Representation by Peter Nicholas Cutforth
- Date submitted
- 23 June 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
Statement as an “interested party” to the Luton Airport expansion application 23 June 2023 My name is Peter Cutforth, I wish to comment on carbon emissions impacts and on noise impact. I comment as an individual 30 year resident of St Albans, and also as a founding member of the volunteer working group that manages the Heartwood Forest Woodland Trust site located 6 miles south of the airport between Harpenden and St Albans. On carbon emissions, I want to comment on how the expansion will impact our government’s ability to meet our net zero requirement. This is a matter of public interest and is disturbing because the government has no ability to meet this net zero requirement currently. It needs the airline industry to reduce flight demand, because it is increasingly accepted that the airline industry’s preferred future solutions of bio derived jetfuels and carbon offsetting are not credible. So, flight demand reduction is vital to net zero, and airport expansion is essentially incompatible with flight demand reduction and thus incompatible with the net zero requirement. To move on to noise disturbance, I want to comment with direct evidence again as both a 30-year resident of St Albans, and as a founding member of the working group that manages the above mentioned Heartwood Forest site. I support the case put forward expertly by LADACAN, and want to contribute by expressing the perceived harm, which the noise numbers aim to represent, but can never succeed in doing. The perceived harm of aircraft noise is most acute at times when we expect and need quiet. For most of us that is firstly night time, and secondly when we seek escape in nature, e.g dog walking, running, bike riding, outdoor yoga, bird watching and so on. Regarding night time, I have slept in the same room in the same house for 30 years. I never used to be woken up by aircraft before 6 am. Now I am. Sometimes I notice two or more noisy aircraft followed by a long gap. Oddly the uncertainty of the gap waiting for the next one wakes one up more, increasing the level of disturbance. I doubt that harm will be represented adequately in any of the noise numbers you will be presented with. Also unrepresented in the noise numbers will be how human noise tolerance depends on whether the source represents a public good or a source of avoidable pollution. If the source was non-polluting or a flight for essential purposes, e.g. humanitarian or medical, it would be much less disturbing. But now we know that most flying is not essential, is discretionary and is highly polluting in terms of global warming and of local urban air quality, and so should be discouraged, not incentivised. This inevitably means the noise problem is felt more strongly than can be represented in numbers alone. There is well established precedent for interpreting numbers to give effect to what the numbers are intended to represent, in this case the actual harm felt. Hence I urge you to take into account that the numbers tend to under-represent the level of harm felt. The second type of evidence I would like to present relates to my earlier mention of needing and expecting quiet, that is when we escape to nature. Thirteen years ago I started volunteering at Heartwood Forest, and I have continued ever since. There are 800 acres of native species woodland and meadows created and run by the Woodland Trust with public access. I used to think of it as a haven of quiet, a valuable escape for the thousands who visit for peaceful walks. It is a place where they and I expect and need quiet. There is nowhere else of comparable scale nearby. So that is where almost any aircraft noise is most noticeable and most harmful, and where no physical barrier can be added in mitigation. I have given public talks there to small groups for a number of years, and sometimes have to interrupt them as I cannot compete with the noisier aircraft. I have been in the audience for other talks and experienced the interruptions. I used to attend an outdoor yoga class there which never used to be interrupted, now it is. I recently received a message from a friend saying her husband, a frequent visitor to heartwood, had just seen so many noisy aircraft almost continuously that he described it as "ludicrous". These are examples of harmful loss of tranquillity. The harm felt will be seriously under -represented in noise measurements. But there are in the region of one hundred thousand visitors per year seeking tranquillity at Heartwood alone. They are now losing it. I seek to represent to you their loss. Please weigh it as well as the noise numbers. To finish, one of the public talks at Heartwood describes the landscape history, and asks the audience what single event had most impact on the landscape. The answer given is the 1947 planning acts, because that saved the last remnants of the rural landscape here from inevitable ribbon development. So, we volunteers at Heartwood forest acknowledge that the great public benefit of this forest derives directly from the far-sightedness of the originators of the UK planning system, your predecessors. Our forest and all of us now need protection again. Will you, the members of the Examining Authority, match that far-sightedness of your predecessors?