AEF submits response to DfT consultation on revised draft NPS
20th December, 2017
AEF has submitted its response to the Department for Transport’s (DfT) consultation on the revised draft Airport National Policy Statement (NPS).
On 24th October, the DfT reopened its consultation on the NPS which sets out the Government’s case for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Sir Jeremy Sullivan, who was appointed to provide independent oversight of the consultation process, advised that they reconsulted on crucial documents not made available at the time of the original consultation, including revised passenger forecasts and new air quality modelling. However, AEF believes the scale of the documentation published amounted to an update of the entire evidence base.
AEF submitted its response to the consultation, which closed yesterday, underlining that:
AEF considers that the revised Airports National Policy Statement (NPS) still fails to provide satisfactory answers to the environmental challenges associated with Heathrow expansion as identified previously in our response to the original NPS consultation. While the new evidence changes the scale of some of these impacts, we remain concerned about the impact of expansion in terms of noise, climate change and air pollution, and consider that the benefits of expansion continue to be overstated.
AEF’s full response can be accessed here.