Airport group targets noise

THE Stop Stansted Expansion has set up a Noise Working Group to try and prove that the Government has "grossly underestimated" how the region would be affected by airport and air traffic noise if proposals for more runways at Stansted go ahead.

The move follows concerns that the Government's forecasts for noise are far lower than the effects currently experienced by a broad swathe of the regional population across Hertfordshire, Essex and Suffolk.

The group wants to extract information from the Government about the basis on which it calculated the numbers and locations of those who would be affected by Stansted's expansion, as described in the first round of the consultation.

The group has studied Stansted Airport's flight evaluation unit logs for between April and September 2002, which detail the public's complaints about excessively noisy or offtrack flights. They show the forecast areas of disturbance are much smaller than the actual areas that are already suffering from noise disturbance.

The group said its checks showed "significant" numbers of complaints across a 60 x 30 mile area with the airport at its heart, with a core concentration in the area between Chelmsford and Braintree in the east, Hertford in the west, and from Haverhill and Saffron Walden in the north down to Epping and Cheshunt in the south.

Complaints from outside the core area were received from East Bergholt, in relation to Dedham Vale, as well as Nayland and Roydon, then further out to the east coast across Constable Country, the group says.

Stop Stansted Expansion chairman Norman Mead said: "When we can see from the current picture that people are being disturbed so badly already it's completely unjustifiable to claim that up to three additional runways and five times as many aircraft movements won't significantly affect noise levels across the region."

09:36 Saturday 8th February 2003

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