Plane crazy

The government's strategy of 'predict and provide' is a return to the bad old days of transport planning. Jonathon Porritt calls for a more sophisticated solution.

Even as you read this, civil servants in the Department of Transport will be staring at a vast mountain of responses to the consultation on the future of air transport in the UK. Judging by the debate already raging in the media, they will know that this is going to be one of the most controversial issues confronting government between now and the next election. As if Alistair Darling didn’t have enough on his hands with roads and railways, his department has now stirred up a hornet’s nest over aviation, and it is sure to make his life more than usually hot and bothered.

Not that he had much choice. Not to have initiated a national debate about the future of air travel would have been an even riskier strategy. The extraordinary success of the ‘no-frills’ carriers, and the inexorable increase in the number of people flying - and flying further, and more often - is already stretching existing airport and traffic control capacity in the south east. Had it not been for the impact of the terrorist attacks in September 2001, that pressure would already be posing serious problems. Even with the new Terminal Five coming on stream at Heathrow, everyone accepts that capacity constraints in the south east will bite with a vengeance within 10 years.

And there’s no point denying that, as some campaigners would appear to be doing. Where flying was once a privilege even for the affluent, it’s now a given in the lives of the vast majority of UK citizens. Far-flung package holidays and dirt-cheap flights provide just another range of commodity products available more or less on demand, anywhere, anytime. That’s the crude but powerful rationale behind Freedom to Fly, the coalition of business and trade union interests with a stake in the growth of aviation. It all starts from that simple premise: more people want to fly, and can afford to - so why shouldn’t they?

And that’s more or less the ggovernment’s own starting position in its consultation documents. Though hedged around with all sorts of caveats, all the different scenarios it offers are based on forecasts of a doubling in the number of passengers by 2020, and a trebling by 2030. Having predicted such growth in demand, all it wants to know is how best to meet it.

If that kind of approach sounds familiar, you’d be right. Right up until the mid-90s, roads policy in the UK was geared to precisely the same ‘predict and provide’ model - until it eventually collapsed under the weight of its own intellectual inadequacy and physical infeasibility. It just wasn’t possible to build enough roads fast enough, and every new road ended up generating yet more demand for yet more roads. ‘Predict and provide’ was unceremoniously dispatched and buried deep in the Department of Transport’s archives.

Now they’ve gone and dug it up again! And they’ve done so without for a moment reflecting on the absurdity of putting out figures that would entail building the equivalent of a new airport the size of Stansted every year for the next 30 years! Without for a moment raising the possibility that demand management might provide a rather more sensible foundation for an air transport strategy in the UK.

And it’s hardly a level playing field that we’re talking about here either. The fact that aviation fuel is not taxed, that there’s no VAT on air tickets (though there has been a small Airports Tax for the last few years), that landing fees are kept artificially low by the Civil Aviation Authority, and that aviation is as yet not subject to any kind of climate change levy, gives a completely false sense of the costs of flying relative to other modes of transport. As John Humphrys eloquently put it in The Sunday Times: “Fill your small car with petrol to drive to your granny’s, and most of the bill for it goes in fuel duties. Governments defend the tax by saying we should use cars less to protect the environment. Fill a vast Jumbo with fuel to fly a bunch of businessmen across the Atlantic, and the airline pays not a penny in tax. It takes a mighty large fleet of family saloons to do the damage of one Jumbo.”

So full marks to Freedom to Fly, the industry coalition, which under the influence of its more enlightened members, has accepted the need to internalise some of the costs of flying that are currently not reflected in the price we pay for our tickets. “Members of Freedom to Fly”, it declares, “accept the principle that industries, including aviation, should meet the verifiable external costs of their operations, such as pollution and noise nuisance, without distorting international trade and investment.”

At one level, that’s just sound economic orthodoxy (markets don’t work properly unless the price we pay for things accurately reflects the costs of making them available to us); at another, it’s a brave recognition that the aviation industry won’t flourish unless and until it starts facing up to its environmental responsibility. It is, after all, an industry that generates substantial economic and social benefits all around the world, benefits which few (if any) countries would be prepared to forego.

But the environmental costs are currently far too high. Literally dozens of protest groups (working together under the AirportWatch Coalition) have been piling in evidence to Alistair Darling about the impacts of noise, local air pollution and increased traffic congestion. On top of that, aviation already contributes around 3.5% of total CO2 emissions., a percentage that is rising all the time. This sounds relatively insignificant until you factor in the disproportionate effect of all the various aircraft emissions in the upper troposphere, which balloons aviation’s responsibility for the total warming effect caused by greenhouse gases to about 6%. And this percentage is rising all the time. Depending on how fast the industry continues to grow, carbon emissions alone could rise to as much as 15% by 2050 - which makes it all the more perverse that emissions from aircraft are currently excluded from the Kyoto Protocol.

The Department of Transport’s consultation documents acknowledge these impacts, but offer no insights at all as to how they’re going to be managed. Instead of thinking within a genuinely integrated sustainable development framework, it was plain good old-fashioned trade-off: in effect, they seem to be saying: that ‘it’s unfortunate but there’s a price to be paid for all these economic benefits, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

Rubbish. Alistair Darling needs to step promptly over the exhumed corpse of ‘predict and provide’ and face up to a much tougher question: if there is to be growth (and that seems inevitable), on what basis will this industry be granted its ‘licence to grow’? How will environmental and social impacts be minimized, subsidies eliminated, costs internalised, communities compensated, overheating in the south east avoided, and regional interests properly recognised? Only when he has answers to all of those questions should he start appraising options for new airport facilities or runway capacity.

In political terms, we’re talking self-preservation here. There are constituencies all over the UK for whom Alistair Darling has become an instant hate figure purely on the basis of some of the speculative options tossed around by those who authored the consultation documents. The only way his reputation as ‘“a safe pair of hands’” will be protected is if he gets serious about both sustainable development and demand management. There was little if any sign of intelligence on either score in the consultation documents, so he’s still got it all to do for himself.

Jonathon Porritt is programme director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission

3 February 2003

Jonathon Porritt