England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
(Mr Justice Turner)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Wednesday, 4th July 2001

Wednesday, 4th July 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE TUCKEY: This is an application by Mrs Gwendolin Rose Tilly for permission to appeal a decision of Turner J refusing her permission to apply for judicial review of a decision of the Radio Communications Agency, which is an executive agency of the respondent. Her application had earlier been refused on paper by another judge.
2. The applicant lives in a flat in East London near to the News International Building. This building, which stands about 30 meters high, has on its roof radio transmitting and receiving equipment. Since 1996 the applicant believes that she has been affected by microwave emissions from transmitting equipment on that roof. Those microwave emissions have, she says, disturbed her sleep and affected her health.
3. Her application is for judicial review of a letter from the Agency dated 22nd November 2000. This letter says:

"We have, since your initial enquiry in 1996, endeavoured to provide you with information regarding your investigations into the activities of News International. You have expressed your dissatisfaction with the content of our responses and refused to accept the accuracy of the information we have provided, to the extent that you have taken your grievance to the RA Steering Board (an independent body). In their letter to you they explained that none of the three visits to the premises of News International over the four-year period have ever found News International acting outside their licence obligations.

Should you wish to continue to pursue this matter further please do so with News International directly, I'm afraid there is no more we can do to assist you."

4. The letter from the Steering Board referred to is a letter of 16th October 2000. That letter says:

"Following your appeal to the ... Steering Board and subsequent meeting with me, it was agreed that a visit to News International and an inspection of the roof would be necessary to clarify the true nature of the satellite equipment installed."

5. The letter goes on to explain that, armed with photographs supplied by the applicant, the Technical Investigations Officer and the author of the letter (the Secretary of the Board) had gone to the News International building unannounced and had found the following: a single licensed transmitter (shown in photograph view 1), two licensed transmitters (shown in view 2) and then the same two licensed transmitters (shown in view 3), and five receiver dishes (shown in views 4 and 5).
6. The three transmitters referred to in the photographs had been licensed by the Agency under the provisions of the Wireless Telegraph Act 1949 between January 1999 and March 1999. Receivers do not have to be licensed by the Agency or, as I understand it, anyone else.
7. It is clear from the discussion I have had with the applicant this morning, and indeed from the written submissions which she has put before the court, that her real complaint is that she does not believe what she has been told by the Agency on this and on previous occasions. It is her case that there have been transmitters on the roof of this building since 1996. She tried to demonstrate this to me by showing me a number of different photographs and other correspondence, which I have to say, with no disrespect to her, do not demonstrate in any way that there have been transmitters on this roof since 1996 or that the Agency have given the applicant false information about this. But the real point is that there is no way in which such a challenge to the accuracy of the information provided can be made in the context of a judicial review of the Agency's letters to which I have referred. If, as the applicant asserts, News International are using or have used unlicensed equipment or are doing anything which affects her health, then that is a matter which she has to take up with them, though I am not encouraging her to do that.
8. The present application is, as I have said, based on a refusal to provide information. What the applicant is saying is that the Agency have refused to provide her with information which she will accept. That is a different complaint. The challenge, based strictly on the failure to provide information, is, it seems to me, doomed failure. When I put this point to the applicant this morning she said that in fact the failure to provide information did go further than a challenge simply to what was said in these two letters. What she says she is asking for is some information about the level of microwaves emitted by these transmitters and what they were being used for. Such information, she says, has not been provided to her. I am conscious of the fact that I have not seen all the correspondence between the applicant and the Agency (and I make no criticism of the applicant about that); but she has shown me this morning another letter written in 1999 in which the Agency pointed out that some of the information which she had requested was the subject of commercial confidence and could not be disclosed to her unless News International consented, and they had not done so. The present application does not get into that area, and I say nothing about it other than that, from what I have seen, it does not provide any further scope for judicial review.
9. The applicant also put her case more widely. She says there are breaches by the Agency, and possibly the Government, of EEC Council Directive 1999/519, which requires Member States to provide a high level of health protection against exposure to electro-magnetic fields; the transmitters on the roof of the News International building may be too big and there may be too many of them for the purpose of the planning controls which exist to control the placing of equipment of this kind on buildings; and, finally, there is a breach of Article 8, which the applicant says is engaged because the emission of microwaves is an intrusion into her private life and home.
10. Quite apart from the fact that none of those points are raised at all in the application for judicial review, I am afraid I can see nothing in them on the information presented to me at the moment which should give the applicant any cause for thinking that they are complaints which can be raised in other proceedings as a way forward to resolving a concern which I am sure she feels strongly about. I make it clear that I think she is well-meaning and acting in good faith but, despite that, I can see nothing in her proposed appeal. So permission for her to bring such an appeal to this court must be refused.
Order: Application refused.