Representation by Peter Binding
- Date submitted
- 8 October 2018
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I lived in the middle of Ramsgate between 1992 and 2014, directly under the Eastern runway approach. I no longer live in Thanet but am deeply concerned that my friends and neighbours are now being lied to by various politicians and pressure groups, particularly in relation to night flights.
The consultation has not been advertised as widely as claimed and the information provided about the proposal has been inaccessible and unintelligible to many ordinary people. Those people have been let down by their elected representatives, all of whom are supporting the proposal to reopen the airport.
I was the Secretary of the Manston Airport Group; a group of local people who were directly affected by the airport’s operation and who campaigned for meaningful controls on the airport’s operations. The group had a seat on the airport’s Consultative Committee (MACC) which was a statutory body.
The plans being put forward for Manston are not dissimilar to plans which were advanced by Wiggins Group PLC, which ran the airport for several years following its privatisation. The airport failed then and will fail again because the potential markets are being grossly overstated. When the airport was privatised in 1998, the council decided not to demand a planning application. In doing so the council stripped itself of the opportunity to set meaningful controls of the nature and scale of the operations which took place there. As a direct result, local residents had to endure many years of unacceptable noise levels, night flights and dangerous activities.
The Consultative Committee collected data on noise levels which show that residents of Ramsgate regularly had to endure extreme noise events caused by aircraft arriving at Manston from the East. The Committee also collected data about runway usage and this data shows that it is not possible for elected bodies and bureaucrats to dictate which runway is used and how often. Most importantly, the minutes of the Consultative Committee detailed the complaints which were received about the airport’s operations. It is this record of complaints which will prove that an airport of the scale proposed would be devastating to the town of Ramsgate.
The minutes show that there were numerous night flights, primarily flights and that a veritable plethora of excuses were wheeled out to explain why flights were arriving late. The local council’s attempts to exert some level of control over night flights were woefully inadequate; night flights were rife and the council found it nigh on impossible to enforce the Section 106 Agreement which it had drawn up; eventually admitting that the agreement was practicably unenforceable.
The entire minutes of the airport’s Consultative Committee should be submitted in the bundle of evidence for examination. The minutes will show that capacity was never limited by the numbers of stands. The airport’s lack of commercial success was solely down to lack of demand.