Legal win for a mast objector in Cheltenham

Planning authorities must assess the impacts of radiation on metal implants and pacemakers

Currently, if you object to a proposed 5G mast installation to your Local Planning Authority, citing the adverse health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs), your comments will be “duly noted”. In effect, this means they will not be taken into account by the planning officer making the decision, even though there may be 60 or more objections and hardly any supporting comments.  This could be about to change, due to the hard work put in by Steven Thomas (representing himself) in a judicial review against Cheltenham Council, after which Judge Jarman ruled partly in his favour.

Around 22 years ago, Mr Thomas sustained a serious head injury, fracturing his skull in a car accident. He now has a titanium implant in his skull, which until recently did not affect his health unduly. However in 2021 he moved into a flat in Cheltenham which had two 5G rooftop masts in its vicinity, each about 100 metres away. He began to experience severe migraines, insomnia, dizziness, tinnitus and even nosebleeds. This has since got progressively worse and he has to reside with friends and family, when his symptoms become unbearable.  At the end of 2021, he asked the council to make various interventions on his behalf, but with no success.

Having been left high and dry by the council, Mr Thomas began his own investigations. He found out that the UK Government follows the safety exposure guidelines suggested by the International Commission for Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) and that almost all councils, when considering mobile telecommunications mast applications, assume that their obligation to protect public health has been fully met by the mere existence of the misleadingly named “ICNIRP certificates” provided by telecoms companies in support of their applications.  These certificates, correctly described, are actually Declarations of Conformity, certifying that the mast, when operational, will conform to ICNIRP guidelines. The certificate is not issued by ICNIRP, but filled in by each telecoms company making an application and is accepted unquestioningly by the Local Planning Authority  (LPA) as proof of compliance.

Most significantly, Mr Thomas discovered during his scrutiny of the ICNIRP guidelines, that if you have any type of metallic implant, pacemaker or have had medical treatment utilising radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs), your health is not protected by the ICNIRP guidelines. ICNIRP has specifically said that these “exposure scenarios are…outside the scope of these guidelines.” The reason given is that “medical procedures rely on medical expertise to weigh potential harm against intended benefits.” Thus the existence of a Declaration of Conformity does not protect the health of those with metal and other implants.

Last month this vital point was admitted by Judge Jarman in a case brought by Mr. Thomas against Cheltenham Council, concerning a proposal for a mast, which was 17 metres from a block of flats at Harris Court in Lansdown Road and 100 metres from a care home in Cheltenham.  Judge Jarman ruled, in relation to the care home, that the existence of a Declaration of Conformity was not sufficient with regard to those with metal implants, and that,

“The failure on the part of the authority to grapple with potential impacts on medical implants was, in my judgment, an error and this ground succeeds”  

However, since the judge had  “no medical evidence to show what a potential impact on a pacemaker at such a distance may be,” he found that it was not possible to quash the decision of the council with regards to the mast.

The main purpose of Mr. Thomas’s case had been to challenge the strange decision by the LPA that prior approval (a process more streamlined than full planning permission) for the Lansdown Road mast was not required, as normally all new ground-based masts require to go through this.  One of Mr Thomas’s grounds for this challenge, was “that the authority was obliged to make an evidence-based decision having taken properly into account objections from the public.” He then presented various failures of the council, one of which was the metal implants issue. 

Another failure of the LPA, according to Mr. Thomas, related to the exclusion zones around  the mast. Drawings for the Lansdown Road mast were not available, so I have shown other examples.

According to ICNIRP calculations, in the above diagram, the brown part is unsafe for everyone, and the green part, named the public exclusion zone, is only safe for workers, for whom allegedly, the effects of EMFs should have been mitigated following Health and Safety risk assessments at work. The public should not go inside the green zone.

Mr Thomas pointed out that the council had not obtained drawings of public exclusion zones for the mast at Harris Court in Cheltenham and in fact, he tells me, he suspects that Harris Court was actually in the exclusion zone. Normally the mast and its exclusion zone would be above the property, but at Harris Court the mast would be directly opposite peoples’ bedrooms. The only concern of the planning officer was the extent to which it would be visible, not whether it might harm the residents. The judge ruled, however, that “such zones are not required in the guidelines, the National Planning Policy Framework, or the General Permitted Development Order 2015.”

Below is an example of a planning drawing, showing a property within the public exclusion zone, as shown inside the red line. The telecoms companies may assume that certain buildings are only occupied by workers, but unless the LPA sees the drawings, this is unverifiable. Unbelievably, verification is impossible as these drawings are withheld from the LPA, as seen from the comment on the drawing: “Note: any drawings showing ICNIRP zones must NOT be sent to the site providers, site providers’ agents or planning departments.” This does beg the question, “What are the telecoms companies trying to hide?”

I spoke to John Goodacre from Hub Telecoms about the telecoms’ lack of transparency and his fear was that “asking organisations to self-police is just opening the door to the potential for abuse and also removes what I believe to be an essential element that is currently absent from this whole industry and that is quality control. The contractors themselves have nobody checking that what they are doing is correct.”

Mr Thomas also pointed out during his case, that the company name on the Declaration of Conformity for the Cheltenham mast was in fact a dissolved company, “Three UK Limited”, which had never been involved in telecoms.  Although the judge considered this likely to be a simple error, this did lead him to emphasise “the importance of local planning authorities checking the validity of such declarations.” It is worth mentioning that campaigners have discovered many hundreds of declarations using the name of Three UK Limited giving an address in Maidenhead.

The significance of Judge Jarman’s ruling on metal implants, is highlighted by the obvious consternation revealed by Cheltenham Council in their appeal against it. The ruling has the potential to radically change the process by which masts are permitted.  A witness statement complained about the potential delay in mobile infrastructure rollout, that this would create and claimed that the decision “risks chaos for decision makers” complaining that “the learned Judge’s judgment also risks subverting the public health regime and placing greater responsibility on the LPAs to undertake assessments of the impacts on implants of EMFs emitted from masts. That is not their proper role and they do not have the expertise to perform it.”  Thus, it would appear that the speed of planning decision is of much higher importance to local authorities, than any concern for public health.

The lack of expertise quoted above, along with the implied lack of care, is exactly the reason another judicial review is being brought against the Government by Karen Churchill and Neil McDougall, again representing themselves. They assert that the Government failed to enact the public health protection provisions within the European Electronic Communications Code in the EECC Directive (EU) 2018/1972, when it was transposed into UK Law in December 2020, and that local authorities need to be equipped to undertake risk reconciliation.

Churchill, an active campaigner, says “Our local actions have uncovered detailed evidence of inconsistencies and failures in regulation across different councils, potentially leaving thousands of UK citizens unknowingly living within unsafe radiation zones known as exclusion zones.” She also highlights the plight of those with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and the case of a local authority being mandated to provide low-EMF accommodation for a pupil with EHS. This Upper Tribunal case clearly acknowledged the real existence of the disability of EHS and its impact on normal lives.

Churchill and McDougall assert that planning policy needs to be updated and telecoms-specific environmental impact statements introduced, so that local authorities can perform the risk reconciliation function directly assigned to them within the EECC in a meaningful way, since currently, Government policy effectively prevents the local authorities from assessing the health and environmental impacts of masts and small cells.

Returning to Mr Thomas’s case, Judge Jarman based his decision not to overturn the decision to allow the mast, on his reading of official statements, leading him to make the assumption that “exposure levels would amount to a small fraction of the limits and that overall exposure was expected to remain low relative to the guidelines.” He therefore considered that his ruling on the medical implants would have made no difference to the location of the mast in relation to the care home. The added assumption here is that exposures that are low in relation to the guidelines will do no harm even to those with medical implants.

This is a highly controversial assumption. ICNIRP’s stance and their guidelines are supported by only a few interconnected European committees, but vehemently opposed by many scientists and organisations across the globe.

One such scientist is Professor Lennart Hardell, who found in his eight real-life 5G studies that people developed serious symptoms very soon after being exposed to radiation at levels very much lower than the ICNIRP guidelines in their accommodation. At even lower levels still, when there may only be general symptoms such as chronic fatigue or persistent flu-like symptoms, it has been clearly proven that oxidative stress occurs in the body over time and this can lead to a range of diseases such as cancer.

In addition, hundreds of scientists have recently called for a moratorium on 5G, until the health effects are properly investigated.  These include the signatories of the EU 5G appeal, the EMF scientist appeal and the EMF Call. There is also the compelling 2020 Consensus Statement of U.K. and international, medical and scientific experts on the health effects of non-ionising radiation, signed by organisations representing 3,500 medical doctors throughout the world, initiated by the Physicians’ Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment in the UK (PHIRE).

Most importantly, a newly-formed organisation, the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) produced a critique of the ICNIRP safety guidelines and its 14 flawed assumptions last year, appealing for a moratorium on 5G.

Our legislators and judges are in no position to make informed judgements, when all of these appeals are ignored and only a few scientists are listened to. It is left to individual campaigners to draw attention to the research that already exists and to fight for their human rights, mast by mast and case by case as Thomas, Churchill and McDougall are attempting to do.

Mr Thomas is determined to fight on and will be appealing the unsuccessful part of this case on the grounds that the Declaration of Conformity was invalid, with its wrong company address and missing pages, that it is likely that the exclusion zones have been breached and that it was unlawful to accept that prior approval was not required.

Finally, these court actions are challenging ICNIRP compliance. But what about the flawed assumptions of ICNIRP’s science, itself? Who will investigate those?

Note: unreferenced quotes are from documents or emails sent to me by Mr Thomas and Hubs Telecom.