Representation by Nicholas Dennys
- Date submitted
- 20 October 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
Passenger numbers will double, jobs and inhabitants will rise. This is not an incremental increase. We don't want the noise We don't want the vehicular expansion We don't want public services drained, they cannot double & may not even manage incremental increase. Who is we? This entire area is one of the most beautiful with views all around the High Weald extending to the North Downs and on the other side to the South Downs. Views stretch for 70 miles in some places. What I can see, can see me. For a view, you need a low valley as much as a high hill. The amenity and pleasure is not confined to the designated AONB area, etc. Its many million people. This kind of country gives enjoyment and refreshment not only to those who live and work in it, but to everyone who passes through it or comes to stay from elsewhere in the UK or abroad. Every environment is an international issue. We provide holiday accommodation and the views, walks and the relative peace are some of the things visitors wax enthusiastic about. It also gets people on their feet, their push bike or their horse. Airports serve many needs but every diminution of that amenity increases its alternative over the long term - seat bound entertainment & increases the burden on the same services such as the NHS that Gatwick's expansion will over-stretch. Gatwick blight of its own area. The relief to wild-life during lockdown, documented by Sir Richard Attenborough, from the silencing of air and other noisy and polluting traffic, was remarkable. This too is also a matter of international importance in the case of many areas, such as Ashdown Forest. The higher more inclusive policy is to end the process by which corporations, with tunnel vision on their own requirements, externalise their costs onto the community so that all travel of which Gatwick is merely one intensively damaging node, is continent in its use of the common wealth of the environment. Without the capture of these externals, “Flight Path to the Future” can be no more than partisan, aspirational, wash. We want the “NO” to be resolute enough for Gatwick to get the message and to stop the endless waste of their time, our time and the human and natural world we all enjoy around us. We would assert that, as it is a matter of law that externalisable costs are seldom the responsibility of CEOs and shareholders, it is necessary for our political representatives to levy fully proportional financial and regulatory impositions upon them, sufficient to fully ameliorate any damage, as a condition of permissions. This is not limiting the freedom of business but requiring it to be responsible for its external costs - a kind of governmental nappy-changing of immature businesses until such time as they self-regulate. Without Further we believe there should be draconian costs on all organisations that thrive by externalising their costs to the community and taxpayers around them, by impositions proportionate to those costs. We do not believe Gatwick or any other of innumerable free riders will take their responsibilities until they have to diminish the burden of such costs. This is because the legal structure of commercial organisations requires response only to the profit motive for senior executives and for shareholders at the expense of all other motives. It is increasingly clear that Govt's primary duty must be to become the guardian of the National Environment, not just in special parks of a few square miles but everywhere including urban environment. This will only be achieved if the law is changed by requiring environmental levies to be placed at the core of the revenue system. We must end placing the revenue burden on human labour (taxes on income and sales, such as VAT). They damage individual and business activity by vastly raising the margin of productivity, so numerous human opportunities are never taken up as too expensive. Instead, occupied or empty, we should require payment of location charges (ie for off-site community created value) by every site from homes to Gatwick Airport. This way the community would charge its members and businesses proportionate to its maintenance and new provision under its primary duty. The viability of all land use at every point and moment would be measured by its effect on demand for locational quality, and will build supply & compensation into every action of individuals and corporations and give the national community, as well as individuals, oversight of it through the public pricing of every location. Gatwick’s damage to its locality will impact other users of the surrounding environment in a way which could be measured and would become a loss to the exchequer, where damaging, and a gain where enhancing. People pay less for houses with noise pollution and under such a location charge proportionate to location value would reduce returns to the exchequer. As individuals we need to remember that "location, location, location" is not just a consideration for the moment of buying a house, or siting a business, but a value on which we base our life's decisions and aspirational engagements. Currently, for some strange reason, we pay location price to the one party who does not create the surrounding environment quality - the previous occupier, the mortgage company, the landlord. Using it as the revenue base of government funding will bring individuals and the community as a whole into a partnership where the value and price of location, its increase and deterioration, is measured and placed at the core of governmental and individual response to the environment. Instead of enabling corporate interests in the pretence of serving the communal, all interests will all be talking from the same sheet. There is no other way in which they and we can mutually aspire to environmental enhancement.