then that operator First Bus is considering halting the service. A group of people gathered last week in the Bear Inn in Wiveliscombe to start a campaign to save the route: “Have a drink, don’t drive, take the 25…” (OK, the third line needs an additional syllable, but it’s a start).
Of course we need high speed trains and abundant, cheap energy but the road to getting there seems like a twisting path over the distant hills with no destination in sight. How different it feels in France as the TGV, or the Eurostar when it emerges from the other side of the tunnel, courses across the flatlands, careering past pylons and endless power stations. Their infrastructure seems to work and, across that country, you can get and afford a decent cup of coffee, some nice pâté and a tender steak.
As the glow of Hinkley Point creeps towards the moor, local authorities need to work with successful local businesses to promote the spirit of pride, professionalism and fulfilment that can be found in a career such as hospitality. We need investment in training and to get the message to schools and colleges that real opportunities exist. And those councils and businesses would do well to contribute to a well-run bus service, a fleet of small 16-seaters even.
Otherwise the bus journeys our young people will take will be one-way. Right out of here and leaving behind a declining, ageing population. I’d like to go out at night with Cyrus, look up at those stars and think that Exmoor wasn’t just a holy grail for future astronauts, that also looking up at the stars and hoping would be future bakers, chefs, hoteliers, publicans.
