Section 106 Agreement

Registered Office: 128 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SW, phone
020 7981 2800, fax 020 7981 2899.
e-mail info@cpre.org.uk http://www.cpre.org.uk or Thanet branch

The certificates of lawful use regarding the operation of Manston only allow for use as at the time of their being issued. At that time there were no night flights at all, and daytime use was limited. Hence any new agreement must limit flights to this, unless planning permission is applied for to extend operating hours.

The council, at its meeting of 13 January, 2005, stipulated that the temporary night-flying policy would include aviation best practice noise monitoring, and that this must be in place before the night flights started. Best practice requires two fixed noise monitors covering the flights from each end of the runway, but there is no evidence of the two additional monitors being provided – using one mobile monitor plus two existing fixed monitors does not accord with ‘best practice’, especially as the mobile monitor should be used to investigate complaints or other concerns. Nor is there evidence of other night flights apart from the 11 allowed flights being prohibited or penalised. For example, the airport consultative meeting on 22 March, 2005, recorded the concerns about "the many late departures of EUJet aircraft (later than 11 p.m.)" (Minute item 5.1.2). However, nothing was said about these paying a fine or that the airport would prohibit them in future. Likewise, the airport stated a lack of confidence in even being able to operate to schedule (Minute 5.1.5). This therefore brings into question the validity of this consultation. If the airport ignores a formal motion from the council, and lacks confidence in operating to schedule, why should it take any notice of any future ‘agreement’ with the council?

In the Aviation White Paper, the Government said that each night flight would need to be justified – this means every night flight. This has not been done for existing flights, nor have fines been levied for many of the flights landing or taking off in the night.

The Local Government Association has a Strategic Aviation Special Interest Group, to which Thanet, and other East Kent District Councils, belong. It has stated that: "no evidence has been produced by the Government or the aviation industry to justify claims that night flights have an overall economic benefit." (SASIG Night Flights Press Briefing, 1 November, 2004). There is therefore no economic justification to allow night flights.

Having flights between 2300 and 0700 means people will rarely achieve eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, especially if there is activity before 0700. The council should be ensuring that its residents can sleep properly.

A major impact of any expansion is increase in road traffic. If passengers and staff are allowed to come by road, then this increases road traffic and the parking needed. Increasing road traffic increase noise and pollution. The problems on the A28, for example, the road most likely to be used by traffic from Ashford, are already severe, and any increase would cause air pollution limits to be exceeded, and congestion increased.

The Kent Environment Strategy progress report for 2005, produced by Kent County council (KCC), states that road traffic has continued to grow in the last two years, and what is worse, that the proportion of travel by car has also increased. Any agreement must include stringent requirement for transport to be by non-car modes. This requirement must be more than just a "green Travel Plan" – it must have targets of at least 40%, for use of modes other than the car.

Kent Council has an environment strategy which seeks to preserve and improve Kent’s environment. One of the indicators is that of air pollution, and the 2005 progress report shows that days when air pollution is moderate or high, have increased by 44% in rural areas and 133% in urban areas over the last two years. Quite clearly all local authorities need to ensure that their own areas reduce the problems and do not make these figures any worse. Therefore any agreement must include measures to reduce air pollution, whether from the aeroplanes or from road vehicles.

Aviation emissions are more damaging than those from ground-based sources, due to the effect of ‘radiative forcing’ – the impact is more than three times the impact of the carbon dioxide emissions alone.

The UK has targets – both international (Kyoto) and national – of 60% reduction in emissions by 2050. Expanding aviation will cause this target to be missed.

The Office of National Statistics (22 July 2004) stated that transport emissions in the UK have risen by 47% from 1990 to 2002. When you consider that aviation accounts for just under half the transport emissions, then it is clear that we need to apply strong brakes to aviation, to recover the 106% increase in aviation emissions since 1990, otherwise all our efforts in using more efficient cars and greater use of public transport will be wasted.

The potential impact on Thanet of climate change is enormous. Thanet was an island, and any increase in sea level will put it at risk of becoming one again. In the 1953 floods, trains could not get through from Faversham to Whitstable along the coast, instead the line from Canterbury to Whitstable had to be used. While the airfield would be needed to bring in supplies when the sea breaks through, it will be useless for wider Kent traffic.

Manston has been promoted purely on the basis of bringing jobs to Thanet, but economic benefit would most likely be negated by the costs of protecting Thanet from the rising sea.

More immediately, expansion of low-cost aviation has seriously harmed cross-channel traffic via ferries and the tunnel. The loss of employment in these services is far greater than any possible employment benefit from the airport.

While many of those jobs have been lost in Dover and Folkestone, some will have been from Thanet and other districts in East Kent. If support for employment is the local councils’ serious objective, then it should be focused on the rail and shipping services, especially as these have far lower negative impacts.

The "Environmental Economy" is worth £8bn in the South East (source: SEEDA). Much of that is due to tourism, and tourists come to the south east because of the historic beauty and for the tranquillity of the area. Encouraging aviation is contrary to that vision, and would therefore damage the environmental economy.

1 1.1 The final paragraph says: "As a general point, a number of the issues raised are difficult to properly assess since it has not been possible to review, or establish the existence, of background studies by the airport, such as any relating to environmental assessment, surface transport assessment, forecasts for the next 5 to 10-year period of expected air traffic growth, and the nature of this traffic." If the council’s own consultants cannot come to an opinion on issues, then how does the council expect the public to do so?

2 1.2 The report is apparently purely a ‘desk report’ and it provides no guarantees of accuracy or timeliness, which seems surprising.

3 2.2 It quotes paragraph 3.2 of the Aviation White Paper, which requires that the economic benefits of night flights must be assessed on "a case-by-case basis". This means that each night flight must be justified by the airport. As SASIG (to which Thanet District Council subscribes) has already stated that there is no economic justification for night flights, this means that any night-flying policy only needs to cover dire emergencies where life could be at risk.

3 2.3 Manston is a designated airport under Section 35 of the Civil Aviation Act 1982, by virtue of SI 2002/2421, so the Airport Consultative Committee is a statutory requirement.

5 2.4 The penultimate paragraph refers to the UK regulations achieving a reduction in the number of people significantly affected by aircraft noise, so this must be the target.

5 2.5 The second paragraph reinforces the need to manage noise. The UK National Ambient Noise Strategy requires that noise does not increase and in particular stresses the need "to preserve environmental noise quality where it is good." As east Kent generally has a tranquil environment, this need is of paramount importance, especially as research shows that change in noise is important (see below). Aviation noise is well known to be the most intrusive of the different forms of transport noise – the hierarchy is accepted as being: road, rail, aircraft.

6 2.6 This section can now be amended to include Planning Policy Statements. PPS 1 covers the objectives of the planning system, requiring recognition of the limits of the environment to accept further development without irreversible damage. Likewise the new UK Sustainable Development Strategy, Securing the Future (7 March, 2005) first guiding principle is: ‘Living within environmental limits’.

6 2.7 Reference is only made to residential developments, but PPG 24 also refers to noise-sensitive buildings such as schools and hospitals. As the public meeting at Chatham house School showed (11^th April, 2005), noise from aircraft passing overhead prevented speech being heard, and that was despite an amplifying system being in use. Hence aeroplanes using the airport must be sufficiently quiet to avoid such problems.

8 3.1 The first sentence is misleading. While noise is the major, immediately obvious, environmental impact, the consequential impacts of an airport are far greater. These impacts include that of climate change and air pollution, caused both by the airport activities themselves and the infrastructure associated with the airport – especially, in the case of Manston, road traffic. Therefore all the impacts, and their costs, need to be included, before any benefits from the activities can be considered. As indicated in Paragraph 1.1 above, the lack of a forecasts for development and hence the lack of a full assessment of the potential impacts of such a forecast, means that the airport should only be operating services as allowed in the existing Certificates of Lawful Use.

8 3.1 The second paragraph is wrong. While research has been carried out, there are still huge gaps in knowledge about the noise environment and its effects around airports. In addition there is evidence continuing to emerge the psychological effects of noise. So the precautionary principle must be applied to avoid damage to people’s health and well being. This is very important in Thanet’s case because it has been shown (for example at the Seattle Tacoma Airport) that the adverse effects are concentrated around an airport, while the benefits are provided to people well away from the airport. The people in the rest of Kent may appreciate the self-sacrifice of the people of Thanet in providing the airport, but it is Thanet that would suffer the worst effects.

8 3.2 Here again the complexity of noise has been over-simplified. A cursory glance at tables of logarithms will show that a doubling (log 2) is actually 3.01 dB.

8 3.4 The last sentence shows why using an average, such as Leq, is totally misleading when applied to relatively noisy events such as aircraft landing and taking off. Current measurement of noise using Leq hides the impact of the great variation in noise levels as an aeroplane goes over, especially if A-weighted filtering is used, which diminishes the low-frequency end of the noise spectrum.

To quote the Inspector’s report into Heathrow terminal 5 Inquiry (paragraph 21.3.32 et seq.): "The expert witness for the Department (of Transport) did not attempt to hide the deficiencies of Laeq measures in general and Laeq 16-hour in particular. He accepted that the relationship between Laeq and community annoyance was statistically weak. … The greatest single criticism of the Laeq approach was that it failed to give adequate weight to the number of aircraft movements. As the Department acknowledged, even a difference of half a decibel could be significant and the area enclosed by a contour could increase by 15% to 20% for each 1 dB increase in Laeq level… The Department accepted that many complaints came from people living outside the area exposed to 55 dB…The evidence confirms the Department’s view that the contours are not faultless and that other factors can and must be taken into account. "

More recent work for CPRE (Aviation, Noise and the Countryside, Transport Research Laboratory June 2003) shows that changes in noise levels are particularly significant. The Design Manual for Roads and Bridges shows that just a 1 dB change in noise increases the number of people bothered by 20%, but there is no comparable data for aviation noise. Given the disturbing nature of aviation noise, the disturbance due to a change in noise levels is likely to be even higher than for changes in road noise.

Noise is basically vibration, and if the noise is loud enough it can cause vibration damage to buildings. In addition aeroplanes can cause turbulence – at least one event is known to have removed roof tiles. Hence any future agreement needs to include restrictions to avoid such damage, by ensuring both that the flight paths are sufficiently high and that the noise and turbulence is sufficiently low to avoid damage.

Hence more precise tools are needed for showing aviation noise impacts, including Lmax. The number of events is also important.

12 3.8 This shows the importance of proper radar to track aircraft movements, which should be an essential requirement for continuing use of the airport.

12 3.9 The third paragraph refers to the importance of the local authority having a suitably qualified independent source to monitor and advise on noise issues. The independence of this source is paramount if impartial advice is to be given.

13 3.10 The last sentence refers to the reporting of action taken as a result of complaints. This is the major gap in the complaints system, as it appears that little action is taken, despite complaints.

14 to 19 We would expect that the council wish to implement the best practice for the airport, to maintain the environmental quality of the district. Looking through these summaries, such practice would include:

Limitation of operating hours: weekdays from 0630 to 2130, Saturdays 0630 to 1230, Sundays 1230 to 2130, Bank holidays 0900 to 2130

21 5.2 The penultimate paragraph refers again to the lack of noise contours and lack of forecasts.

21 5.2 The final paragraph refers to the need for Sound Exposure Level measurements of the Fokker aircraft used by EUJet. However, the council needs to put in place management that will cover any prospective aircraft, hence the best practices listed above are what is required.

22 6.2 The first sentence is misleading. At least four ‘city’ airports have no night flights (Belfast, London, Norwich and Southend) while the rest have restrictions of some sort. As Manston is effectively a city airport because of its proximity to Ramsgate, the best practice of those with no night flights must be followed, especially in view of the lack of economic justification for night flights.

22 to 28 6 The consultants identify numerous weaknesses in the existing Section 106. It is astonishing that the council has gone out to consultation without indicating that it will incorporate these criticisms into the draft revised agreement. Section 6.16 highlights why there has been so much concern about Manston, because the monitoring and enforcement has not been visible, if indeed it has been taking place. As the council has a legal duty to care for its inhabitants, we expect the council to state firmly its intention to implement rigorous monitoring and enforcement, as well as correcting the weaknesses described here.

24 6.7 Good practice requires at least two noise monitors at each end of the runway.

29 to 32 7 This brief review of some other agreements, shows that management of Manston needs to include:

39 Appendix B2: These summer 2005 contours show the contours expanding beyond that of summer 2001, and hence a deteriorating noise environment.