Hello Everyone!

Two important things to tell you today; the first is that the Developmental Control Committee meeting is on the 20th January, and not the date that you may have seen in the Yellow Advertiser. This is the meeting at which the Planning Application will be discussed. It is at 2pm and is open to the public. I think it is important that you try to get there, although I appreciate that some of you may be at work. If your office is closed because of weather, please consider wrapping up as warm as you can and making the effort. If you can’t go yourself, ask your friends and neighbours or family to turn out in your place. This decision will affect them as much as at it will you, after all!

The second thing is the attachment with this e-mail; it is a reminder of the fact that you should all have written to John Denham to demand that this whole process is called in. The only fair way to get the process decided is for a Public Inquiry to take place, in public so that all may state their case openly. There would seem to be a strong feeling amongst many that the whole thing is a done deal, and if that suspicion is there it would surely be better if the Council, the Managing Director of the airport and your SAEN representatives could discuss the whole situation in the light of day, with the public able to judge for themselves. There is still time to write. Please do it if you haven’t already, write to David Amess, write to GO-EAST. Sorry to keep banging on, but this is vitally important!
Check the SAEN website for addresses you will need, and when you’ve finished all that, have a happy new year from kiti and the committee!

See you all on the 20th at the Southend Civic Centre!

This could be the last bulletin before Christmas, and you may think that it will be OK to forget about the campaign for just a couple of weeks, but before you do, there are just one or two more things to do.

Let me begin by saying ‘thank you’ to all of you who have been writing to the Councillors, both those on the Developmental Control Committee and your own Councillors. You are doing a marvellous job! If you have been busy and have missed the deadline, please send in your objection NOW before Christmas. It will be accepted right up until the date of the DCC Meeting in late January.

What we would also like you to do now is to continue to press for the whole process to be ‘called in’. This will mean that we will all be able to participate in a Public Inquiry, that the whole process will be examined in detail by experts with experience, that we will be able to put our own case, and that our objections will be listened to in full and taken into consideration. If you write to Andrew Edwards, GO-­EAST, Eastbrook, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge, CB2 8DF, asking for the process to be called in, be sure and express the following concerns:-

• The confusion over Government Policy on regional airport expansion
• The effects of expansion on 70,000 people in terms of noise, etc
• The substantial controversy that the application has given rise to in local press
• The accepted ‘infringement’ of the church on the runway as a hazard
• The presence of several schools beneath the flightpath of a predicted 53,300 flights per annum

We would be allowed to put our objections to the DCC, but only if we could contain it all in a 3-minute speech, and that does sound ridiculous!

If you have already done all that, then may I suggest that your topic for the week, to send one letter by e-mail to all the DCC, is congestion? (Send it to sbc-dcc@saen.org.uk, which is delivered to all the members of the DCC)

It has been said that there are two main roads into Southend, but there is in effect only one route towards the airport from the outskirts of the Borough, as the airport is signposted on to the A127 form Sadler’s Farm roundabout on the A13; besides, no-one in their right mind would use the London Road to get to the airport, as it is so littered with traffic lights that progress is far too slow. So in effect we only have one main A-road to the airport, which is over capacity at peak times. The airport claims that traffic will only increase by 5%, when passenger numbers increase, but at the same time, Southend is expected to build another 6,500 homes as part of the Thames Gateway, and at an average of 2 cars per household, that will be another 13,000 cars clogging up our roads on a daily basis.

So the A127, with its 50mph limit, leads us towards the airport. First stop, Rayleigh Weir, which in spite of the underpass, still regularly grinds traffic to a halt. Then when we get going again, the traffic slows inexorably towards Progress Road. Once again, we are stopped by lengthy queues. A crawl towards Kent Elms, gridlock at the Tesco roundabout, another crawl towards The Bell, and finally we can turn off to the airport! Not far now – oh, then we hit the traffic at Harp House roundabout, queuing to get in to the MacDonald’s bar and the shops on the airport trading estate. Of course, you could also come off at the Tesco Roundabout, duck along Eastwoodbury Lane, (the one that’s due for closure) , and then there’s only two more roundabouts and a set of traffic lights and a barrier to overcome, and you are home and dry!

I somehow doubt that the Council can afford to improve the infrastructure of all these approach problems; they don’t seem to have enough money to resurface the current roads, having spent so much money on putting in bumps to stop us killing each other by driving too fast along the rat-runs!

As you may know, on the 10th December we submitted a 40-page document containing our objections to the Planning Office. We expect to be adding more to it by the time the DCC meet, as there are parts which require a little more research before they are submitted.

Good luck with your letters – in spite of what you may read, we really are doing extremely well with the campaign, and your one or two letters a week will make all the difference in the long run.

If you’ve managed to read this far, thank you! Get writing, people – we are relying on you. Have a happy Christmas holiday -

Kiti Theobald and all the committee