The cabinet will compensate local residents in municipalities around Schiphol for noise nuisance they experienced between 2017 and 2019. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management has made this announced Thursday. About 4,600 addresses in Uithoorn, Haarlemmermeer, Aalsmeer and Amstelveen are entitled to compensation, which for most people will be between 50 and 2,200 euros.
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Local residents around Schiphol have been complaining for years about the noise of low-flying aircraft. In order to reduce this nuisance, the government attempted to implement a legislative amendment that broadly limits the nuisance. The new law forces ‘strict preferential runway use’, in other words: aircraft must choose the runways that cause the least nuisance to local residents.
That legislative change is delayed, partly due to the nitrogen ruling of the Council of State in 2019, in which the government was forced to reduce nitrogen emissions at the expense of under transport movements. In the meantime, aircraft must already comply with limit values to prevent nuisance, which the ministry calls ‘anticipatory enforcement’. A nebulous term, which actually means that the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate (ILT) has no possibility, for example, to initiate an official report when aircraft do not land on the prescribed runway.
In 2020, nine local residents indicated that they had suffered damage due to the lack of enforcement, after which an independent committee commissioned by the government concluded that there was indeed nuisance. The ministry extrapolated from this that there are therefore thousands of addresses in a comparable situation. The government hopes to pay out the compensation this year. The amount of the compensation is determined based on the WOZ value of the house and the degree of nuisance.