First of all tomorrow is the LAST DAY to submit your response to North Somerset Council on the BIA expansion Master Plan. If you haven't responded yet, please do so NOW! Details are on the campaigning website. See link to Stroud District Green party's submission here.Photo: Bristol Airport fuel
The special meeting held by North Somerset Council's Strategic, Planning and Economic Development panel (SPED) was yesterday. I have a report that the meeting started uncomfortably with BIA being given an uninterrupted 30 minutes to give its case and other groups having to fight to even speak for 3 minutes each (at the beginning of the meeting they were told they wouldn't be allowed even this, but councillors rebelled and the chair relented). Despite this, it was apparently a very one-sided affair with only one other person speaking in favour of expansion. At the end a resolution was passed 3-1 (with several abstentions) that the P&R committee "should not accept the master plan until full and independent reports had been prepared on all 5 areas mentioned", these being:
1) surface access, parking, traffic
2) climate change, biodiversity, pollution
3) economics case
4) physical changes to the airport eg terminal building etc
5) policy background
This is as good as we could have hoped for - but we must insist that all of these reports are in-depth, independent, transparent and if possible scoped with our cooperation, and be prepared and published well before ANY decision is made upon the Master Plan. This is all huge progress. Let's hope 2007 will bring success!
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At the London Mayor's Question Time on 13 December, Green party Londn Assembly member Darren Johnson quizzed the Mayor on why his London Plan revisions were only proposing opposition to expansion at Heathrow and still backing expansion at Gatwick and Stansted. In a dramatic u-turn, Ken Livingstone told Darren he would commit to a further revision of the plan, ruling out any expansion in London and
the South-east, arguing that the aviation industry had told him "a pack of lies" about the economic benefits of expansion.
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