United Utilities has asked Lancashire County Council for permission to deposit 1.5 million tonnes of excavated tunnel waste at Waddington Fell Quarry.

The material will come from the East Lancashire stage of a £1bn project to upgrade 70-plus year old Haweswater Aqueduct pipeline which supplies water from the Lake District to the county and Greater Manchester.

It tells the authority's development control committee the scheme is essential to keeping water flowing through the 110 kilometre pipeline.

The Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme represents one of the largest UK investments in public water supply infrastructure in the last 50 years.

The county council needs to approve the waste removal and deposit as the mineral authority for Lancashire.

It constitutes a revised quarry restoration scheme incorporating tunnel waste from the Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme (HARP) - namely the Bowland and Marl Hill tunnel sections - at Waddington Fell Quarry, Slaidburn Road, Waddington in Ribble Valley.

A planning officer's report to the committee meeting on Wednesday says: "Permission is sought to allow for the importation and deposit of up to approximately 1.5 million tonnes of excavated tunnel waste at Waddington Fell Quarry.

"The waste would be derived solely from tunnelling operations which are part of the proposed replacement Haweswater Aqueduct project, and the scheme would take up to 10 years to complete.

"The timeframe is dictated by the rate of tunnelling operations and works to complete final restoration at the quarry site.

"Tunnel excavation compounds would be located at Braddup (the Marl Hill tunnel drive side), Bonstone (the Marl Hill tunnel reception site), and Newton (the Bowland tunnel drive site).

"The existing use of the application site is for mineral extraction.

"The quarry is located on the summit of Waddington Fell and extends to an area of approximately 25 hectares.

"The active quarry void includes approximately 11 hectares of the wider quarry area and the southern areas of the site have already been restored, largely through natural regeneration of heather moorland.

"The site is located in the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), 3.5kilometres north of the village of Waddington and 3km south east of Newton.

"The availability of Waddington Fell Quarry as a receptor for tunnel waste would be of significant benefit to the area to avoid the need to export waste through local villages to disposal sites elsewhere or dispose the waste within the landscape of the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

"Waste disposal at Waddington Fell Quarry would have very little impact on the AONB designation given the size of the existing quarry void and it is considered that exceptional circumstances have been demonstrated and that the development would be in the public interest."