The Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA) has successfully opposed Leeds Bradford Airport’s (LBA) expansion plans since 2020. But the airport keeps on finding new ways to try and increase its passenger numbers to seven million by 2030 and ten million by 2045, disregarding the repeated advice from the Climate Change Commission to stop expanding airports.
LBA wants the local night flight rules to be reinterpreted
Under local planning conditions, there is a limit on the number of planes allowed to land and take off at night from LBA. Readers may remember that last year, the airport applied to Leeds City Council seeking a reinterpretation of the meaning of those rules. The airport’s aim was to exempt a certain type of plane (known as QC0.25) from the limit on nighttime flying, allowing these planes to fly without any limit on their numbers between 11pm and 7am.
With the help of GALBA, the council rejected all three of the airport’s certificates of lawful existing use or development – known as CLEUDs. However, LBA then appealed against the council’s decisions, opening a public inquiry in Leeds in March of this year.
In July, the planning inspector who chaired the inquiry announced that he had rejected the two most important of LBA’s CLEUDs and only partially allowed the third. So, how is LBA still flying its QC0.25 planes without them being counted towards the night flight limit? To understand this, we must join Alice in Wonderland for a moment, where it gets curiouser and curiouser.
LBA’s unusual claims
At the public inquiry, LBA made some apparently contradictory claims. They claimed that the local night flight rules made it unlawful for them to fly QC0.25 planes at night at all. Yet, they also argued that these planes had been flying continuously for ten years, meaning the rules no longer applied, therefore they were allowed carry out unlimited night flights without these planes being counted towards the limit on nighttime flying.
This argument can be difficult to understand, but it is used in other areas of law. For example, if a public footpath isn’t used for a long time, a landowner can apply to the council to end its designation as a public right of way.
The results of the inquiry
The problem for the airport is that the planning inspector agreed that the local rules mean QC0.25 planes are not allowed to fly at night at all. He did not agree however that LBA had broken the rules for ten continuous years. The result is that LBA cannot lawfully fly QC0.25 planes at night at all. This is bad news for LBA, at least you would think so.
However, at present Leeds City Council has decided that because QC0.25 planes cannot lawfully fly at night, they also cannot be counted towards the limit on the number of planes allowed to fly at night. Therefore LBA is flying as many QC0.25 planes at night as it desires, and the council isn’t counting them towards the cap on night flights – exactly what LBA wanted in the first place.
Real-world consequences of airport expansion
Another result of the council’s decision is that thousands of people who live under the flight path are having their health damaged and their air polluted. In LBA’s last planning application, they accepted that: “Environmental noise … has been linked to a range of non-auditory health effects including annoyance, sleep disturbance, cardiovascular disease, impairment of cognitive performance in children, higher BP, hypertension or the prescription of antihypertensives, ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, neuronal disorders and cardiometabolic disease.” Noise, especially at night, isn’t just ‘a bit of an inconvenience’ – it’s a serious public health issue.
In addition, LBA’s unlawful nighttime flying means that even more greenhouse gas emissions are being pumped out into the atmosphere, harming the climate we all depend on, when we should be trying to reduce emissions as much and as fast as possible. By the way, if you’ve heard the aviation industry talk about so-called ‘sustainable’ aviation fuels sorting out their emissions problem, don’t just accept it. I urge you to take 30 minutes to listen to this well-informed and well-balanced Radio Four programme, Rethink, to find out the facts.
A workable solution
So, what is the way forward? There’s a clause in the local night flight planning conditions that gives Leeds City Council the power to make it lawful for QC0.25 planes to fly at night. They don’t have to wait for an application by LBA; they can just do it. GALBA has asked the council to use that power as quickly as possible.
It may seem odd that GALBA wants the council to allow QC0.25 planes to fly at night; but here’s the thing – once they’re lawfully allowed to fly, they must also be counted towards the limit on night flights. If or when LBA exceeds that limit, as they have every year since 2022, the council can say STOP! Of course, the council would have to choose to take enforcement action against LBA but this time they would be doing so in the full knowledge that a public inquiry has clarified the meaning of the night flight rules.
To be clear, GALBA is not calling for the airport to close down, we just don’t want it to expand. That’s because of the damage that expansion would do to local people’s health, the air we breathe and the future of our children and their children on the only planet we have. Stay tuned for more updates and, who knows, maybe another trip into Wonderland.
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