Heathrow Consultation Response Form
Cllr. Vlod Barchuk briefly mentioned the matter of a proposed 3rd runway at Heathrow at last week’s WARA meeting.
He has since sent out the Consultation response form. At his suggestion I’m forwarding it to WARA members.
The Government is consulting about its plans to build a 3rd runway at Heathrow airport. This runway would be to the north of the two existing ones.
Ealing Council is opposed to the building of the 3rd runway, in particular because of the additional noise and pollution that it would cause in the borough. The 3rd runway would create new flight paths coming out over central Acton and also over Northolt and Greenford (saying exactly where is not possible as the Government has not clarified this). The maximum annual number of flights in and out of Heathrow would increase from the present limit of 480,000 a year to about 702,000 by 2020.
When the planning inspector gave permission for Terminal 5, in 2001, it was on the condition that there would be no further expansion of the airport. The Council believes that the Government should honour its agreement to respect this condition.
The Government has published a consultation document (if you don’t want to read several hundred pages, a summary is here and questionnaire, with replies to the latter to be returned by Wednesday 27th February. The questionnaire has flaws: it is badly written and difficult to understand in places (the Plain English Campaign has criticised it as ‘atrocious’); and it invites comments on the noise and pollution from a 3rd runway but does not explicitly ask for views on the principle of an extra runway – however you can insert comments in reply to Questions A8 and E1. And the Government did not think it necessary to send the consultation document and questionnaire to any more than a very small of Ealing borough residents. Nevertheless, it’s the best Government consultation residents are likely to have so I would urge you to complete the questionnaire to register your opposition to the 3rd runway. There is a freepost address for returns on the last page.
You can order a copy of the document from the Department for Transport (though time is running out to do this) or fill in online (but as the online version requires you to answer all of the opaque questions you may not wish to do this). Yesterday the Council received 1,000 questionnaires from the DfT, which we’re distributing to libraries and leisure centres. We have also scanned and ‘PDFed’ the questionnaire (see attached) if you want to print out. Please forward this to your email contacts.
If you want to know more about why the Council is opposed to a 3rd runway please visit www.2MGroup.org.uk which sets out the views of the councils (including Ealing) that are working together on this issue.
click here to view the form, or alternatively, right click and select 'save target as' to save a copy to your desktop.
