Campaign groups including CAGNE and Extinction Rebellion held a protest outside a Crawley hotel this morning (Wednesday, February 28) to protest London Gatwick’s plans to bring the Norther Runway into more routine use. The groups were outside the Sandman Hotel on Wednesday morning as the examination process by the Planning Inspectorate started on the airport’s £2.2 billion planning application.
If the planning application goes ahead, it could see an increase the airport operations to around 80m passengers per annum (from 46.6m in 2019) with over 390,000 aircraft movements p.a. (up from 280,000 in 2018/19). CAGNE (Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions), Extinction Rebellion, local residents, Safe Landing – a group for climate concerned aviation workers – and the Green Party were all represented at the protest in Crawley.
If the planning application goes ahead, it could see an increase the airport operations to around 80m passengers per annum (from 46.6m in 2019) with over 390,000 aircraft movements p.a. (up from 280,000 in 2018/19). CAGNE (Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions), Extinction Rebellion, local residents, Safe Landing – a group for climate concerned aviation workers – and the Green Party were all represented at the protest in Crawley.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 No airport expansion, no airport expansion, no airport expansion.
00:07 I'm Sally Pavey, I'm chair of CAGNI.
00:11 The open hearings of the new runway application by Gatwick Airport,
00:21 where the government planning officials will look at the evidence to see if they grant a new runway to be built at Gatwick Airport.
00:28 Yes, and you've got a great turnout here from the South CAGNI and Extension Rebellion.
00:34 How pleased are you with the turnout of the protesters?
00:36 It's wonderful to see so many people feel so passionately about that this is the wrong development for this area, for the whole of the South East.
00:44 Yeah, and why is it so wrong for the area?
00:46 At the moment we face some really unsustainable areas.
00:51 We've got people fighting housing, we've got people protesting everything.
00:56 The lack of hospitals, the lack of healthcare, the lack of schools, and most importantly the lack of affordable housing.
01:03 Where are all these 14,000 workers going to live and how are they going to get there?
01:08 They're going to come by road.
01:10 It's just not sustainable.
01:12 If this is granted, this will make Gatwick as big as Heathrow is today.
01:16 And we all know what a nightmare Heathrow is.
01:19 So it's just not sustainable.
01:21 The air quality, and even if you don't believe in climate change, you know, really we've all seen what's happening.
01:28 You know, the changes to the weather patterns.
01:31 We have to understand that a major pollutant such as Gatwick Airport shouldn't be allowed to expand by 101,000 flights a year.
01:38 We're really lucky that through crowdfunding and very generous residents we've been able to afford a team of experts.
01:48 And so we will be here every day voicing the concerns of residents of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, as well as what we will do to the planet.
01:57 Big enough! Gatwick's big enough!
02:04 This expansion is going to deliver more flights, that's going to be more jobs, that's good for the economy, it's good for workers.
02:10 Well our group is saying actually we're aviation workers and we think expansion at this time during a climate crisis is crazy.
02:17 It's not a good economic investment, we're not going to be able to have these flights in the future.
02:23 We're going to waste all of our money and all of our time doing something that's in the name of workers but isn't going to benefit us at all.
02:29 We want a future where we can still travel, we can still visit some of the destinations we love to visit and not completely destroy it and ruin it for future generations or even just us in 10 years time.
02:42 So here we are objecting to the expansion, we think that rather than expand the airport should be looking to transition, to transform itself to a low carbon alternative.
02:53 Completely different aircraft, fly slower, with less emissions and we're requiring a completely different airport and runway than what's being proposed here.
03:02 Green transition! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Green transition! When do we want it? Now!
03:10 Thank you all for coming this morning, I think this is a really important day to show on the first day of this six month planning inquiry that this is not the way we need to go, this is not the future for Gatwick.
03:24 What Gatwick want to do is to make this airport as big as Heathrow airport with 80 million passengers a year.
03:32 Heathrow is the largest single climate emitter in the UK. Gatwick say they can be the largest single climate emitter in the UK but yet their planning application says that their climate impact is insignificant.
03:47 That is not the case. As you all know that is greenwash at the highest order.
04:01 I fell in love with aviation by going to Southend airshow as a kid and that smell of jet fuel I used to absolutely love and now as I approach the airport within a five mile radius of the airport I can smell that toxic kerosene and the visceral reaction I have now to that smell compared to that childhood delight of watching the airshows is palpable.
04:26 The reality is now I know that air is toxic, one in five people globally now die prematurely due to fossil fuels and ultimately my parents, I'm from a working class family, my parents and my grandma helped me out and it cost £130,000 to be a pilot, my dad was a builder and I'm still in £80,000 worth of flight training debt.
04:49 To be honest I'd much rather be flying the planes right now and I wish the climate crisis wasn't here but it is.
05:00 As aviation workers we're trained to think free from bias, to mitigate risk, to preserve life so I urge anyone who's watching this if you're an aviation worker then to please come and check out safe landing. Ultimately we believe that if we continue to expand aviation then we're going to see a much bigger crash to the job market than what we witnessed during the pandemic.
05:23 It's either coming from climate breakdown or it's going to be enforced regulations once the science catches up with the politics or the politics catch up with the science.
05:32 Cat twits, big enough! Cat twits, big enough! Cat twits, big enough!
05:36 Gas can't be sustained within this area, it's not just the pollution and everything else. So that's the first thing is that it's going to take 10, 15 years to recover from what this government's done to local government, to all sorts of other needs that need to be put in place and so the ability to actually put the infrastructure in place just won't be there.
05:56 The developers will put the second runway in and run away and leave us with a mess. And secondly I'm so heartened to hear so many people who work at Gatwick and are dependent on it as the whole of Crawley is in many respects.
06:08 Although we realise after Covid we need to diversify and not put all our eggs in that one basket up the road, nevertheless it's heartening to hear so many people who work at Gatwick and want it to survive and thrive to realise that like so many projects, developers make their profit and run away, they've over expanded the capacity of whatever it was they provided, then it collapses and the whole thing goes to pot.
06:33 So I'm really heartened to hear the brave people here who work at Gatwick and are dependent on it realise we're better off where we are now and not having that expansion.
06:42 [BLANK_AUDIO]