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To: Tim Loughton
Date 10 April 2004
Dear Mr Loughton
Many thanks for such a prompt reply. I have as yet received nothing from your office by post, though I do have the briefing from Hazel Blears. That, as with every other communication from the Home Office, persists in declaring that signal intensity is the most relevant aspect, and that TETRA base stations have no 17.65 Hz signal component. The former is quite false, and the latter is contradicted by NRPB measurements, by local measurements, and indeed by O2 themselves in both recent planning applications and their own factsheet.
However, I endorse your considerations entirely. So what about sites?
It may be coincidence, but "available" sites presumably means "requiring no planning consent", and again it may be coincidence that there are 7 mmO2 sites in Worthing to which additional antennae may be added without consent or request:
Mulberry Lane (next to Goring First School)
Mendip Crescent (next to Durrington First and Middle Schools)
Woodside Road (where we are)
High Salvington (where there is already a new TETRA mast)
Seamill Park Crescent (next to Brooklands Park)
Montague Street
Liverpool Terrace
and again it may be coincidence that only three drop out as being feasible, as mentioned at your meeting. Whether next to a public park is a good idea, reduces this to two, or effectively, to one: Worthing town centre, where there is still a fair degree of residential housing. Perhaps I presume too much in saying that alternatives are not quite as straightforward as it appears. O2 Airwave's only criterion of acceptability is coverage.
[NOTE: subsequent reply from Tim Loughton confirmed that this was an incorrect supposition: the alternative sites are not mmO2 sites. But having done the exercise, it showed how little of Worthing is non-residential.]
As regards it being too early to assess whether there have been any effects linked to TETRA, you appear to be unaware of the immediate impact on people's sleep patterns in the Woodside area, ie from the very night the mast was switched on. There is a wealth of such evidence across Sussex, in Littlehampton and in Bognor, and all over the UK -- and it can only be continually called "anecdotal" because no-one seems willing to measure it! Maybe, maybe, it is "only" electrical sensitivity, about which quite a lot is known, and directly linked to radio masts of one kind or another. But it is not "only" when it prevents a person from sleeping in their own home. It is a direct and serious risk to health. It certainly does appear that TETRA masts do something that ordinary mobile masts do not, since we already have three mobile phone mast installations at Woodside Road, which for years appear not to have caused any health problems at all.
Incidentally, TV interference reports stretch at least half a mile, maybe more, in radius around Woodside Road. Ofcom indicates that TETRA TVI can occur at far greater range. But I agree: O2 should (morally) pay to set this right, since they knew it would happen before they set up their mast.
I haven't really begun to talk about Calcium efflux, melatonin, blood-brain barrier, leukaemia etc.! Far from being a scaremonger, I am raising very serious issues in the immediate term, but the long-term doubts are indeed valid. People doubted asbestos, then thalidomide, then tobacco, then CJD for a long long time, and were called scaremongers, so we should be very careful with that term when scientific doubts most certainly exist about operating 24 hour radio systems with 17.65 Hz signal components.
With the current information being given out by the Government being incomplete at best and incorrect at worst, we desperately need relevant research about what is happening to people, and what the facts are: not what predictive research in the laboratory on dead tissue indicates might be the case. That is, I believe, what you should be pressing for in Parliament: for Government to find out what lies behind the reports from across the UK, indicating as I say, at best a surprising degree of electrical sensitivity among the population, and at worst, indication of a serious problem ahead for us all.
Regards
Andy Davidson
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