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To: Tim Loughton MP
Date: 10 April 2004
Mr Loughton
Not having received a reply to my email as below, 9 March, I was wondering what else you might be able to offer on the issue of the safety of TETRA base stations.
In the meantime of course, you have had your closed meeting with O2 Airwave, regarding alternative sites for TETRA in Worthing. Whilst I applaud any activity in favour of those of us in the Woodside Road area, I am left wondering (as per my previous email to you long before your meeting was arranged) what you are most likely to achieve?
From around the country I am hearing of people who experience (at the least) immediate electrical sensitivity to TETRA masts at a range even of one mile or more. Bearing this in mind, were you able to feel reassured by O2 Airwave that alternative sites actually exist?
You will be aware of the disquiet within Worthing Borough Council concerning what they can do to resist TETRA masts, and you will be equally aware of the wonderful loophole that O2 Airwave can exploit by attaching TETRA to existing mobile masts without any permission being required. This is how the case of Woodside Road arose in the first place, and if O2 Airwave can achieve commensurate coverage from an alternative mobile mast, what will you have achieved? Only putting another community to the cost of remediating TV interference, and the misery of sleepless night, headaches and all the rest. And all that is without even knowing the long term effects of 24/7 TETRA emissions.
Those of us with a wider social ethic have pressed forward, liasing with other community groups. On Thursday 8 April we held a very successful information and petition day outside the Guildbourne Centre in Worthing. In six hours we handed out over 1,000 information leaflets and collected over 400 signatures for the switching off of Woodside Road TETRA. That is still our aim. We do not want to have to go back and do it all over again on behalf of one of the other three ‘suitable’ communities hosting an existing mmO2 mast, who find TETRA has been landed on them.
How do you propose instead to press the matter of TETRA forward in parliament on behalf of your constituents?
Regards
Andy Davidson
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