Open Floor Statement of Peter Lanyon, 23 July 2014

Registration ID 10021812

I have been living for 12 years in Little Plumstead, 2 KM downwind of the massive

bridge and associated roundabouts to be built for the NDR over the Plumstead Road

and the Norwich-Cromer railway line.

I show that on the edge of NCC’s Drawing Percentage of Change in Traffic Flow

(AADT) 2032, Slide 1 which I have enlarged for us Slide 2. You’ll see Little

Plumstead at the top right-hand side, with the NDR like a bleeding wound down the

middle, cutting my village off from Thorpe End, another village in our parish.

Other than showing that wound very well, I hold no brief for that map at all. Among

other things it fails to show that the NDR will be elevated hugely above the ground

on the bridge as it passes between the two villages, which inevitably will make the

noise we will suffer from it that much worse. But please notice that the red and blue

lines on that map, which are supposed to represent where roads will carry less or

more traffic if the NDR is built, aren’t in fact roads at all. They’re mythical

abstractions between various locations. The thick red line that starts suddenly at the

middle of Thorpe End Village Green and ends just as abruptly at the Brick Kilns

public house in Little Plumstead, suggests at least an enormous increase in thirst

among the Thorpe End villagers if the NDR is built, but also that my home will be

particularly beset by that increase in traffic and its noise. Interesting that all the roads

going to another public house on the map, at Great Plumstead, are shown in blue as

carrying reduced traffic. Now that pub hasn’t been there for decades. Whether that

may serve as a reverse corollary, confirming the abstraction, or merely to invalidate

the map altogether, I’m not sure. But I can assure you our villages are where the

map says they are, and the NDR will be a grievous wound to them.

I would instead like to draw your attention to the introductory paragraph in NCC’s

Environmental Statement Volume 1, 11. 1. It’s on page 617. Slide 3

This is NCC reassuring us about “introducing traffic into a relatively quiet rural

corridor in the north and east of the city”. And it says it is at pains to discover

“whether there are any likely significant environmental noise impacts”.

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Please will you notice:

• That it normalises traffic, as though it’s a given and has always been with us

• That it further normalises “the city” by marginalising in comparison “a rural

corridor” to the “north and east” of the normalised city

• That it completes the urbanocentric nature of this introduction to its section on

Noise by relating the contingent “rural” absence of traffic to the given “urban”

traffic

• That it uses the seductively misleading verb “introduces”, as though this

peripheral rural corridor is going to welcome a gift, a benefit, for which it ought

to be grateful

• That it downplays the perfectly obvious noise this is going to make by

enquiring gently whether there may be any noise impacts

• That it further casts doubt upon the noise by wondering whether those noise

impacts could possibly ever be “significant”

• That it denigrates the rural area the NDR is to occupy by calling it already a

“corridor”, with its connotions of movement, of hurry, of busy clacking heels

and people bumping into each other.

• That nowhere does it even mention the contingent noise of the house building

and the industrial development that will inevitably result from the NDR, that

indeed the NDR is designed to produce

• That it artificially and deceitfully tries to separate from the effect of the NDR

the contingent damage the new road would do to the countryside as whole –

to the entire Gateway to the Broads, and to an existent way of life for Norfolk

people, among other things.

This is not only a circular argument, normalising what is proposed over what is the

existent fact. It is an attempt at bogus contextualisation – to force a imaginary

context around what would truly be an imposition. It is so biased, so politically

contrived, that it ought to disqualify this bit of the ES from the word go. Yet it is very

informative too, in revealing what is really going on.

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Let me first say what is wrong with it. It is downright untrue that the NDR would go

along a rural corridor of any sort. Everyone knows that instead north eastern Norwich

stops before Thorpe Woods well to the west of Thorpe End – as its name suggests -

and that from there to the North Sea is uninterrupted countryside. To suggest that

there is a “corridor” of any sort there gives an entirely false context for the ensuing

77 pages of the Environmental Statement.

There’s a very revealing statement on page 634 of the ES volume I, para 11.3.44.

Slide 4 “The majority of the receptors that are expected to be affected by noise

would be dwellings”. It’s also repeated in a different form on page 678, para 11.7. 37.

Yet the countryside is characterised not by dwellings, but by lack of dwellings. Do

you see the blind, urban arrogance of that?

What is proposed by NCC and then justified is a very noisy intrusion of urbanity and

building development into an area of countryside of particular quality.

It is the countryside that is the existent fact, into which NCC wish to intrude

something. So let us look at this countryside in its own right:

• It is countryside that is valued and cherished for what it is - the normality that

NCC daren’t face up to and has to use devious language to avoid

• It is countryside that is what is there at present,

• It is countryside that the NDR would destroy.

• It is countryside that has always been there, in its various guises through the

aeons, - since it rose from the sea, since it became a Roman estuary, that

became the marshes that were then dug for peat to fuel St Benets Abbey, and

subsequently became the Broads, through which the River Bure and the River

Yare run to the sea, with the 8 mile long Mousehold Heath on the higher land

between them, on the slopes of which my village stands, along with

Rackheath and many other villages that have owed their existence to the

marsh and to the heath

• It is countryside always changing, always evolving, but steadfastly existent, a

bit of which NCC now wish to destroy for ever

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• Countryside that has remained there even since humans began to assert

themselves on it, but that now is threatened with extinction, a sacrifice to –

well, to what?

• Is it to be a sacrifice to the motor car, that we know is a major cause of

climate change and that will therefore go on to ruin other countryside, when it

has ruined ours? Or is it more abstract than that, is it to be a sacrifice to greed

and to blindness, to the inability to see any other way ahead?

• It is countryside that the present villagers overwhelmingly wish to maintain

there where they live, the only place they have to live, where they feel they

have a right to live without threat, and to be protected there by their

government

• It is countryside that we are quietly proud will feed our descendants if we look

after it and let it, which NCC’s proposed intrusion can never do

• It is the existent peace and quiet and pace and smell and colour of the

countryside that we wish to retain; yes, even the smell of the pig manure

being spread on the fields this last humid and thundery weekend

• That is why we live there and why we oppose this proposed intrusion.

I have dwelt on that concept of countryside because so much of the paperwork you

inspectors have to study turns the concept on its head, by pretending the NDR itself

is conceptual, to be laid out into a vacuum – a corridor. It’s not. It’s a proposed

intrusion into an existent and necessary fact, the countryside. And as planners, your

job is to decide whether to allow it. I shall return to that in a moment.

Let me show you graphically first what NCC are trying to do. It appears on pages 22

and 28 of volume 2 chapter 11. Slide 5 Appropriately called Noise. Here is page 22,

showing the longterm change in noise into the future, without the NDR, of the land

around the railway crossing on the Plumstead Road. There’s the railway, with the

Plumstead Road crossing it, with a little bit of traffic noise unavoidable on the

unrestricted part of the Plumstead Road itself. That’s the noise from the Broadland

Business Site and the Rackheath Industrial Site. Some noise in the villages of 4

Thorpe End and New Rackheath. You don’t get my village of Little Plumstead on it

because NCC is obsessed with its corridor myth, and I’m beyond the pale. But you

can sense the tranquillity that will still be there, can’t you?

Now look at page 28. Slide 6. It’s the same area exactly, with the NDR built across it

and the noise visualised in 2032. That’s its bridge over the railway and the

Plumstead Road. You don’t need to read the legend. The colours tell the nightmare

of it. The countryside blasted by noise. In some Freudian way the NCC just couldn’t

leave it out. That, if you can believe it, is Rackheath Hall, with its country park and

ornamental lake. Again you don’t get to see my village. It’s off the top of the map.

The crimson blotch means up to ten times more noise than now. And the inference is

that these areas will extend to my village. But they don’t think that’s important

enough to show it. I’m not in their invented corridor, so I don’t count.

Somewhere I have read that the contractor will be applying for a section 61 prior

consent to the Local Authority where noise is predicted to exceed 65 decibels or

increase noise levels by 5 decibels or more. But these are likely, it says, to be only

temporary, and anyway, they’re not going to ask me. Why not? (Guidelines 20?)

If you do happen to read the legend, to find out what those awful colours mean, it’s

important to remember that decibels, the units they use, are logarithmic, not linear. A

change from 65 decibels to 75 decibels, which is the sort of range they may be

signifying here, is not just a change of a sixth in noise. It’s a ten times change in

noise. Going from yellow to green, for instance, just about doubles the noise, from

green to that bilious pink increases it by more than four times. That’s what it’s going

to mean to the householders in Thorpe End and in New Rackheath. And it’s

appalling that most of them are totally ignorant of that fate.

In that context I must mention that in the ES Volume !, page 620, para 11.3.5, Slide 7, under the heading of Methodology of Noise and Vibration studies, NCC say “No

comments from other Local Authorities have been received.” For several years, my

own most intimate Local Authority, the Great and Little Plumsteads Parish Council,

has been making representation after representation on the NDR to its senior

councils. Is it perhaps part of the methodology of those senor bodies to lose such

things?

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There’s another thing pictured there; all that noise there is a form of energy, waste

energy, doing no earthly good at all, and it’s energy from fossil fuel too. It is nowhere

suggested, that I can find, that by 2032 we have to have found a better way to live

than by hurrying from A to B on fossil fuel and then as hurriedly and noisily hurrying

back again. What are the climate change implications of that? Are they of no

relevance to us? They will be to my grandchildren, and not just in little Plumstead,

but on a planetary basis. As will covering food-producing land with concrete and

tarmac, which our descendants can’t eat. Is there no intergenerational assessment

to be made of all this?

Yet even those colourful maps aren’t reality. The map is not the territory. In reality,

noise isn’t quite like that, is it? It’s not a quality you can control, in the way

developers like to pretend they can control everything, by pinning it down on a map.

Let’s see again the map that does show Little Plumstead. Slide 8 There. Down at the

bottom is the A47 southern bypass, with the Postwick interchange, much as it is

now, give and take a few pubs that have disappeared and housing estates that have

been built. At present in my village sometimes we have to put up with the noise of

the traffic on the A47, and it warns us uncomfortably of what may be in store for us, if

they build the NDR. But it depends on the wind. Sometimes it’s so obtrusive if

interferes with our way of life; it colours our thinking. At other times we can’t hear it.

You just can’t cover maps in shocking pink to show where noise will be, as a fact.

Noise is shape-shifting, it’s a trickster. It affects different people differently; it’s

particularly elusive in the way background noise gets in the way of the

comprehension of people with hearing problems – that is so difficult for people

without hearing problems to appreciate.

What’s more though, the A47 is three kilometres to the south of us, and still it harms

the quality of our life. The NDR would be only two kilometres away, and directly up

the prevailing wind.

In your recent Examiners’ Questions, Ref No Q1.6, Slide 9 you ask about the noise

from construction traffic, since NCC’s para 11.4.6 of ES Vol 1 says something

dismissive about it. You ask “Has this scoping out been agreed with relevant

consultees?” I must be a relevant consultee, since I am going to be able to hear the 6

noise, and I can tell you no one has ever approached me about this. I object very

much to that.

What the NCC is trying to do is not development. It is trying to impose a cultural

change under a disguise, to belittle the countryside so as to pretend they’ll put their

mortorway into a hollow, empty corridor, that is just waiting for it, made for it.

Instead,obliterating countryside for suburban dormitories fed by traffic would be a

massive cultural change. NCC is trying to alter the culture of Norfolk under a

disguise of legislation – under the Planning Act of 2008 and the NPPF. But even that

legislation doesn’t allow them to do that, and even they had to admit that awkward

point.

They did so 19 pages away from that introductory put-down about rural corridors. It’s

on page 636 of the Environmental Statement, Volume 1. They’re not stupid. It comes

under the heading of “Planning and Legislative”, and a subheading of “National

Planning Policy Framework”, but those headings are at the bottom of the previous

page. So it’s easy to miss them.

It’s 11.4.9 on page 636 I’d like you to look at.

Bullet-point 1 refers you to another section. I won’t go to it, because it’s full of

acronyms like NOEL, LOAEL and SOAEL. But that section ends by admitting that

there aren’t really any rules about noise, so that – say NCC – gives them the

necessary flexibility until there are. But let’s be fair. I think that probably gives me too

the necessary flexibility to reject the NDR on the basis of noise. So it’s irrelevant.

Back to Bullet-point 2: It says NCC ought to mitigate and reduce impacts of noise,

but NCC have admitted they can’t do that. And as has already been mentioned in

these hearings, they don’t even try very much.

Bullet-point 3 is totally irrelevant, through its last clause “because of changes in

nearby land uses since [developments] were established”. The countryside was

there before the NDR. So one must wonder why NCC put it in at all. Did they hope 7

readers would be impressed by how the sentence began, and wouldn’t read to the

end?

Bullet-point 4 is interesting. “Identify and protect areas of tranquillity which have

remained relatively undisturbed by noise” Does that give us a clue to why NCC

consistently fail to identify the countryside, and misrepresent it as a dingy corridor,

etc? So that they don’t have to protect anything? I would say so.

But why does the NPPF itself only talk about “recreational and amenity value”? Is

that all the countryside is, to Whitehall? Or did they perhaps phrase it like that

because legislating about cultural change is a dodgy business, so they found some

less pointed language that they thought would do? I can’t answer that, but perhaps

you Inspectors can.

All I need to say before I rest my case is that countryside IS all that, and then a lot

more too – all of which ought to make you identify it, protect it, and reject the

imposition on it of the NDR.

Thank you for listening to me

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