The decision by the Variety Club to honour Gordon Linacre with a lifetime achievement award is long overdue.   As Chairman of Yorkshire Post Newspapers, he was a pleasure to work with – not least because of his own superb network in the region.  This meant, for instance, that he was frequently able to give me a steer on a story when I was Business Editor.

I recall on one occasion picking up the phone and being told by Gordon that I was wasting my time on a particular line of inquiry which I was then pursuing in connection with a Scarborough businessman.   He was right.  As I found out after making a few more calls of my own.

Gordon presided over a very different media environment.  The Yorkshire Post was then one of the Big Beasts in regional journalism and not just a subsidiary of an over-geared Scottish newspaper chain.  He believed in having fun and had no objection to his employees having fun – provided that they also did the job they were being paid to do.  Accordingly, a key element of his hospitality involved a liberal supply of alcohol – in traditional journalistic manner.  It’s definitely a different world today.

Tockwith residents are doubtless still celebrating North Yorkshire County Council’s decision yesterday to reject BCB Environmental’s proposed £24m energy-from-waste plant at Marston Business Park, just outside the village near York.  But other North Yorkshire taxpayers should be feeling very angry. For two reasons.

First, the Government has imposed on all local authorities the obligation to reduce dramatically the amount of waste it sends to landfill.  Failure to meet these targets will result in huge fines – quite apart from the soaring cost of landfill tax.  At present, the best councils manage to recycle about 40 per cent of household waste.  That leaves a huge shortfall, which the proposed BCB plant – which would have been capable of processing 60,000 tonnes of waste a year – would have significantly reduced. 

Second,  BCB is now likely to appeal against this decision and, given that it meets all the criteria laid down by the Environment Agency and will produce 10,000KWh of sustainable electricity (hello? has anyone noticed that this is an issue?), stands a good chance of being ultimately approved. At which point, North Yorkshire taxpayers will have to foot the bill for costs.

So the poor, long-suffering mugs who pay their council taxes to North Yorkshire County Council will face a huge bill one way or the other – either for failure to reduce the amount of waste landfilled or for the costs of fighting the appeal.  And all because councillors were running scared of a few hundred residents who mounted an irresponsible over-hyped campaign.

Incidentally, I’m happy to declare an interest in this, having handled the media relations for BCB’s proposal for the past couple of years.   And I look forward to announcing the result of a successful appeal, if that is what BCB’s board decides to do.

Has the economic recovery begun? And, if so, will it be sustained? These are the big questions that everybody in business is asking. 

Earlier this week I attended a “question-time”-style meeting in York organised by The Alternative Board in the rather grand offices of Dickinson Dees.  In answer to the above questions, one member of the panel said he thought the recovery would be “W”-shaped while another member thought it would be “U”-shaped.  Either way, there was general agreement that recovery was not likely to feel much better than recession.  My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the recovery in stock markets and other asset prices is unlikely to last, driven in large part as it has been by the billons – £200 bn in the UK alone – that have been pumped into the financial system.  Confidence is closely linked to rising asset values.  But prices (and confidence) will surely fall once the tap is turned off.  As an eminent former banker told me recently “watch out for when quantitive easing becomes quantitive squeezing.”

One of the reasons why the recovery is going to be difficult for businesses is that banks do not have the capacity to meet the appetite for money by small and medium-sized enterprises.  The York meeting was told that banks were now much more risk-averse and no longer wanted to fund property-based transactions.  SMEs are advised to explore other sources of finance.

While this is grim news for SMEs, it bodes very ill for the UK as a whole.  SMEs account for more than 95% of all UK businesses.  They are the engine of growth in the economy and are likely to provide the lion’s share of the new jobs that are needed.  The FTSE-100 companies and big mult-national corporations may grab the headlines, but it is smaller firms that will have to deliver the recovery. I wonder if the Government appreciates that.