A BOURNEMOUTH councillor says he would 'happily lose the Bournemouth Air Festival if it meant we could all breathe a bit easier'.

Green Party member for Winton East, Simon Bull, said: "It's always great to see the Arrows go over but because of the state the planet is in, I would far rather look after the planet and not have the airshow, if that was the choice it came to."

Cllr Bull believes there should be a full review of the festival but admitted he has not been party to any discussions or aware of any immediate plans. "At the next full council I'll be presenting a motion about ecological emergency," he said. "If that passes, that says something."

He was speaking in the wake of the row surrounding allegations - which she strongly denies - that BCP council leader Vikki Slade had said she wanted to cancel the air festival.

She has described the rumour as 'complete fake news', stating: "What I said was that a sensible way of doing business was to review things after an event to look at their future. There is no plans, there is no policy, somebody is starting a rumour.

“On the record, there is nothing in our forward plan about the airshow," she said.

"There is nothing in our proposal about the airshow. It is normal business practise for anybody to look at an event and see how successful it is and then look at what you do in the future to make an event better."

Cllr Bull said the government had declared a climate emergency. "How can you want an emergency but on the other hand not take steps and what that means for the airshow at this point I don’t know, but it's something that needs a lot of consideration."

One of the consequences of an emergency being declared by BCP Council, he said, was the need to review everything the council does to ascertain its carbon impact. This would include the air festival.

He said he had seen suggestions that it took place every other year. "I've spoken to a lot of people that say we shouldn't have it but I’ve spoken to a lot of people that say we should," he said.

Portfolio Holder for the Environment and Climate Change, Dr Felicity Rice, of the Alliance for Local Living Independent Candidate for Oakdale, said the council had a commitment to analysing its carbon footprint 'everywhere'. "We will be looking at everything in the future but the air show hasn't been looked at," she said.

She said she believed there had been 'informal discussions' regarding the air festival but nothing within the council. "It hasn't been coming up," she added.

Cllr Slade said: "The truth of the matter is there is nothing in the Alliances’s policy where we’ve even discussed it; we had a conversation about the summer, we had a conversation about the air show and we had a conversation about what would the flagship event for BCP look like in the future, bearing in mind we’ve declared a climate emergency and bearing in mind that people’s taste might change."

"People can think whatever they like. But if the air show stops attracting a million people a year and starts attracting 200,000 people a year people would be saying 'why are you going ahead?'.

"What I have said is at some point in the future there may not be an appetite for the air festival. If that were to happen it would be foolish for a council to continue to support something if it wasn't meeting its objectives."