About US
Hillingdon FoE has been a local group for over 30 years. We have campaigned on many issues which are now mainstream such as unleaded petrol ,recycling and the bee campaign. Today the challenges are many especially in our area of Hillingdon Borough.
Most, if not all of these challenges are climate change related, so we can say that everything we are doing at the moment is addressing climate change.
We oppose Airport Expansion anywhere, but especially a 3rd runway at Heathrow, which contravenes the Government’s own climate change goals. FoE is one of the Consortiums of councils (including Hillingdon Council) and environmental groups who brought the court action and subsequent appeal against the Dept of Transport. In February 2020 the appeal was successful and the Third runway was declared illegal as it did not take into account the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Heathrow Ltd are challenging this in the Supreme Court which will be heard in October 2020. Our role has been to attend and challenge as many of the public Heathrow consultations as possible and provide visitors with alternative literature from FoE and other SHE groups. We have also shown solidarity both with the other groups outside the courts and also by attending residents’ meetings in the Heathrow locality.
We oppose the HS2 project on environment grounds. FoE support rail transport, but not HS2 in its current specification and execution. We have taken various forms of action from letter writing to MPs, councillors and HS2 Ltd, attending HS2 public consultations and challenging their information, and supporting the Harvil Road protest camp.
As Hillingdon Climate Action Group, we are hoping to work with Hillingdon Council, who declared a Climate Emergency in January 2020, using FoE's 50 point plan to combat climate change.
Finally some good news. We run restart parties/repair cafes which have the aim of reducing electrical waste and encourage repairing. People with broken electronic and electrical items come together with volunteer repair experts or fixers, as they are known. We also do small sewing repairs. The experts show the owners of the items the process involved in diagnosing and hopefully repairing their item. At the end of each event the data collected about the items seen and their outcomes are input to a central database. So far our events have saved 153 kg of items from being thrown away and prevented 1,266 kg of carbon emissions. 87devices have been fixed, the most popular being portable radios, small kitchen items and lamps.
stall at Colne Valley festival 2019
We hold many stalls at community events, where we combine fund raising, campaigning and raising awareness of local and global environmental issues. As the Denham Country Park area of the Clone Valley is threatened with large scale destruction, we were joined by Sarah Green, a leading anti HS2 campaigner. Please see our HS2 campaign page for more information.
Sadly, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this event was not held in 2020. The pandemic has not stopped HS2 from beginning their large scale destruction of vegetation and habitats in Denham Country Park.
