Tim, I think your suggestion of asking Sir Nicholas Stern, his opinion on Heathrow expansion is a very good one. His father was a labour councillor in Hounslow after the war and Nicholas Stern lives in Wimbledon so will be well aware of the Heathrow problem. If he came out publicly against the expansion, I'm sure it may help put political pressure on the government.A good person to get him involved could be Andrew Dakers?On another point, an article by Simon Jenkins in yesterday's Sunday Times points out how Ruth Kelly has buckled under pressure from the air industry lobby:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article2937330.ece"From The Sunday TimesNovember 25, 2007Hello Big Carbon, this is cowardly Kelly – you’re cleared for takeoff Simon Jenkins Those worried by the current state of British politics will not be calmed by Ruth Kelly’s decision last week on a third Heathrow runway. She let Big Carbon walk all over her. British Airways (BA) and the British Airports Authority (BAA) have long been among our most fearsome lobbyists. They love Heathrow and would bulldoze Windsor Castle to help it expand. Kelly shuddered at their advance and capitulated. British government no longer “does” independent judgment. Its National Health Service is in thrall to consultants, its Home Office to computer salesmen and its Foreign Office to Americans. It refuses to lead but follows the prevailing wind – and the money. British airports are not, as those running them love to claim, really about helping business but about something far less fashionable: the relatively affluent end of the tourism market. More than 87% of the UK’s international travellers (and 65% of London’s) are “leisure and personal”. For most people air travel is primarily an indulgence. There is nothing remotely amiss in this fact but it is not, as presented by Kelly and her lobbyists, “of key importance to the local and national economy and to our international competitiveness”. Any user of Heathrow and Gatwick knows that these airports are overwhelmed by outgoing sun-seekers and far fewer inbound tourists. If Heathrow were to concentrate primarily on overseas “business” destinations, the place would be half empty. Indeed, I could plausibly argue that, with 70% of passengers British, curbing airport capacity would aid the economy by forcing more to holiday at home, boosting the hotel industry and reducing the country’s heavy and burdensome deficit on its tourism account. In addition, every big planning decision nowadays has to address climate change. It is impossible to set Kelly’s decision in this context. Either she believes in global warming but has concluded there is nothing to be done about it, or she is a flat-earther who thinks global warming is a load of hooey. It would be a help to know which. In either case she is aiming government policy at doomsday with all jets burning, like the general in the film Dr Strangelove. She and Gordon Brown cannot honestly fly the world’s conference circuit calling down damnation on carbon criminals and then hop into bed with the hypermobility set. Under Labour the UK’s aviation carbon emissions have risen from 4.6m tons a year to over 18m. Kelly has stated that she can see no argument for limiting air travel. Her one-time transport adviser, Rod Eddington, says that “to seek artificially to constrain the natural growth of air travel, once carbon pricing is fully in place, would pose a significant cost to the UK economy”. But Eddington is not a dispassionate adviser. He is the former head of BA and a relentless campaigner for the third runway, a fact of which Kelly seems unaware. Kelly gives no shred of evidence for the much-cited “cost” of Heathrow overcrowding, merely a lobbyist’s assertion. London’s airport chaos has not impeded the city’s unprecedented economic boom. Sophisticated financial services now operate online. Certainly some businessmen must travel but air journeys are a consequence, not a cause, of wealth. The case is grotesquely overstated. As for the Eddington/Kelly thesis that an expansion is climatically “sustainable”: this is drivel. It would lead to roughly 40% more carbon emissions. The thesis is based on airlines buying controversial carbon certificates from other industries. In other words, their emissions are set to rise at will, but they hope someone else’s will be cut to make up for it. This is pure double-speak. The pressure to expand Heathrow is chiefly a result of the success of BA and BAA in resisting a third London airport in the Thames estuary back in the late 1970s. When most big world cities were constructing airports and rail links well away from their populated areas, Britain was dithering and arguing and eventually building Stansted. The Stansted decision, born of political cowardice, was a disaster. Today nobody dares to expand Stansted because BA still prefers Heathrow and because that part of Essex is peculiarly lovely and packed with marginal voters. In other words, it suffers precisely the features that made it such a bad location in the first place. Hapless Middlesex residents in Cranford, Sipson and Harmondsworth were promised half a century ago “for all time” that there would be no further growth of Heathrow to blight their homes. Because they carry no clout, Kelly tells them to get stuffed. Having resisted the Thames estuary, the airlines have had to induce ministers to expand Heathrow. Millions have gone on lobbying, on lunches, dinners and MPs’ upgrades. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proved putty in these hands. Stansted appears to have been forgotten and the Heathrow pledge is to be broken. Kelly has broken another commitment made in 2003 to keep the third runway to 2,000 metres, for short-haul domestic flights only. She is now “persuaded” in favour of a full-load, all-screaming, all-polluting, jumbo-sized third runway, lengthened by 300-500 metres. Its flight path will bring to Camden, Hammersmith and Harrow the aeronautical delights now endured by Richmond and Windsor. With a doubling of Heathrow’s throughput, the prospect is of Armageddon along the M4 corridor as a sixth terminal sucks 25m extra car journeys to the airport perimeter. Since London is unlikely ever to have a government with the guts to build an estuary airport, the one thing to be said for the Heathrow extension is that it concentrates pain where it exists already. The chief sadness is that another warehouse/terminal is to be erected when the about-to-be-marooned Harmondsworth village would make a superbly kitsch “themed” terminal with church, pub, hotel and old houses integrated into its departure area. Harmondsworth tithe barn, Betjeman’s “cathedral of Middlesex”, would make a fine first-class lounge. I remain sceptical about how far humankind can influence the present global warming, but only a fool would deny all obligation to do something to mitigate it. Kelly is denying just that. She takes as axiomatic a doubling in demand for air travel over the next 25 years. This is dumb planning, reminiscent of her department’s “predict and provide” approach to road-building in the 1970s. That was before it learnt of tolls, taxes, licences, rationing and capacity restraints to curb traffic growth. Kelly’s airport policy is still in the Dark Ages. She says she is in favour of a continual increase in low-cost holiday travel and does not want to ration it or limit slots at Heathrow to business destinations. She wants outbound tourism to let rip. To hell with Harmondsworth and the balance of trade. Airline travel is by no means the worst culprit on the CO2 front. Although a jet’s carbon emissions have three times more greenhouse effect per ton than do emissions at ground level, a full plane can be more efficient per passenger mile than an equivalent journey in 300 half-empty cars or an empty train. But cheap air travel remains an incentive to hypermobility. The truth is that nobody yet knows how transport policy should respond to global warming. The government squanders billions on near-useless wind turbines, rendering Britain’s most beautiful places unappealing for holidaymakers and inducing them to fly abroad. I am told the RAF does more greenhouse damage with its jets over Wales in one day than all Wales’s wind turbines save in a year. Yet the government will spend little on nuclear power or rail electrification, because one is controversial and the other costly. Until we know what a lower-carbon transport policy might look like, we cannot assess how government might discourage marginal air travel in favour of the essential sort. We cannot say whether a new runway at Heathrow is really “needed” or merely profitable. We cannot even say if the government should look again at the Thames estuary option and give west London’s residents some peace. All we do know is that the government’s case for a third Heathrow runway is so thin as to amount to a single sentence: BA wants it. Kelly, like the rest of us, is being led by the nose by Big Carbon and all because the quality most lacking in Brown’s government is courage. simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk "
Duncan Walker ● 6758d