Putney’s civic society takes the town’s case against Heathrow noise to MPs today, when Mike Fawcett gives evidence to the Commons inquiry into a third runway.
Fawcett, a member of the Putney Society, faces the Transport Committee from 4pm to 5pm on a panel of five. The committee decides who it invites to give evidence in person, and this is the first panel of the inquiry to include residents’ groups. Since early September, MPs have heard from economists, airlines, airports, Transport for London and Hillingdon Council.
Beside him sit two residents’ associations from closer to the airport, Longford and Molesey, the Colne Valley Regional Park Trust, and Parmjit Dhanda of Back Heathrow, which campaigns for expansion. Straight after them, at 5pm, MPs question the Climate Change Committee, the government’s independent climate advisers.
The Society, a volunteer group with more than 900 members across Putney and Roehampton, sent its written evidence to the committee over the summer, after MPs asked for submissions by 23 July. Fawcett is the member who dug the detail out of the government’s documents on what a third runway would mean for Putney’s quiet.
The Society’s case turns on the 3pm switch. Every afternoon, Heathrow’s landing planes change runways, giving people under each approach a break of around nine hours, half the airport’s operating day. The approach to the southern runway passes over northern Putney.
With three runways, the Society says, the southern runway would take landings for three quarters of the day on average, cutting Putney’s break from half the day to a quarter. It says the government’s consultation never spells this out, and that the figure only emerges from paragraph 2.13 of a technical annex on noise.
“Our view is that halving our respite is totally unacceptable,” the Society told the government in its consultation response. It wants a guarantee of at least nine hours a day without landings overhead written into the policy.
It also wants a seven-hour ban on night flights, from 11pm to 6am. The Society says the draft policy offers six and a half hours, and by its count 16 planes land between 4.30am and 6am.
It wants a noise limit tied to what a two-runway Heathrow is forecast to produce, in place of the government’s test of no worse than in 2024, which the Society calls “so feeble as to be completely worthless”. And it wants planes brought in on steeper approaches, so they pass over Putney higher and quieter.
The government’s consultation closed on 1 September, but the committee questions Heathrow Airport itself tomorrow morning, and any amended policy has to go to a vote in the Commons before it takes effect. Wandsworth Council also opposes a third runway.
How to watch
The session is streamed live on Parliament TV from 4pm, and the committee publishes a transcript afterwards. The Society’s written evidence is already on the committee’s website.
We will report what Fawcett told MPs, and what they asked him.
