Representation by Jonathan Bradley
- Date submitted
- 26 September 2018
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
My wife and I and our two children moved to [Redacted] in September 2015 for the quality of life and health benefits that the place had to offer. Manston Airport’s closure in 2014 due to its failure as a going concern, combined with the fact that no risk was identified in our house survey and searches gave us no reason to be concerned about purchasing our house. Now, like so many, we find ourselves directly under the RSP proposed flight path. The human cost to this proposal, purely in terms of negative health and wellbeing, is too big a risk. The NSIP case seems very unsound, as follows:
Flawed business case
No proper P&L, cashflow forecasts or investment detail.
No satisfactory evidence of funding.
Worryingly, the proposal is to force ownership away from a British company with a proven track record, to a shell company without one, registered in Belize.
[Redacted], a [Redacted], leads the proposal and has presided over the failure of Manston under different ownership. How can this be acceptable?
Manston is both unnecessary and unviable as an airport. The conclusions of no less than four independent aviation experts, casting huge doubt over the research conducted by [Redacted], drawn on so heavily by RSP.
The success of the proposal is totally dependent on the capturing of the bottom of the freight market and the uncapped volume of chartered night flights. This has the most potential to devastate the lives of Ramsgate people and is one of the least transparent parts of the documentation. A potential scandal not just locally, but nationally too.
Potential health risks
ATMs vary from 10,000 to 83,000 allowing room for considerable disturbance.
RSP working off “worse case” scenario of 17,100 ATMs with no enforceable cap.
There is no cap on night flights, but the proposal includes an overall quota of 3028 QC points per annum. This allows for extremely high levels of night flight activity. RSP’s own environmental assessment is based on 8 flights per night.
Particulate pollution would seriously endanger our health and well-being.
PM 10 levels are increasing at the only two sites measured in Thanet, Birchington and Ramsgate (83% capture rate).
PM 2.5 is not currently monitored by TDC at all. (TDC - Air Quality Annual Status Report June 2017)
The available data appears to be inadequate.
RSP claim “The airport will be a very small source of these pollutants”. How can they know this?
Increases in air freight pollution and airport traffic would increase levels of NO2 pollution beyond reasonable levels and would not be “small”, “slight”, “moderate” or even “negligible” as in RSP plan.
Worldwide studies show that exposure to aircraft noise increases the frequency of waking up during sleep and decreases deep sleep impacting on the quality of sleep and increasing sleep disturbance. An important health issue and has been associated with other problems including obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression and increased risk of mortality.
An unacceptable risk, surely?