Last updated 10:08, Friday, 18 July 2008

Your report and leader comment on the Carlisle Airport planning application (The Cumberland News, July 11) both strain to suggest that all is confusion and doom. It isn’t.

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The application has been said by the Government to be “of greater than local importance,” to which you say “never a truer word”.

The local planning authority can’t, and shouldn’t, make local decisions on matters that are not local. So there is no confusion there.

As for the doom: your front page news item, in its third paragraph, sees fit to say: “hundreds of jobs, a huge chunk of the county’s economy and much of its credibility as a business destination would go with [losing the plans for the airport]”.

You report this as a matter of fact in a “news” item.

Clearly, The Cumberland News thinks this, and various economic development bodies in the area do continue to talk up the importance of everything to do with “growth”. But that doesn’t make it a fact.

Anyone who has been involved in the deliberations on the Carlisle Economic Strategy over the past year and a half cannot but fail to realise that there is something profoundly wrong with this approach.

It tries to suggest that business can continue, more or less, as usual.

This position gives no meaningful recognition to the major issues of our age: climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and justice in the world.

We need to move away from exploiting environmental and social opportunities in any way the markets will allow, irrespective of the external consequences.

The markets are failing in many ways. This can’t go on, and it won’t.

Pushing for more indiscriminate growth and globalisation by encouraging passenger air travel and air freight, making the area even more dependent on an economy which is hooked on fossil fuels and pumping out greenhouse gases, is bad enough.

As for jobs, there has been no thorough assessment of the overall impact on jobs. The developer hasn’t provided it, and the city council didn’t ask for it.

It’s an assumption, as it often is, that the net effect of a new, big, brash venture will be beneficial to the community.

In the current context, this is dinosaur, 20th century, business-as-usual talk.

We should be heading for a more localised, less energy-intensive, community-orientated world, and making serious preparations for new, sustainable ways of living.

There are many exciting opportunities for addressing the challenges we face.

And I would suggest that none of them has anything to do with airports.

BOB ALLAN
Tree Gardens
Brampton

• I see Andrew Tinkler is going to encourage business people to leave the train and fly to London, in order to save one hour journey time.

That one hour is dependent on a 20 min on/off time at each end – how do you check in and board 45 people in 20 minutes?
And how environmentally-friendly is this plan?

What sort of message will these business people be sending about their attitude to climate change if they take up this option?

Many old people will face a cold winter if they depend on oil for heating, I am sure they will be cheered to know that our business people can cut an hour off their journey time to London.

C McCUTCHEON
Newtown
Brampton

• There has been a lot of information in the media recently regarding the current position of Stobart Air, and its plans for Carlisle Airport, but nothing quite as misleading as your headline: “Stobart to leave at Xmas if airport block not lifted.”

There is no ‘block’ on the planning application to be ‘lifted’.

From the day that Stobart Air submitted its planning application to Carlisle City Council bosses knew that the application contained certain core elements that were a ‘departure’ from the Council’s Local Plan.

They knew that any planning application that is a departure from a Local Plan, and is approved by a local planning authority, is automatically referred to the regional Government office for assessment. They also knew that one of the possible outcomes of such an assessment could be the Government ‘calling in’ the application for consideration by a Public Inquiry.

So, there is no “block” on the planning application.

The application is exactly where it should be in accordance with the procedures of planning law.

Laws which apply to everyone in this country seeking to build or develop anything from a conservatory to an airport.

IAN GRAY
Irthington

• I have this great newspaper sent to me in Eastbourne every week and I can’t wait to read it.

Originally I come from Cumbria and, after leaving 40 years ago, I have in recent years realised just what a beautiful county it is and will possibly retire to Carlisle with my husband.

However I can’t believe what this Government is doing to Andrew Tinkler’s proposals for the airport.

How can they not see sense and what the proposals mean, both economically and socially, for both Carlisle and Cumbria? For those who are objecting, they ought to be sent to the south particularly the less desirable parts of inner cities where people would give their right arms to benefit from relatively low house prices.

ANNE PITTS
Eastbourne