Representation by Jonathan Swift
- Date submitted
- 18 November 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I am very concerned about Gatwick's plans to open the emergency runway for routine use. The airport maintains that doing so will create hundreds if not thousands of jobs in the Crawley/Horley area, but what they don't say is what kind of jobs these will be. They should be asked to specify, because if all they are talking about is low-paid service jobs then frankly I don't believe the area needs them. Secondly there is the impact on residents of Crawley and Horley, particularly a) noise - there is already considerable local noise from the airport, and increasing its capacity will only make this worse; b) pollution - having twice the number of runways will obviously make pollution worse in the area; c) infrastructure - not only will traffic coming to the airport increase, adding pressure to the local road network and increasing traffic in what is already a congested area but also, if the airport does create "thousands" of new jobs, the effect this will have on already stretched local services as people move into the area, such as GP services, hospital and other such services. There is also a dearth of rentable property in the area and I've not seen a proposal from Gatwick that includes projections of the negative impact bringing the second runway into routine use will have on the local community.