Countryside campaigners have launched a blistering attack on the Government for a policy which most people thought had been dismissed some fifty years ago: opencast coal mining.

In the years following World War 11, tens of thousands of acres of countryside were stripped to make way for coal workings. But such operations were largely abandoned half a century ago after joint protests from conservationists and the then all-powerful National Union of Miners.

But new figures issued yesterday by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) show that since 1999, 120 licences have been issued for opencast coal workings and in many cases, the go-ahead was given despite local councils refusing planning permission.

Only 26 such applications were turned down by Whitehall.

In a press statement headlined “Time to de-throne King Coal” the CPRE claimed that the figures cast doubt on the Government’s often-declared support for clean energy.

Open cast mines, it said, “will accelerate climate change and destroy communities and landscapes.”

The release of such figures will be a major embarrassment to the Government, which is already under fire for allowing the building of a new “clean coal” power station in Kent. But ministers are in a cleft stick: because of the 12 year delay in ordering new nuclear power stations, experts of predicting that Britain will begin to suffer power cuts in eight years time.