Stop LBA flying more planes at night!

GALBA is meeting with our lawyers to plan our opposition to the application. Obviously this will cost money. We know times are hard but if you can afford it, please make a donation to our fighting fund.

If you’re not already a GALBA member, please join us – together we can win! It’s free and only takes a couple of minutes to fill in the membership form. We send regular email newsletters to all our members, so this is the easiest way to keep up to date.

The good news is that LBA has applied for CLEUDs before and they were rejected, first by Leeds City Council and then at a Public Inquiry. You can read more about this here. However, we can’t be sure GALBA will win again.

LBA’s new CLEUD is available on the Council’s Planning Portal. Enter Leeds Bradford Airport or 26/00926/CLE in the search box, the CLEUD is at the top of the list on the results page.

The CLEUD seeks to make certain types of planes immune from all enforcement action by Leeds City Council, even if they exceed the permitted number of night flights set by local planning conditions. Those types of planes are the most frequently flown planes at LBA.

The basis for this is LBA’s claim that those types of planes have been flying unlawfully from LBA for a continuous period of 10 years (January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019), with no enforcement action against them by Leeds City Council. If that is true, LBA argues that the CLEUD provisions, in effect, permanently exempt those planes from the cap on the number of permitted night flights.

We are consulting with our lawyers to assess the legality of LBA’s application and GALBA is also assessing the factual claims made by LBA.

The decision whether the CLEUD is granted or not will be made by a Council officer, not elected councillors on the relevant Planning Committee, the City Plans Panel. While a form of public ‘consultation’ will take place, the public cannot submit opinions or personal views on the possibility of an increase in night flights.

Only factual and legal evidence relating to the 10 years in question is acceptable – the deadline is 25 March. There is more about the process on the Council’s website.

Would expansion really be good for the economy?

LBA makes grand claims about how more flights would help the local economy. Let’s examine that claim… The reason flying is meant to be good for growth is because of business travel but the facts no longer support that assumption. Besides, LBA is a ‘bucket & spade’ airport, not a business airport.

Business travel at LBA declined by 41% from 2010 to 2017, when just 7% of all LBA’s passengers were business people. Since 2019, business travel across the country, even at London airports, has fallen by nearly a third. Why? During lockdown, everyone learned that online meetings are often as effective, definitely more convenient and always cheaper than flying overseas for face to face meetings.

LBA is overwhelmingly a holiday airport, taking far more people out of the region to spend their money abroad than it brings in. We’re not saying people shoudn’t have foreign holidays but the reality is that LBA takes more money out of West Yorkshire than it brings in.

The last official passenger survey at LBA found that international leisure travel accounted for 87% of all UK resident passengers using the airport. The majority of those leisure passengers had incomes significantly higher than the national or regional average and recent research has found that UK tourists spend twice as much abroad as foreign tourists spend in the UK. Added to the huge imbalance of outgoing and incoming tourists, this adds up to a big ‘tourism deficit’.