HOWARD SAUNDERS holds an unenviable record at Hatfield colliery, the South Yorkshire coalmine whose sudden closure was announced on Monday — he has been made redundant from Hatfield four times.

This time, the sack is final and so is the closure.

Millions of tons of coal will be abandoned, along with a newly developed coalface.

Meanwhile, Britain will import over 50 million tons of coal a year to burn in coal-fired power stations, which will take 10-15 years to be phased out.

Howard, 57, isn’t the only member of his family affected.

His sons Lee Saunders, 37, and Jack Saunders, 25, both married with young families, work at Hatfield too.

Howard’s redundancy is immediate, along with 300 of the 420-strong workforce.

Lee and Jack will be part of a crew which will spend nine weeks making the pit safe before its final closure.

Howard plans to use his redundancy money “to get some euros and go to Spain — treat the grandkids.”

Lee and Jack are the fourth generation of Saunderses to work at Hatfield.

“My grandfather started at Hatfield in the late 1920s,” said Howard. “Then my father. Then me, and Lee and Jack.”

He left the pit following one of three closures of Hatfield following privatisation of the coal industry in 1994, but returned when it re-opened.

During the pit’s final phase, it was a worker-owned co-operative. It could have continued producing coal for at least another year but for government decisions.

“There was the carbon tax,” said Howard.

“Europe had a carbon tax of about £5 a ton on coal, but the British government put £16 or £18 on it.

The energy producers built their coal stocks up before it came in on April 1. They had that much in stock … the carbon tax — it beggars belief.”

Another factor was the energy giants’ willingness to buy foreign coal made cheap by subsidies from other governments, a handy boost to the energy firms’ profits.

“It’s scandalous,” said Howard. “I’ve said it all along that it’s going to come back and bite them on the backside. We will just be dependent on foreign fuel — gas, coal, oil.”

Howard isn’t sure what the future holds. Mining skills are unique and difficult to transfer to other industries.

Britain’s other two remaining deep coalmines, Thoresby in Nottinghamshire and Kellingley in North Yorkshire, will close this year.

The government offered the pits grants, but only to fund the closures, not to mine coal.

Tony Shaw, another Hatfield miner, is 43 and is secretary of the pit’s branch of the National Union of Mineworkers.

He said that Hatfield’s closure, along with those of 180 other pits abandoned by successive Tory, Labour and coalition governments, has one cause.

“It all stems from 1984-5,” he says, referring to the miners’ year-long strike against pit closures.

“I was at school, but since the strike governments have all had their fair share of depleting this industry. They’d put a hurdle in front of us. We’d get over it but then there’d be a bigger one.

“Then coal was a dirty word. We got around that (with clean coal technology) but the last nail in the coffin was the double tax on carbon.

“The generators stocked up so much before the tax came in that they’re not taking our coal. It was £9 a ton, then it doubled to £18 a ton.

“They’re also burning gas and there are the imports. We shouldn’t be importing it when we could be producing it.”
Tony’s stepson is looking for an apprenticeship — but not in mining.