Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180 - 199)

WEDNESDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2004

MR JEFFREY GAZZARD

  Q180  Mr Challen: You mentioned the fact that we are taking over the EU presidency in 2005. It sounds to me like an announcement on this scheme will not be one of the crowning achievements of that presidency at the current pace but you mentioned the Dutch were preceding us. How do we relate to other countries in the EU in terms of their commitment to this scheme? Are they as committed as we are? I am just thinking of Holland, a very small country with a very large airport and very large international traffic. Do they have the same concerns as we have? Are they as committed, and indeed other European Union countries, in your view?

  Mr Gazzard: One of the things I said in our memorandum was that I did feel in the UK arena that most policy-makers in DEFRA, the DTI, the Treasury and what have you knew the scale of the issues and that is true for our European colleagues as well, whether they are regulators in the CAA or environment ministries or environment protection agencies. Everybody knows it is a major problem. There is no argument about that any more. The discussion, as the Committee is quite rightly putting me on the spot about, is how do you develop policy initiatives and analysis to get some results here. The strongest government on this would be Germany, in my view. The Dutch, for the reasons you pointed out—they have a very big airport—are note very pro this. You would have thought with the low-lying nature of their country they would equally be interested in climate change implications. We have spoken to them and I have asked that question directly of Tineke Netelenbos, their transport minister. It is this question of people being sometimes unable to get the balance between their economic imperative and their environmental obligations. I am sorry to sound so woolly on this but the situation is woolly.

  Q181  Mr Challen: Are some of these other countries pushing other solutions then? Are they looking at other solutions or, given the timescale, interim proposals?

  Mr Gazzard: Well, everybody is quite keen to. I think most people have realised that the ICAO process, which is the mandated process for developing an emissions trading scheme is never going to materialise. The only useful thing about the work that ICAO do is they run a lot of scenarios, which are quite useful, but the power of the USA and its allies there, although it is supposed to be a consensual organisation, is such that there will never be, in my opinion, any workable emissions trading scheme developed by ICAO even though that is their mandate. That is why I think in the Environment Directorate at the Commission there is a desire to work towards including air transport in an emissions trading scheme but there is also just as firm a desire, I think, to look at enroute charges as a medium term mechanism as well. For instance, we have had discussions with Euro Control, which is the alliance of air navigation service providers across Europe, nearly 50 countries now, because we were concerned to get our act together and say is this the best mechanism for charging an en route emissions levy. Would it have any accountancy, treasury and cost implications for them? Because they would be literally analysing it and charging their airline customers. So there is some work we have done on the mechanisms of how you would introduce this in accountancy terms, what the organisation would be and we have got them thinking about any financial implications as a result because what we have been trying to do is to move this forward on two fronts—the practicalities of an emissions charging scheme, which I think we can work out, and then the policy implications of it. To be quite honest, I am more advanced on the practicalities of it than we are on the policy implications.

  Q182  Mr Challen: I understand the ICAO conference is taking place as we speak in Montreal and that your director is over there.

  Mr Gazzard: Yes.

  Q183  Mr Challen: Could I just ask about the focus of that event and what people going to it might hope to get out of it.

  Mr Gazzard: Well, they have already got something out of it, which is the new standard for NOx. This is the standard that aero engine performance has to meet by 2008. If I could just find this note first of all, I will read it to you.

  Q184  Mr Challen: Could I just ask whether that would reflect George Bush's contention that we just have technological solutions to these problems and regulation does not really come into it at all?

  Mr Gazzard: No, I think it is slightly better than that, to be fair. I hate to say that. What they were looking at was a series of NOx stringency options. These are for the performance of aero engines and these are better than the current standard. So they were looking at a range of improvements. All of these are percentages better: minus 5, minus 10, minus 15, minus 20, minus 25 and minus 30. So that is an improvement in NOx performance over the existing stringency and they did a number of scenarios. We went along and said we want the best, minus 30, as did ACI, the airports body, because they are the ones who have this problem of local air quality in NOx terms. The UK Government said minus 20%, the US manufacturers, IATA, said minus 10% and Canada said they did not see the need to do anything. So although this was not modelled, we somehow came up with minus 12%. It had not been modelled. It would be slightly churlish of me to say they guessed at it, but they came up with 12%. What this means is that with a range of scenarios from 5-30%, if we had gone for the best on the table that still predicted an increase in aircraft NOx emissions worldwide from 2002 to 2020 of about 150%. That is with the best stringency. A 12% stringency will lead to an increase of about 148-151% over those years. Once again it is this whole question of growth overtaking these technological improvements, which are welcome and once again it is a bit of a cliché but they only make things not quite as bad as they otherwise would be. What drives this is the cost implications of this. Broadly those scenarios are best described as you can have not a very good standard cheaply now or you can wait for a better standard which is more expensive later. That is the difference between those scenarios in essence and, unsurprisingly, what they voted for was not very much now and cheaply, thank you very much.

  Q185  Mr Challen: I do not know if you would agree with my rather controversial characterisation of the airline industry as perhaps being a little similar to the tobacco industry, which always did put out a very positive message until they were taken to the courts and people got very litigious. Is the airline industry really aware of what the real figures are but then in public spews out all sorts of other stories?

  Mr Gazzard: I do not think they are quite as bad as the tobacco industry. I think that would be a slight overstatement, although I have my moments when I agree with you completely. I do think they understand the problem and I think they are relatively up front about the scale of it but what they believe is that their commercial imperative is so important that the best they can do, this kind of standard, is acceptable.

  Q186  Mr Challen: Just finally then, at the ICAO and other organisations at the international level how would you characterise the Government's approach and specifically on ICAO how is it represented in the sub-group on environmental issues?

  Mr Gazzard: This meeting we have had a UK chair, who is the head of the Aviation Environmental Division at DfT, a chap called Graham Pendlebury, who is fine and I do not know how he keeps his concentration up because these meetings are very tedious and stultifying. AED over the last two and a half years has expanded so they have air quality specialists—not specialists but administrative specialists like Roger Gardiner, who has also gone and is the head of the UK delegation. We have tried to make sure that DEFRA has been more involved in these issues and DEFRA now send a representative to ICAO whereas three or four years ago they did not do that. So I would say that the DfT understand the issues. Their representation in a technical sense at ICAO is fine. The diplomacy of negotiating standards is, I think, the question you are really asking and how do you get a better performance from our Government in ICAO. I do not think you can because it is so dominated by airline and US interests. The analogy I would use, to pick up what you said about tobacco, is that it is as if the World Health Organisation was run for the benefit of drug companies. I do not think it is.

  Q187  Mr Challen: Just a little supplementary. We had the issue—I know it is not on emissions but DVT was a very controversial thing. Did the airlines sort of hold back on information on that? We are talking about people's health in many ways on this Committee.

  Mr Gazzard: Well, you will know that it went to a High Court judgment and the High Court said that they did not actually think there was a responsibility there and I think within a couple of days a major UK airline had taken DVT socks off their travel shop shelves in Victoria. So I think your analogy in a wider sense is well made. If I could, as the risk of sounding a supreme self-publicist, just refer the Committee again to our previous submission, what we try and do is to look for new areas of research and new areas of interest that will inform the debate. I know that sounds incredibly trite but we have put a submission in that had some research we had found on reinsurance companies and the UNEP programme, which is looking at financial instruments and financial institutions, and they mention that fossil fuel based industries could be facing the question that you posed of future liability for health and the environmental and physical impacts of the cost of climate change caused by fossil fuel based users in exactly the same way as tobacco is currently worried about being sued for the health impacts of its products. That is the analogy they made, not me, so there are people who think similarly to the comment that you made.

  Q188  Mr Thomas: I would just like to follow up on the NOx issue, if I may, with two things. First of all, could you clarify the percentage increase overall that you expect from NOx under the two scenarios you outlined. You outlined the 30% scenario, which is the best.

  Mr Gazzard: Yes. It is not what we expect, it is what ICAO tells us will happen.

  Q189  Mr Thomas: So they have done the modelling?

  Mr Gazzard: Yes, they have done the modelling.

  Q190  Mr Thomas: Could you just do that again because I certainly did not quite understand.

  Mr Gazzard: Sure. They have a current standard. For the sake of this argument it does not matter what it is. They discussed with airlines and everybody what technology could reasonably deliver and they came up with a range of scenarios, 5% better than today at 5% gaps through to 30% and then they modelled the cost implications of those, they looked at each individual on aircraft performance, pages and pages of the most interminable stultifying spreadsheets on this but very important. Then they attached cost to those things and the most expensive is the best, 30%, and the least expensive of all just 5%. They went all through this last week and on Wednesday they decided they would go for minus 12%. Now, minus 12% stringency will limit the increase of NOx. From 2002 to 2020 NOx will increase by 148-151%. If they had gone for a 30% it would have been 140% increase, so it would have been anywhere between 8 and 11% better.

  Q191  Mr Thomas: Why is the gap there so small? To a layman like me a difference between 12% and 30% is huge; a difference between 140% and 148% is relatively minor.

  Mr Gazzard: That harks back to what I was saying earlier, that technological improvements are (a) slowing down because you are squeezing the bottom of the barrel and (b) growth overtakes them anyway. That is the scale of the problem.

  Q192  Mr Thomas: Are you able to transpose those two scenarios, particularly the 12%, which is the one that is going to happen anyway, into the situation then under the EU regulation 2010 because if you are going ahead with the third one, at Heathrow for example, then we have been told that would affect something like 10,000 people with excess NOx emissions under what would be the new EU regulations? Does this decision last week mean that de facto has been overcome?

  Mr Gazzard: No, quite the reverse, it makes it harder, in our view. If we can go back to ICAO, because I have not seen this work and neither has Tim Johnson, our director, who as you know is in ICAO at the moment. We split these advocacy roles between us. When they did a similar exercise for noise that was based on a per airport scenario for what the various categories of noise improvement would bring about. So it must be possible to apportion this to an individual airport basis. As far as I know they have not done that, but I am pleased to tell you ICAO in Montreal has Wi-Fi and I can e-mail Tim this afternoon and get an answer almost straight away on whether they have done it and whether they would be prepared to do it. But it is perfectly possible to answer your question in a slightly roundabout fashion, now we know the standard to have a look at what its impact would be on an airport by airport basis.

  Q193  Mr Thomas: At your convenience, is it possible to have further information to the Committee on the implications of that, whether it is possible now or at least some information?

  Mr Gazzard: I will find out how soon it can be done and let you know and if it is available, fine.[5]


  Q194  Mr Thomas: I think that would be useful.

  Mr Gazzard: But off the top of our head, there is no question that the better the improvement the more benefits there are potentially, but you will be aware that the Government published 27 background papers today, which even I have not read yet, but they are in a bundle about that high because the Minister thumped them on the table during the debate which has just finished about that high and in there is a specific Heathrow air quality assessment which has included burying the M4 spur in a tunnel and moving the southern runway even further south to try and avoid this problem plus a range of issues to do with public transport and restricting road access and the emissions from road traffic that BAA put forward. At the end of that report NOx is still substantially exceeded so this does not make it any easier.

  Q195  Mr Thomas: Finally, to be absolutely clear, that report and previous Government and BAA reports would have been working on a model expecting what technological reduction in NOx?

  Mr Gazzard: They will have included an estimate of what this may have been but I do not know what that was without looking into it.

  Q196  Mr Thomas: But it was not necessarily 12%?

  Mr Gazzard: No.

  Q197  Mr Thomas: In your estimation, would it have been higher or lower?

  Mr Gazzard: I cannot say without looking at the document that has just been published and I have not had that opportunity, but I can do that more or less straight away.

  Mr Thomas: Thank you.

  Q198  Chairman: We are meeting on a day when everyone is aware of those documents[6] but nobody has had time to read them, which is a slight disadvantage.

  Mr Gazzard: Well, it is a problem because they were, to be critical of the Government as I was nice to them earlier, promised to be published contemporaneously with the White Paper. Who knows the reasons why they have been delayed.

  Q199  Chairman: However, they will be read with great interest, not least by this Committee.

  Mr Gazzard: Well, probably by me, I am afraid.


5   Please see supplementary memorandum. Back

6   Supporting documents for the "Future of Air Transport" White Paper. 27 documents. List announced in Hansard Report, 10.2.04, 68WS. Back


 
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