Written evidence (plus photographs not printed) for the Science and Technology Committee in its investigation into the above.

INTRODUCTION

  1.  I cannot claim to be a dedicated amateur astronomer, as my observations are not systematic enough or frequent enough; but I have been an enthusiast for some 40 years and I valued the relatively dark sky that my area of Worthing (Salvington) enjoyed when I moved here nearly 30 years ago. However, a combination of replacement street lamps about 12 years ago (poorly designed low-pressure sodium lamps with a higher luminous flux, instead of fairly weak and often unworking tungsten bulbs); an explosion of badly designed and over-powered security lamps on the houses of neighbours; and the installation of inefficient sports floodlights to the south-east, south and south-west, within a radius of one and a half to two miles have largely destroyed the former dark ambience until after midnight at the earliest.

  2.  Although the Committee is, if I understand correctly, only investigating the impact of light pollution on astronomy, any action that follows from its recommendations is likely to reduce the impact in other areas. These include adverse impacts on wildlife, damage to the night-time ambience of rural landscapes, nuisance and even misery caused to people during the hours of "darkness", electricity generation and climate change. I believe that light pollution is denying us a birthright: the sight of our own galaxy. I also believe that perpetrators of the pollution are contravening the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 and Article 1 of Protocol 1. Arguably, there is no more stunning spectacle in nature than that of a clear starlit sky above a totally dark landscape. I have been fortunate enough to observe this spectacle from both east and southern Africa; but it is a heritage destroyed in England, much of Britain and most, it seems, of the developed world.

  3.  Two and a half years ago I decided to increase my knowledge of the issue and to compile a photographic archive of examples of light pollution in my area and more widely in Sussex. I have divided my findings into four parts: street and road lighting; domestic security lights; car park and area lighting; sports floodlighting. In all cases, light pollution arises from combinations of: (i)  the installation of lighting when none is needed; (ii)  failure to turn the lighting off promptly or at all following its use; (iii)  employing over-powered lights; (iv)   "luminaires' disease" or acute light incontinence that arises from poor design or incorrect adjustment. Early on, I wrote to the then DETR in an attempt to gain Government figures on light pollution in Britain's skies (eg the Government estimate of the total light power going upward on a typical dark evening and the fraction of the country's electrical generating capacity that this represented). I also asked what targets the Government was setting the Highways Agency on reduction of its light pollution and on energy saving. The same civil servant ignored my questions in two successive letters and failed to reply at all to the third letter. An inadequate response, which underlines the need for a Freedom of Information Act in Britain. I enclose a copy of the reply to my first letter. (See Annex 1)

  4.  Carl Shaflik of the University of British Columbia, Department of Civil Engineering, quotes roadway lighting as causing 35% to 50% of the light pollution total. I enclose a copy of his paper: "Environmental Effects of Roadway Lighting" (not printed).

  5.  Street lamps and road lamps are somewhat misnomers as I understand that, typically only 45% of the light falls on its intended target of road and footpath. Much of the light flux falls instead on gardens and buildings and enters living rooms and bedrooms, whether the residents want it or not (any many do not want it), as well as going direct into the sky. There appears to be plenty of scope for reduction in lamp powers if they are designed to do the job they have ostensibly been erected for: illumination of roads and footpaths.

  6.  Many replacement road lamps of recent years are full cut-off, particularly the larger and more powerful standards. Equally, many are not. I find no consistency in the replacement policy of the Highways Agency and I wonder if different contractors are being left to their own devices when it comes to luminaire selection. For example, you can find full cut-off replacement lamps at one roundabout of a major road and, at the next, dropped refractor replacements. Unbelievably, Highways Agency contractors Mott MacDonald tore down full cut-off lamps along a one mile stretch of the A27 near Worthing about two and a half years ago when they resurfaced the road. They replaced the lanterns which provided good illumination without glare, with over-powered dished bowl lunimaire heavy with glare. This stretch of road runs mostly between fields and yet it is not lit like a city centre. Why is this rural highway being lit at all? Please see photograph 13.

  7.  There is currently a love affair with high-pressure sodium lamps for road lighting. The broad-band emission of these lamps cannot be filtered out nearly so satisfactorily as the narrow-band emission of the low-pressure variety and their light efficacy is lower, requiring more electricity generation for the same illumination. All this for the cosmetic reason of colour rendering. Insofar as colour rendering matters at all on roads at night—very doubtful—there is usually adequate ambient white light around from car headlights and buildings.

  8.  I do not know what time-scale the Highways Agency has for complete replacement of (for example) the old, long tubular sodium lamps on main roads. I still see plenty. There is, for example, a vast assemblage of these lamps at the confluence of the A23 and the A27 north of Brighton, which must be pushing many kilowatts of sodium yellow straight up into the sky. Nevertheless, progress seems rather faster than with the local authority.

  9.  Traditionally, villages did not have any or only had limited street lighting. That was part of their characteristic charm. Now, there is constant pressure to urbanise villages with bolted-on lighting for the bolted-on housing estates. No longer are many villages the havens they were where light pollution does not rule. Why have developers been allowed to get away with it?

  10.  It strikes me that many more roads should have a curfew switch-off time for street lights (say 12.30 or 1.00 am). My road and neighbouring minor roads have it but the slightly less minor road about 300 yards away, with little traffic after midnight, has its lamps on all night. Why do so many non-A and non-B roads now have all night lighting when previously they didn't? Even road lamps with a curfew time can remain on all night (and often all day) for months or years at a stretch when they go wrong. Repair contractors are not always efficient.

SUMMARY

  Street and road lamps are responsible for a great deal of light pollution: glare, light trespass and sky glow. I urge the following actions to reduce its growth and to put it into reverse from this source.

  (i)  The installation of only full cut-off replacement lamps, such luminaires being designed to restrict their light trespass off the road and footpath as far as is practicable.

  (ii)  Return to the use of the more efficacious low pressure sodium lamps and to keep lamp powers down to a minimum safe level.

  (iii)  Removal of the lighting from rural roads where it ought not to have been put in the first place.

  (iv)  Speeding up the replacement programme of the big, old-style, tubular lamps.

  (v)  Restricting heavily any new street lighting in villages.

  (vi)  Expanding after-midnight curfews for minor roads in towns.

  (vii)  Tackling the all-night burners that are currently not supposed to be all-night.

HOUSEHOLD SECURITY LIGHTS

  11.  When the tungsten/halogen security lamps with infra-red sensors started to become widely available about a dozen years ago, I bought one. Its shortcomings were soon apparent. The sensor had no movement possible independent of the lamp housing and the lamp needed to be angled very steeply downwards in order not to send copious quantities of light up into the sky. But this steep angling of the sensor reduced its range dramatically. The bucket design, if design is not too flattering a description, of the casing and reflector meant that, even with the lamp axis at a large angle below the horizontal (say 30º), much of the 500 watts of radiation went directly up. Please see photograph 10 (not printed). I modified the lamp by removing the sensor and mounting it separately on the wall. I also replaced the 500 watt bulb with a 300 watt when these became available. I was unable to obtain a lower power bulb of the same dimensions.

  12.  With the exception of the Astrica (photographs 11 and 12) (not printed), which has come on the scene in the last year or two, all high power outdoor domestic security lamps that I have seen have had the inefficient bucket design. Their siting by people is sometimes dubious; more often than not, their angling is far too close to the horizontal; almost without exception, the lamp is over-powered. People seem largely unaware that glare from these lamps actually hinders vision and that they would see better with a lower power. Knowledge of the damage that light pollution causes is slight, no doubt because it has been little talked about hitherto and because there is normally no planning control attached to the installation of domestic security lamps. I have been round to half a dozen of my immediate neighbours to elicit their co-operation in directing their lamps off the roofs and out of the sky and, instead, onto the ground. They have been co-operative. I paid for an Astrica lamp for my next-door neighbour who could not direct his floodlight down without loss of sensor range.

  13.  I imagine that millions of these security lamps have gone up in the last 10 years or so and that undoing the damage they cause will be a formidable task. The first requirement is the widespread education of the public that there is a problem and that, if they have pivoted security lamps, they can alleviate it simply by steep angling. A small outlay of about £2 allows replacement of a 500 watt bulb with a 300 watt. An outlay of £12 to £16 allows purchase of a well designed lamp. A leaflet included with the annual rate demand from the local council would be a useful and cheap way of getting the message across.

SPORTS FLOODLIGHTS

  14.  On one evening most weeks I drive back from Tunbridge Wells to Worthing, some 50 miles. About half that distance is through the East Sussex Weald, still a relatively dark area but much less so than just a few years ago and much less so than it ought to be. I pass about 10 sets of sports floodlights, spewing their radiation over many square miles and lighting up the sky with great auras. Only one of these facilities, in Lewes, has anything like well designed lamps, with glazing parallel to the pitch it is illuminating.

  15.  The photograph of Boar's Head Golf Centre (photograph 1, not printed) shows many square degrees of sky washed out by the plume of high-pressure sodium light that looks (and is) alien to the Wealden landscape. The planning process proved inadequate here, as it did for a similar golf centre at Angmering in West Sussex. Please see photographs 2 and 3 (not printed) and copies of correspondence with Wealden District Council and Arun District Council Planning Departments. Whatever clauses now exist in the local plans of councils in regard to light pollution, they cannot tackle the legacy of luminaires' disease from the mushrooming of outdoor sports floodlighting in the last couple of decades. We urgently need planning laws in this field that can be applied retrospectively, to force the polluter to clean up his mess if he will not do it voluntarily.

  16.  As a third example, I cite the replacement floodlights erected by contractors at Worthing Borough Council's Leisure Centre, following structural failure of the 1972 lamps in 1997. The old lamps caused no undue pollution so far as I am aware; certainly, they did not hinder my observations of the southern sky from the back garden. The new, "improved" luminaries, however, immediately did, owing to their inadequate design. Please see photograph 9 (not printed). Following a local protect, one half of the lamps were shielded; the other half are to be shielded this year after my repeated representations on the issue. The photograph of the shielded and unshielded halves (photograph 4 not printed) demonstrates the effectiveness of shields that ought to have been there from the start for all the lamps. Worthing's Local Plan does now have clauses dealing with light pollution, thanks to Worthing Astronomical Society, but this is only for new installations and it remains to be seen if they will be routinely applied without intervention from members of the public. Please see photographs 4 to 9 (not printed).

CAR PARK LIGHTING

  17.  Vast acreages are, of course, given over to car parks and their attendant lighting by supermarkets, hospitals, colleges, etc. There are examples of sensible lighting, directed downwards. Photograph 16 shows one of the luminaires in the B&Q car park in Worthing, a design also used by Worthing Hospital.

  18.  Photographs 17 and 18 show luminaires in Sainsbury's and Tesco car parks, respectively. These send deluges of light upwards, as photographs 14 and 15, taken from hill-sides above the retail sites demonstrate. My impression from limited correspondence with these retail concerns is that they are uninterested in tackling the pollution they cause. Once again, the polluter needs to be forced to clean up his act if he will not do it voluntarily.

ADDENDUM: ORNAMENTAL GARDEN LIGHTS

  19.  At the moment of completing my submission, I observe that a neighbour lower down the hill has removed a hedge, to reveal a set of ornamental garden lights. Needless to say, a large light flux is beaming directly up and into my back garden, instead of going to the ground. I have already seen two examples of lights place at the base of garden trees to illuminate them from below, and I guess that ornamental garden lights are set to become the next wave of luminous folly, following in the footsteps of the now annual epidemic of external Christmas lights throughout December and the first week of January. Unlike domestic security lights, these ornamental lights are not extinguished after a few seconds or minutes and, without prompt controls on their design and operation, we shall be blighted by them all the year round.