Heathrow: Noise Mitigation

John Howell Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) for securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to participate briefly in it. Although Henley-on-Thames is a little further up the River Thames than his constituency, it is also very badly blighted by noise pollution from aircraft, particularly those on easterly operations, which appear to do the equivalent of a handbrake turn over Henley, with all the attendant noise that brings.

I invited Heathrow, NATS and others to a public meeting to look at this problem. They willingly attended it, for which I am very grateful to them. However, their solution was that everything depended on the air patterns—whether aircraft were on a westerly or easterly approach. I can understand the logic of that, but it does not answer the whole question.

The fact that the landing routes have changed is a big contributor to the difficulties my constituents face. It affects the whole of Henley. Emails from my constituents say that they are woken up early in the morning, particularly with the old 747s that are among the noisiest aircraft in the skies, and late at night. It is necessary to do something about that. I approve of what my hon. Friend has said about steepness of the descent. That would keep aircraft significantly higher as they come in to land over my constituency, which would be a major improvement. Something needs to be done about older aircraft, because when the big 747s come in they are powered in such a way—I do not know whether the pilots do it deliberately, but they certainly seem to—that it creates an enormous noise.

Like my hon. Friend, I am looking forward to the results of the inquiry into the future of Heathrow. We need the capacity and we need to build something there, but if we are going to do so, we must solve the mitigation problem first.