The BAA Campaign for Dark Skies: Twenty Years On

CfDS Update

June 2008

The starry sky is, unofficially but indubitably, a site of special scientific interest and an area of outstanding natural beauty - if it can be seen.

The British Astronomical Association's Campaign for Dark Skies (CfDS) was set up by concerned Association members in 1989, to counter the ever-growing tide of skyglow which has tainted the night sky over Britain since the 1950s. Once caused almost exclusively by poorly aimed streetlamps and building floodlights emitting light above the horizontal, skyglow is nowadays increasingly the result of vastly over-powered, poorly mounted household security lights and literally "over-the-top" sports lighting.

CfDS has grown into a network of 138 volunteer local officers, and several hundred committed supporters, who work to persuade their local councils and organisations of the benefits of well directed lighting, the motto being: the right amount of light, and only where needed.

The last twelve months have been busy for us, and the ten-strong committee feels that we are making good progress. We continue our dialogue with central and local government, the lighting industry, retailers, the British Standards Institute, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Institution of Lighting Engineers and other bodies. CfDS staged the Sixth European Dark-Sky Symposium in Portsmouth on September 15-16 2006. We attracted an audience of local government personnel, lighting professionals, environmentalists, and many others. The Symposium was opened by Lembit Opik MP, and Robert Key MP made the closing speech. Many other well-known speakers appeared. Much of the proceedings are available online

CfDS was also strongly represented at the 2007 Dark-Sky Symposium in Slovenia and will attend the August 2008 event in Vienna.

Perhaps the most interesting development of 2003 was the decision in February of the Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee to investigate and report on "Light Pollution and Astronomy". Representatives of CfDS met the eleven MPs of the Select Committee at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and gave evidence in the Houses of Parliament, in early June 2003. We pressed home the point that the night sky deserves as much protection as any other part of the environment. The committee's report appeared on October 6 2003, and came out very strongly in favour of firm control of waste light: "We regret that PPARC and the Government have adopted a defeatist attitude towards light pollution and astronomy in the UK". The report recommended that light be on the list of statutory nuisances (see above), and that the Government should cease its previous apathy on the subject and get local authorities to take light pollution seriously. The CfDS committee believes that the report is a welcome step forward on the road to winning back the stars and combating light nuisance.

The full report can be viewed at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm/reports The government response to the report was lukewarm at first, but now, as well as the statutory nuisance status which obtrusive light has now acquired (see below), there have been developments elsewhere...

DEFRA (Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) is charged with the protection of our environment. After many years of prevarication, DEFRA finally conceded, in the wake of the Select Committee report, that light should become a statutory nuisance within the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Bill in the 2005 parliamentary session. This was passed in April 2005, and came into force in the spring of 2006. Inexplicably, transport premises (bus and railway stations, docks etc) were excluded. CfDS is working to change this; Lembit Opik MP asked a question in the House of Commons on this subject in January 2008.

The CN&E Bill does not specifically protect the night sky, but offers some redress to householders troubled by intrusive lights.

In a debate in February 2004, a government spokeswoman echoed a promise by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM, now Department of Communities and Local Government, DCLG) that it would be directing local authorities' planning officers (via a new annex to Planning Policy Statement 23) to consider light pollution when granting planning permission to new developments. This was supposed to be in effect sometime in 2006, but both DCLG and DEFRA have been dragging their feet on this one. CfDS is working with them to get things moving.

Getting light pollution into planning policy decisions will be another positive step: but this does not address the problem of small-scale lighting (e.g. domestic 500W floodlights, which CfDS aims to have banned) which can cause light trespass, glare and skyglow over a large area. One of our 2008 targets will be a major initiative to get 500W floodlights removed from retailers’ shelves. In an era when energy considerations are looming ever larger, the existence of such lights is a bad joke.

On the legal side (see our Light pollution and the Law page for more details), not all complaints by people against intrusive and injurious lighting may be pursued in spite of the regulation of lighting (as mentioned above, the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Bill excludes transport premises, for example, with no logical reason). In August 2000, in Brighton County Court (Bonwick vs Brighton & Hove Council), Judge Fawcett ruled that the Council's obtrusive security lights should be switched off and that "the nuisance should cease". A similar case was won in 2004 by Mr Alfred Bacon, of Tywyn, West Wales, against very intrusive sports lighting - not binding precedents, but still of great interest to anyone troubled by light trespass. A case in Scotland (Stonehaven Angling Assn vs Trustees of Stonehaven Recreation Ground and Stonehaven Tennis Club) has established a precedent in Scotland that light can be a nuisance in law. According to a law lecturer who advises us, this might well apply as "persuasive", to use the legal term, in the rest of the UK. Anglers had the local tennis club's lights switched off, as they were disturbing fish in the River Cowie, and Sherriff Eccles ruled that the spill light was "a nuisance".

The legalities of light pollution are dealt with in articles such as "And God Divided the Light from The Darkness: Has Humanity Mixed Them Up Again?" by Martin Morgan-Taylor of the Law department of de Montfort University (Environmental Law & Management, Jan-Feb 1997, and 2004). Martin organized a "Light Pollution and the Law" event in Leicester in April 2006, which attracted a large audience, mostly of local government Environmental Health Officers.

Lawyer Penny Jewkes examined the subject in the Journal of Planning and Environment Law, Jan 1998, with "Light Pollution and the Law". Planning departments may have a copy of this. In many places, for example Northampton, Gt. Yarmouth, Chester, Worthing, Milton Keynes and Skegness, councils have ordered sky-beam advertisements on night-clubs and similar establishments to be switched off on environmental and sometimes traffic safety grounds. In a landmark decision in Jan. 2000, Her Majesty's Planning Inspector Ava Wood classified a night-club skybeam in Guildford as an advertisement, even though no overt advertising supported it. She called it 'an alien presence in the countryside', and ordered it to be switched off. The CfDS gave evidence in support of the night sky at this enquiry. The Guildford decision meant that such displays could possibly be opposed under advertising legislation, and hard work by Martin Morgan-Taylor in 2007 with DEFRA and the DCLG means that now, all skybeams and similar displays must have permission under those regulations before being switched on. The new regulations can be seen at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/321506

As a result all local authorities must now act against unauthorised sky beams.

At the CfDS/Schreder Light Trespass conference in London on Nov. 8 2001, Francis McManus, Head of Law at Napier University, Edinburgh, explored the law of nuisance and cases of noxious intrusion. His conclusion was that "there is no doctrinal reason why light should not rank alongside noise, dust and fumes as a potential pollutant in law, including Article 8 of the Human Rights Act".

Canberra in Australia, Lombardy, Catalonia and some other European and American regions and cities have lighting ordinances in place. Another interesting development of recent times was the passing of a law "for the Protection of the Atmosphere", including anti-light pollution clauses, in the Czech Republic (Feb. 2001): the first such national legislation. This has been followed by similar laws in Slovenia (2007) and Liechtenstein.

CfDS representatives were invited to a science reception at Buckingham Palace on October 25 2006. Co-ordinator Bob Mizon met Her Majesty the Queen, and they compared the relative merits of the night sky as seen from Balmoral and London. Bob gave Her Majesty some advice on her new Palace floodlighting scheme!

Sports lighting is, in our opinion, overtaking road lighting (where the trend is positive) as the major source of UK light pollution, in its triple forms of glare, light trespass and skyglow. There are many well-directed and 'sky-friendly' sports floodlights on the market, but while clubs are allowed to opt for cheap, obtrusive lamps and bolt them to masts, aimed vaguely at the playing surface and just about everywhere else, they constitute a major environmental threat. The new, firmer guidance from the DCLG/DEFRA, when it comes, will mean that local planning departments may be far less likely to ignore the environmental impact of lights when allowing planning applications.

CfDS is working with other EU dark-sky movements and has contributed to the drafting of an approach to EU Energy Commissioner Mr Andris Piebalgs, with a view to firming up of a Europe-wide clampdown on poor lighting practice. CfDS is liaising with other European dark-sky organizations to plan a concerted approach to the EU Parliament.

Philip's map company, in association with CfDS and ISTIL (the Italian Light Pollution Study Institute headed by P. Cinzano, producers of the World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness), now offers a folding Dark Skies Map of the UK (ISBN 0-540-08612-6), now available in any good bookshop (and also Amazon.co.uk).

The most encouraging trend towards better lighting and more visible night skies is that large numbers of modern, downward-directed road lights are now coming "on stream", and are vigorously promoted by major lighting manufacturers - they have publicly acknowledged CfDS' important role in recent lighting trends. We are pleased to see that the Highways Agency has opted for downward-directed lights only on all new and replacement "A" and "M" road schemes. The HA received our Award of Appreciation for its new policies on strict light control in April 2008. Many councils are choosing "sky-friendly" options: for example, Dorset CC and East Dorset DC, have now re-lit much of their area with well-directed types, and the improved visibility of the night sky from some Dorset back gardens is pleasingly obvious. But given that there are 7.5 million road lights in the UK with an average lifetime of thirty years, progress towards a national policy is slow. Several local authorities have now embarked upon switch-off programmes for night-time lighting, in a bid to save energy and money, and, for example, in the case of Essex, savings have been made. Upsurges in crime and disorder predicted by sensationalist newspapers have not been happening!

Light ‘art’ is a growing concern, with landscapes threatened by projects involving skybeams or floodlighting of the natural environment at night. CfDS has been working with the CPRE against some of the more environmentally-unfriendly schemes, and we contributed in 2007 to the abandonment of what we thought was a reckless scheme to shine 15-mile long laser beams across rural Hampshire (including the New Forest, a National Park) by Southampton City Council. CfDS also joined the CPRE in a nation-wide star count project, to raise public awareness of light pollution, in the winter of 2006-2007.

DEFRA prides itself on being at the forefront of the international Agenda 21 agreement on energy conservation, global environmental protection and sustainability. Former Secretary of State for the Environment John Prescott wrote in the booklet Climate Change in November 1997: " The world demands a good agreement (on tackling climate change)......"; elsewhere in the same publication we read: "Energy efficiency will continue to play a major role in delivering the new UK climate change targets". We continue to insist that this will include the wasted energy from poor-quality lighting.

Bob Mizon, co-ordinator CfDS.