Jonathan Essex, Green County Councillor for Redhill East (Reigate and Banstead Borough Council and Surrey County Council)
I am speaking as a green councillor in Redhill and am a chartered civil engineer and environmentalist opposing this application.
This DCO application glosses over real impacts of Gatwick’s planned growth:
- 100,000 extra flights a year will increase noise but there are no plans to limit noise or meet the government’s requirement to ban night flights.
- The air pollution modelling doesn’t fit the monitoring data.
- A ridiculously short runway design life underplays the climate impact of flooding.
- We don’t know where Gatwick plans to get its extra water supply from or the impact of increasing sewage and surface water from Gatwick being pumped into Horley and Crawley sewage works.
- Gatwick’s air pollution, flooding and traffic models haven’t been shared. The Environment Agency and National Highways have refused to comment on them until they are. Now the DCO has started they should be.
- Did you know Gatwick’s plans would increase its road traffic by a third, hence the huge highway works, increase rail congestion but not fund any more rail capacity, increase local road congestion but without better bus infrastructure.
- And where is the joined-up, landscape-wide ecological assessment needed? Missing, I think.
- And the economic case falsely presents Gatwick as a business airport, hypes the jobs benefits and excludes the economic impact of extracting tourism from the UK economy.
Underestimating all these negative impacts will make the mitigations proposed completely inadequate.
Gatwick’s plans have a huge climate impact. But this has been belittled by: discounting future emissions in line with the UK’s Jet Zero strategy, offsetting, omitting the impact of contrails which the UK Climate Change Committee say will triple global warming, overlooking flights that arrive not just leave the airport which will be created by Gatwick’s growth, and ignoring how aviation locks-in economy-wide carbon emissions [including surface transport and wider induced traffic growth, and limiting investment in a green transition]. This overall Gatwick’s climate impact could be as much as a quarter of the UK’s carbon budget by 2038.
To discount, omit, overlook and ignore. And then to pretend it is insignificant. This is climate denial. To deny this process, and decisions such as this have agency in averting climate breakdown, is literally flying in the face of climate change.
Gatwick should not compete with Heathrow to be the UK’s biggest climate polluter whilst claiming its climate impacts are insignificant. Instead the UK must limit demand for flights [as called for by the UK’s official climate change advisors. For Gatwick that must start by accepting it is big enough already.
