Ok I wrote in, here was the response:
Dear All,
My apologies for not writing to you individually, but, as we have had about 20 emails criticising our stance, it is easier to do this one response. Obviously each of you have made slightly different points, but there are common themes running through your emails and it is these I will try and deal with in this letter.
1. The most common point is that we bought our homes knowing we were under a flight path. That is true of most people in South West London. Long-standing residents of South West London will argue that , though they knew they were under the flight path when they bought their homes, they had no idea that the number of planes (day and night) would reach the level they are at today. But those of us living further from the airport moved into our homes when aircraft noise was not a problem. The reason for this is that, over the last few years, extended flight paths have been used during the day to accommodate the increased number of flights (and, of course, a few years ago night flight routes were changed on an 'experimental' basis'). The real anger comes from people who feel "the aircraft noise moved to them".
The other point that nobody mentioned in their emails was the position of low-income households. I don't particularly mean those people living around the airport who would have known the score when they moved in. I am more thinking about the low income areas, such as Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, which are new to the aircraft noise. Low-income communities, often with no realistic prospect of moving away, can feel trapped by noise. This was borne out by a report I produced in 1997 called Poor Show which looked at the impact of transport policies on low-income communities in the London Borough of Greenwich. It found that a fifth of all council tenants in the borough rated traffic noise as big a problem as crime (in the mid-1990s, when the research was carried out, aircraft noise was not a problem in the borough).
2. A lot of your emails don't see noise as a real problem, implying that it is no more than an irritant. Of noise can be no more than that. But when an individual experiences a real noise problem - whatever the source of the noise: aircraft, traffic, loud music etc - it can become the dominant thing in your life. It invades your home. For many of us, though by no means all, in HACAN ClearSkies aircraft noise is causing us that sort of problem. It is what motivates us to give up hours of our free time (none of us is paid) to campaign against this intrusive noise. It is why we do not want to send our noise problem to another area: we believe nobody should be required to suffer this level of debilitating noise. It is why so many of us end up, if we can, moving away.
3. The third area many of you raised was the question of the economic importance of the aviation industry and, in particular, the question of jobs. HACAN ClearSkies have never taken an "anti-aviation" stance. What we are arguing is that the aviation industry must adopt a responsible attitude; that it should adopt the "polluter pays" principle - ie, that it pays the costs of the social and environmental problems it causes. At present it does not. When I was invited to speak to a major aviation industry conference in Paris last year, the question of how much the aviation industry should pay was raised. My view then and now is that, for too long, the aviation industry has expanded while trying to ignore the social and environmental costs of what it has been doing. Inevitably local residents groups - as well as environmental groups - were going to say "enough is enough". If, over the past twenty years, the industry had spent much more of its research and development budget on producing cleaner and quieter planes (they have got cleaner and quieter, but not by enough to match the huge increase in the number of aircraft), then expansion could take place without residents like those I represent going to the courts. I would argue that the blame for any job losses that result from the industry now having to take a more responsible attitude must be firmly laid at the industry's own door because of the cavalier attitude it has adopted in the past.
Of course I realise that doesn't make it any easier for people who might lose their jobs. Outwith the work that I do for HACAN ClearSkies, I sit on the Executive of the Socialist Environment & Resources Association (SERA), an orgainsation affiliated to the Labour Party. As its name would suggest, one of it main aims is to put pressure on governments to tackle related questions of employment and environment in a way that is beneficial to both. SERA, in its work, works closely with the trade union movement.
I hope this helps to make our overall position a little clearer.
Yours sincerely,
John Stewart
Chair HACAN ClearSkies