Plane emissions focus of court fight
Bristol Airport clashed in the High Court with anti-expansion campaigners over whether emissions from planes count towards its environmental impact.
Campaign group Bristol Airport Action Network (BAAN) were appealing the decision of the Planning Inspectorate to allow the airport to expand, overturning North Somerset Council’s refusal of permission.
The airport wants to increase its annual capacity from 10 million to 12 million passengers by extending its terminal and building additional parking.
BAAN’S lawyer Estelle Dehon identified six grounds, mostly around emissions, on which she argued there had been errors of law in the Planning Inspectorate’s decision to allow the expansion to go ahead.
But Michael Humphries, representing the airport as an interested party, said that this was an “overly legalistic criticism” of the planning inspectors’ report.
He added: “Fairly read, this is an exemplary inspectors’ report.”
A major point of contention between the airport and the campaigners is whether emissions from flights should be considered as an environmental impact of the development.
Ms Dehon had argued that the Planning Inspectorate had been wrong in interpreting planning policies as not relating to aviation emissions.
Mr Humphries, however, said the Planning Inspectorate had been “perfectly correct” that planning policies did not apply directly to aviation emissions and that they only applied to the environmental impact of the airport buildings and ground vehicles.
He claimed that the impact of aviation emissions had still been taken into account but that reducing them had been judged to be a matter of national, rather than local, policy.
He said: “The key point of difference between parties is how this is to be achieved. Other parties are saying this should be addressed through restrictions on capacity [of the airport]. The airport is saying this should be controlled at a national level.”
Mr Humpries drew a comparison between the case of the airport and the example of a council considering the impact of a housing development. He said that the environmental impact of the houses would be taken into account, but not the emissions from each car driven onto the estate.
In contrast, Ms Dehon said that considering the sustainability of the airport buildings but not the planes was like considering an application for a chicken farm by looking only at the sustainability of the barn building and ignoring the impact of the birds or their excrement.
Ms Dehon rejected the idea that the Planning Inspectorate had taken aviation emissions into account. She said: “Inspectors found a way of taking aviation emissions into account by leaving them to someone else.”
Other issues raised by BAAN, including the validity of local carbon budgets and the impact of non-co2 emissions, were also contested by both Bristol Airport and the Planning Inspectorate.
No immediate judgement was made at the end of the two-day hearing. Mr Justice Lane said: “I will reserve my judgement, as it befits something of this nature, and hand it down in due course.”