MONDAY 14 JULY 2003

MR P LUMMIS

  Q124  Chairman: You are from Huntingdon.

  Mr Lummis: Huntingdonshire District Council, yes.

  Q125  Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. You were sitting in the previous session presumably and heard what was said.

  Mr Lummis: Yes.

  Q126  Chairman: We are going to try to take it a little further. May I ask about the developments in your jurisdiction? Which of them have been subject to light pollution policies? How many of these have been major developments?

  Mr Lummis: Since 1998 all the developments the district council have gone through in planning terms, major supermarkets and the like, have all had an element of lighting in them which has been looked at and planning conditions in relation specifically to lighting have been put upon them. I should like to pick up on the point and say they have been enforced as well.

  Q127  Chairman: I have had cases in my constituency, especially B&Q stores with huge orangeness above the stores annoying neighbours, and the council has not done much about that; in fact, to be honest, they have done nothing about it. What would you do in that situation?

  Mr Lummis: Where we have new planning applications, since we had our supplementary planning guidance for external artificial lighting, we have been in the position to go through the process of looking at the whole of the application, which takes in the lighting side. What the planners now do is pass the lighting element of the applications to myself as the lighting engineer. I look at it. Sometimes I have to break it down into language they are happy with and they understand what the effects of that lighting are. Quite often the applications do not have sufficient information and we ask for more specific information about the type of luminaire, the actual levels of lighting up to the site boundary and beyond the site boundary as well. I then make my recommendations back to the case officer and we then normally would agree what conditions would be put on the actual application. I then normally go out with the enforcement officer, with a lux meter, and check that the conditions which have been put upon them are discharged before we give full planning permission.

  Q128  Chairman: How many cases do you get really nasty about percentagewise?

  Mr Lummis: Not many.

  Q129  Chairman: That is the crunch, that you do something about it.

  Mr Lummis: Not many, because as a lighting engineer there is always more than one solution. The problem is that because some people do not understand what they are doing in terms of lighting, they put forward a proposal for a cheap solution, whereas what we do is go back to them and if I have the time or the opportunity to speak directly with their lighting design consultants, I discuss the technical merits of what they are proposing and we can normally suggest to them that their proposal will not get planning permission in its current format. Normally they are prepared to review and to look at solutions which will come up with what they want, which is to light the area.

  Q130  Chairman: Tell me about that conversation. Tell me about it. They ask what they have to do to get away with it. Is that what they say?

  Mr Lummis: Yes. It is fine. What I am trying to explain to them is that I do not want any light going up directly from the luminaire. It might come up from the ground, but that is a different issue. We do not tolerate any upward light from the luminaire itself. We have either to point them towards manufacturers or types of luminaire—we have been talking about fully cut-off, we have been talking about curved tempered glass—or floodlights which have the shape of a reflector which will cause all the lights to be projected in a downward direction. Once they have understood that and the fact that they can still get a cost efficient solution which will comply with our planning conditions, we can normally find a way forward. I cannot think of any we have had to refuse or where we have not, by negotiation and practical discussion, knowing that we have the teeth to enforce it, managed to come up with solutions.

  Q131  Chairman: Who are the worst offenders? I was rather cruel to B&Q; not that I mind. Sports facilities or the lot of them?

  Mr Lummis: Sometimes you have to look at some of the supermarket chains in that what seems to be happening is that they are very cost driven. I am concerned—it is a slightly different issue but it is related—that they are trying to get as much lighting at the levels they want for car parking for example, with the minimum number of luminaires. They are actually driving down the height of the luminaire against the wattage, which is a problem in itself. They can sometimes cause problems, but once they realise that we are not going to accept it, they normally have to backtrack and look at it again.

  Q132  Chairman: What do you do about the ones which are up already, which had planning permission in the past? Do you just say too bad, life started a few years ago?

  Mr Lummis: That is a genuine problem. Because they have put in a planning application and it has been approved and they installed it according to the accepted practice of that period, that is where we have a problem and that is where the big difficulty is for us as a local authority. We cannot force them to change, because there are financial implications to putting in completely new luminaires or changing it all completely. Unless there are many complaints or problems, where, for example, a supermarket chain receives enough complaints about how terrible an older design is and they realise public opinion is against them and we change the whole attitude of the public's tolerance of upward light and the problems it causes until they are forced by measures like that to do something, they are not going to do a lot about it. It is going to come back to this cycle of time where, if they make a new application, or they have to change the lighting in 10 or 20 years' time, then there is the possibility that we would be able to implement our guidance notes on them as we looked at planning and lighting for them.

  Q133  Chairman: Some very eminent individuals have lived in Huntingdonshire in their time. Did they have private security lighting around their little pads? Do you have any jurisdiction over them?

  Mr Lummis: There is actually very little lighting around the outside of the property of a certain eminent person who lives in Huntingdonshire. Really the only thing we notice is that there is infrared lighting on the CCTV camera at the entrance. There is not a lot around the actual property, because it sits on a hill and can be seen quite prominently from a distance. The other thing is that it is surrounded by trees and the combination of the two means that there have not been any problems.

  Q134  Chairman: You have obviously had a look at it.

  Mr Lummis: I drive by it most evenings going home, so I do know the location.

  Q135  Dr Turner: It is good to hear that you are effectively carrying out lighting impact assessments as part of your planning application procedures. That is very good. What is your experience with enforcement on any developers who do not actually conform to the controls you put on?

  Mr Lummis: I am a lighting engineer not a planning officer, but we do have two enforcement officers with whom I work very closely. We have built up a level of trust, where they have confidence in what I am telling them and therefore what happens is that when a development is finished, sometimes it could be that there is a complaint and sometimes we will go and have a look at it to see whether what we have said they should be doing they are doing. If they are not, if we see that there is an infringement of one of the planning conditions, then the enforcement officer will write to them initially and say they are in breach of conditions, 1, 2, 3, etcetera and they are then given a certain period of time to respond. If they refuse to respond in that period of time, the officer can then state that they are in breach of planning conditions and until such time as they comply with those planning conditions the lighting is to be turned off. On occasions we have done that; we have actually insisted that they turn it off. Because it is a breach of planning condition, we do have a certain amount of teeth and strength to do that. It is a question of the planning enforcement officer and the lighting engineer working together. If I had my way and there were enough money, especially in some of the really big authorities, there ought to be a lighting engineer as a planner, in planning departments. I work very closely with the planning department. We are not a huge authority: about 20 or 30 planners. I know them all personally and they all know me and that is good. We have got over this departmental mentality. The difficulty is that sometimes you have lighting engineers who perhaps work down at the depot and are very much linked to the idea of highway lighting, whereas in fact lighting engineers, as the ILE is trying to promote, should be a lot more central, involved in planning processes and all the other things. It is important and it is down to the lighting engineers to have a commitment and a concern to work with the planners to do this and we are doing it in Huntingdonshire and successfully.

  Q136  Dr Turner: That is good. You have not actually had to drag anyone screaming through the courts to get your way.

  Mr Lummis: No, not quite that. I can give you one very brief example, almost at the extreme of it. We have a sports facility next to a chicken farm and some of you are perhaps aware that chickens are very, very sensitive to light. Anything above half a lux and they start having problems deciding whether it is daytime or nighttime, whether they should be roosting or not. When I saw the original application, this particular sports club had bought some second-hand footlights. I told them that if they put them up we would not approve them. There was a lot of toing and froing and it got very political. At the end of the day they went and bought the modern type with flat glass, mounted horizontally so there is no upward light at all and we actually tried putting two of the other sort just to see and we did a trial. They acknowledged, when we went into the chicken farmer's land and took measurements, that the old lights were the ones causing the problems. When they changed it over and put all new flat mounted floodlights and we went with a lux meter, I did not get anything above half a lux. The mathematics had proved that would happen, but we then confirmed that by going out and doing it.

  Q137  Chairman: You kept the chickens' sex life happy.

  Mr Lummis: Absolutely.

  Q138  Dr Turner: This sounds very good. You sound to be at the cutting edge of lighting as a planning consideration. How well do you think other authorities are dealing with it?

  Mr Lummis: I was saddened to hear some of the figures. We are a small authority. It could be education and the fact that most authorities have lighting engineers and it is just a question of the planning authority having to take the lead and be aware of their responsibilities and get in on the act of working with the lighting engineer. It may be that they are going to have to allow for budgets. My authority has designated a certain amount of money so that when my time is spent on dealing with planning issues, my money is carried across to that. They have taken that step of saying it is going to take money to do it, but they are prepared to do it because they think it is important. I believe most of these other authorities will have lighting engineers. Unfortunately not all lighting engineers would like to be involved as much with planning, because they work down at the depot rather than in the main offices, but we need to get the message across to planners of other authorities. I know the ILE is keen to make sure that although the core membership of the Institution of Lighting Engineers consists of highway engineers, that message of them taking more responsibility and showing that they have services and skills which other people ought to know about, is a message we are promoting actively as well because it is important.

  Q139  Dr Iddon: It sounds as though you settled a number of cases by negotiation, which is always the best way forward. Would you, or even could you take a nuisance to court?

  Mr Lummis: You could. What would happen is that because it is the planning authority which has actually created a supplementary guidance in relation to external artificial lighting, because they actually put conditions in the planning permission, that unless those conditions are discharged the people fail under the planning side, because the planners are used to that type of action and the fact that they know how to deal with people who fail to discharge the planning conditions, they are used to doing it in that way, it is irrelevant whether it is lighting, or whatever it happens to be, because they are used to that type of thing. They could do it and yes, they would. They might ask me to give evidence and to advise them, but I do not see any problem, because it is a planning condition and therefore it has the strength of law with it to enforce it.