MONDAY 14 JULY 2003

MR D COATHAM, MS G CLARKE, MR N SINDEN AND MR T OLIVER

  Q100  Dr Iddon: In your estimation, how many local authorities take light pollution seriously?

  Mr Sinden: Difficult to say precisely. We did carry out a survey for our research of around about 50 or so district level or unitary authorities and found that over one third of authorities had no policies and no intention of including any policies in their local planning documents to control light pollution. We know that two thirds are seriously interested in the matter in terms of their planning responsibilities and their planning powers, but there is a question beyond the policy level, beyond the local plan, around what impact those policies have on the ground. All the evidence we have suggests that local authorities actually find it very difficult when it comes to the crunch to enforce their local planning policies and to enforce any conditions which may be attached to planning permissions relating to developments which may be potentially light polluting. The enforcement of planning controls, as we all know, comes at the bottom of the list of priorities when it comes to planning authorities carrying out their responsibilities. I am not sure that with the government's current plans for reform of the planning system, or indeed the extra money that the Treasury and the ODPM have put into planning delivery, through the new planning delivery grant, we are going to see much improvement in the enforcement of planning controls to tackle the light pollution issue at local level in the short term, I am sorry to say.

  Q101  Dr Iddon: So what you are saying is that government could do a lot to help strengthen the planning laws and enforcement of them.

  Mr Sinden: Yes.

  Q102  Dr Iddon: How much of the problem with the one third of local authorities which you mentioned is due to a lack of knowledge of the subject amongst those local authorities or even a lack of will to explore existing frameworks?

  Mr Sinden: I would say it is more to do with other priorities being higher up the scale for some authorities and lack of skills. We are aware from our work on the ground through our local branch network, that the planning departments in many local planning authorities are seriously under-resourced. Even if light pollution were recognised to be a political problem at the local level which warranted attention, the capacity for local planning departments to respond to that problem is very limited, as is the capacity of many local environmental health officers, who are often inundated with complaints related to noise and find it very difficult, for a variety of reasons, to tackle the growing number of complaints they receive relating to light pollution at domestic properties.

  Q103  Mr McWalter: I hear what you say about local authorities, but should the first step not be for government to implement policy planning guidelines to tackle light pollution, which would at least give those authorities who have the will the legal framework to act effectively.

  Mr Sinden: We would argue that planning policy guidance, or planning policy statements as they are soon to be known, is certainly an area where improvements are needed. There is a very patchy and inadequate coverage of the issue of light pollution amongst the current suite of PPGs we have. It is not mentioned in the key planning policy guidance notes for us, the one on the countryside and the one which sets out the general policies and principles for the planning system. So we look for improvements there[1]. Before that the starting point for us has to be the extension of statutory planning controls through the new Planning Bill over light pollution or light polluting development. We have been responsible for supporting amendments during the committee stages of the Bill in this House which would see the introduction of some kind of statutory regime similar to the one applied to outdoor advertisements, to the issue of outdoor lighting in certain areas. We believe that the outdoor advertisement control mechanism has a lot to be said for it. It enables local authorities to designate large areas of undeveloped, largely rural areas and to prevent any form of outdoor advertising happening in those areas. We think a similar set of regulations could actually be developed which would enable planning authorities to have the same powers of control over lighting in designated areas. We would urge the Committee to look at that possible route for improving planning controls, which, just to emphasise, actually has the potential to be much more powerful than any kind of exhortation in the new PPS framework.

  Q104  Mr McWalter: That is very helpful. May I ask a question which is rather distant to that but it is relevant to our subject and particularly you? Has your organisation managed to do any work on the ecology of dark skies and the extent to which certain species require dark skies in order to flourish and the extent to which there are degradations in numbers and so on?

  Mr Sinden: No, we have not. The wildlife impacts of light pollution are mentioned in the research we have published and the point we make is that a lot of cast iron research has not been done in this area. But all of us can point to anecdotal evidence about the impact of light pollution on blackbirds singing in the dead of night and behaviour of glow worms and other nocturnal creatures like owls.

  Q105  Chairman: It has not eliminated the sparrow, has it? That is the biggest problem.

  Mr Sinden: It may well have had something to do with the decline in the house sparrow. We do not know, is the point I am making. There is a real dearth of evidence, of recent research in this area, which would certainly be worth the Committee looking at.

  Q106  Mr McWalter: I was wondering whether you might contact the Butterfly Association, who are also concerned with moths. Clearly moth pupae and so on are a very important foodstuff as well as everything else. I would think that there must be some capacity.

  Mr Sinden: Yes. It is important to disentangle the variety of potential causal factors for the decline of moth or glow worm populations. In relation to glow worms, there is some evidence that the decline in local populations has been due to the loss of habitat. Clearly everyone would accept that light pollution and the extension of light pollution in some areas will have something to do with that as well.

  Q107  Mr McWalter: May I turn to Ms Clarke from the Highways Agency? You mentioned that you light 30% of your road network with these cut-off lights. Do you think it is possible to have a programme to replace the polluting and inefficient lights with non-polluting and efficient lights over a much shorter timetable than has previously been envisaged?

  Ms Clarke: Certainly on our network our intention is to move gradually to all of our lights being the most environmentally friendly. That is not just both the high pressure sodium, but also using the full cut-off. However, we do not have plans to do that in an accelerated way, but through our regular maintenance and renewal schemes, where we get the ability to change from the low pressure to the high pressure, because it is not just about the lamps themselves but the impact that then has on the spacing of the columns, the power supplies, everything linked with it. We do not have an accelerated programme for doing it. Our plan is to do it within the framework in which we would generally replace lighting schemes, during maintenance and at the end of their lifecycle, to which the ILE referred.

  Q108  Mr McWalter: So it will be another 30 years.

  Ms Clarke: Our estimate is about 10 to 15 years for that; a very unofficial figure, but at the rate at which we generally renew schemes our estimate would be about 10 to 15 years for that.

  Q109  Dr Turner: I take it that you light stretches of trunk road for road safety reasons.

  Ms Clarke: Yes.

  Q110  Dr Turner: How sound is the actual evidence to support the safety impact of lighting?

  Ms Clarke: It is sound in the sense that it was generally accepted. It is work which is actually now quite old. It was about 25 years ago that there were quite extensive studies, looking at the impact on accidents from lit to unlit roads. Generally, the evidence was quite readily accepted by a large community, but it is about 20 to 25 years' old. It had some reinforcement, when there were restrictions on power supplies and some of our lighting was switched off for a period of time, going back to the late 1970s.

  Q111  Dr Turner: Was that during the three-day week?

  Ms Clarke: Yes, that is right. Effectively there was some check against that in terms of taking light away from roads which had previously been lit. In that sense, the evidence base is quite strong, but it is something which could bear looking at again and it is something which, we as part of the Department for Transport, Road Safety Community, will be looking at. We have no timetable for that, but we will be looking at that in the scale of trying to ensure all our safety benefits.

  Q112  Dr Turner: Your memorandum says that whilst SON lighting is less likely to cause light pollution, it is less energy efficient than the SOX, which is the low pressure sodium.

  Ms Clarke: Yes.

  Q113  Dr Turner: Is that a problem for you? Does this affect your policy?

  Ms Clarke: No. I suppose it has not been a problem because we have tended to put the road safety aspects and the environmental benefits of the SON system, the high pressure sodium, as our priority. To some extent we have accepted that we have not been able to achieve the energy savings. We have accepted a different form of lighting, which actually is in most cases neutral, looked at on a scheme by scheme basis. It is not always worse in energy, because we can maximise some of the benefits in terms of the total design of the scheme. The reality is that we are not claiming any energy savings there. The energy savings we are trying to achieve look into the future. Having accepted we would use the more environmentally friendly lighting, for the future what we are looking at is the potential for asking whether the level of lighting is right and what industry can do for us in producing these high pressure lights with a more efficient use of the energy they have to have in the first place.

  Q114  Dr Turner: Do you find the industry is in fact helpful in trying to respond to your specific needs?

  Ms Clarke: Yes. We have found the industry, in the generic sense, actually quite a responsive industry. Certainly a lot of ideas come forward, not always relevant necessarily to our use of those lighting systems, but we have found the industry generally responsive and innovative in terms of looking for new ideas.

  Q115  Dr Turner: Do you find that other countries have better lighting systems available or does the British product compare reasonably well?

  Ms Clarke: It seems to compare relatively well. It is interesting, because I have a role as a member of European Groups and of the World Road Association, that lighting is not actually one of the key issues in respect of the technical aspects of it. Generally, we do not appear to be any worse off than other developed countries where lighting starts, from an environmental point of view, to come up the agenda. Noise or air quality, which often are issues, from an environmental point of view, tend to attract more attention. Generally we fare relatively well in my experience.

  Q116  Mr Key: I know the Highways Agency has taken this very seriously for a decade or so, because it is a decade or so since both you and I were in the Department of Transport.

  Ms Clarke: Yes; that is right.

  Q117  Mr Key: How high up the agenda now, for the Department of Transport particularly in their new approach to appraisal, does lighting come?

  Ms Clarke: It still sits there relatively high, although to some extent we have found not final solutions but satisfactory solutions, which generally have produced a much reduced level of light spillage outside the needs of the actual highway itself. It has not fallen down the agenda, so in terms of our new approach to appraisal of the environmental considerations, and the sub-criteria of the landscape effect, the lighting still comes in there in terms of its contributions. Certainly, looked at on a local basis, when we are proposing a road improvement or a change to the lighting scheme within maintenance, at a local level we are not allowed to forget about the importance people, particularly residents who live close to our roads, put on these things. In terms of our agenda, despite our ten years of experience, I would suggest that we do not take it any less seriously and certainly the local population is just as keen to understand the benefits they can get from these systems.

  Q118  Mr Key: You sit on the Department for Transport Lighting Board. You share experience therefore with local authorities who light far more roads than you do. Do you get the impression that local authorities, highway authorities in particular, but planning authorities, are taking this issue sufficiently seriously?

  Ms Clarke: I do not actually sit on the Lighting Board, it is one of my colleagues who does. The feedback I have received from there is that there is a great willingness to share the knowledge and share the experience. We have an advantage of having a very focused use of lighting in a way that I do not think local authorities do, but the Lighting Board provide that very good forum where both the road authorities, combined with the ILE and government, can sit together and share that knowledge. How that is then used is probably outside the area that I can comment on. We do have the right sort of forum to get the best benefit of the knowledge which is there.

  Mr Sinden: We are very pleased with the way in which the Lighting Board is addressing the issue of light pollution in relation to the work CPRE has done recently. We are addressing a meeting of the Board later on this week about the issue. It is encouraging that they want to hear about it. We would say that we would like to see the DfT and Highways Agency pushing forward the message about tackling light pollution in street lighting modernisation at the local and regional level much more vocally and forcefully than they are doing. We are keen to work with ILE on providing guidance to local highway authorities in terms of including light pollution policies in their local transport plans (LTPs) and we would like to see the Highways Agency and DfT pushing that as well very strongly at the regional and local level. I have to say, in terms of where government responsibility lies for light pollution on the issue as a whole, that we are very concerned that at the moment there is absolutely no clarity about where overall responsibility for tackling light pollution lies. We have Defra, having consulted in the Living Places paper on the security lighting issue, asking the question whether or not statutory nuisance controls should be applied to security lighting, which we very strongly believe should happen. We have the ODPM denying any sense of responsibility for tackling this issue, despite the fact that department holds quite a few of the levers for seriously getting hold of this problem in terms of the planning system.

  Q119  Chairman: We will get to that later this afternoon, when the Ministers are here.

  Mr Sinden: It will be interesting to hear what they say.