Luton-10

[LTNman]

The planning inquiry is a bit of an eye opener. To encourage growth the Town Hall offered incentive schemes plus “super incentive schemes” to raise passenger figures fast, which is what happened, meaning the airport operator and the airlines were being paid by the Council to raise passenger numbers.

The problem was that the growth was happening faster than quieter aircraft were being introduced. This had been carefully worked out meaning 18m was not meant to happen until 2028 when more quieter aircraft were meant to be introduced by. This was being highlighted to the Council as early as 2016 who decided to allow the breach in planning permission to occur, as they were making money out of it. This happened for 3 consecutive years until 2019 when nighttime restrictions were introduced due to pressure from outside the Council to comply with the planning permission it had granted.

Not happy with this the airport operator in consultation with LRT and the Council put in a planning application to the same Council to allow more aircraft noise while at the same time increasing capacity to 19m. This went before the planning committee who approved the application thus ignoring 500 objections, as they always approve any application coming from LRT or LLAOL.

At the planning inquiry a member of the public asked whether the 19m could have been approved but the extra noise rejected, as this was allowing the noise contours to be extended. The Council’s chief planning officer, after a long pause and who was by now getting flustered gave a misleading answer by implying no when the answer was yes. The correct answer was only extracted by the public inquiry chairman after further probing after the member of the public had left.

The public inquiry continues.

So what will the final outcome be? I suspect the planning permission decision will be upheld but the Council will be shown to be biased and acting in its own interests and not taking a balanced view with the interests of the public being taking into account.