Examination of Witnesses (Questions 600
- 619)
WEDNESDAY 7 JUNE 2006
MR TONY
BOSWORTH, MR
SIMON BULLOCK,
MR RICHARD
DYER AND
MR PETER
LIPMAN
Q600 Mark Pritchard: Given that airports
are growing all over the world and they are driven by demand and
we all possibly in this room use products and services that perhaps
have been flown in my air cargo, and we meet friends that come
from different parts of the world and we go to different parts
of the world from time to time, we cannot stop that demand; it
is there. If it does not come to Britain, it will go elsewhere.
Do you feel that you have completely said "no" to an
extra runway at Heathrow, given that there is demand and there
is no capacity, or is it completely a "no"?
Mr Dyer: In terms of demand at
Heathrow, to answer that question first, I think it is fairer
to look at London's airports as a whole, and there is spare capacity
at London's airports as a whole, and London's airports are far
busier and handle more passengers than the nearest rival in Europe,
which is Paris, by something like half as much again. I think
it is a more accurate comparison to compare the airports in London
with those in Paris. It is also fair to say that there are severe
air quality problems around Heathrow which are currently being
investigated and could rule out expansion at Heathrow. There is
a wider point here that the UK Government is setting itself up
as an example about climate change. They make statements on climate
change. The credibility of their statements is undermined with
an expansion policy alongside a greater expansion of airports
and we have to tackle that.
Mr Lipman: I do not know if we
are going to have time to look at the people emission and the
Hersch report today. The current plans about expansion of high
speed travel generally and the infrastructure for high speed travel
totally ignore the fact that oil production may be going to peak
now and may be going to peak, as Shell say, in 25 years' time
but 25 years' time is very close. I would say, coming back to
the point about energy literacy, that any plans to build more
roads, to expand runways and build extra runways, have to go through
a test: what is the energy return on energy invested here and
what is the long-term likelihood of use? It is not Government's
role just to react to demand. Government is here to look at the
future coming towards us and to say, "How should we be shaping
that demand?" I would say that there are fundamental moral
issues here. We should be shaping a demand that is right for our
children and our children's children. Therefore, we do have to
say at some stage: no, we are not just going to expand airports
because people like jumping on planes.
Q601 Mark Pritchard: The aviation
industry seems to be at one in its support for the inclusion of
aviation within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Why do you think
this is and what are your views on aviation? I think we have touched
on that, but specifically the ETS, as well as when you think it
might be included.
Mr Dyer: I think one could be
cynical about the industry's approach in saying that they see
it as a possible soft option. That is entirely true; emissions
trading could be a very tough option or it could be a soft option.
The key here is really that we do not know yet how it is going
to end up. It is some way away. I think the 2008 target the Government
put in the White Paper is now looking very optimistic but that
is two years away. There are so many things to be decided and
so much political lobbying to go on about things like allocation,
the CAP, geographical coverage, et cetera, that we really do not
know. Certainly there have been some positive noises recently
from the European Parliament's Environment Committee that is proposing
a very strong ETS that would have an impact, but equally, on the
other side of the coin, the research that came out last autumn
from CE Delft, which was the Commission's own research, showed
very little impact on demand and very little impact on prices.
That is the kind of scale of result that we might see. The key
thing to say here is that we need something in the meantime. Emissions
are rising by over 10% a year from UK flights. It could be another
two or three years at least before anything is done through ETS,
and even then if we get the weak option, that is not going to
do very much. We need to see something in place now, and the measures
are now in place. Air passenger duty is already there; it could
be increased and used; it could be further refined to make it
more environmentally effective, but it is a measure that would
effectively do the job.
Q602 Mark Pritchard: In conclusion,
I just wondered whether you felt aircraft manufacturers are doing
all they can with regard to new build aircraft? For example, Boeing
claims that their new 787 is 16%, allegedly, more environmentally
friendly than the latest Airbus models. That environmental competition
clearly is good hopefully for everybody, but is it genuine competition
and do you think it is going to have some beneficial outputs?
Mr Dyer: It is obviously in their
interests to save as much fuel as they can from the engines, and
they will carry on doing that. It is obviously a very strong selling
point for aircraft which burn a lot of fuel. Naturally, that will
go on. The issue is that it is not happening fast enough. Most
experts agree that we are only going to see something like on
average a 1% reduction in emissions through technology each year,
whilst emissions are growing far faster than that. There is nothing
on the horizon for many decades that is seriously going to tackle
the problem. Hydrogen is really not feasible at the moment. Other
designs which change the shape of aircraft, often called blended
wing, may have a role, but that is decades away as well and this
problem needs to be tackled now. Unfortunately, that has to mean
economic measures.
Mr Bullock: Following up on that,
aircraft are very expensive and last an awful long time, so with
the turnover rate of new aircraft, even if they massively ramped
up the technology to improve and repair aircraft, you would still
need other measures to reduce demand, otherwise it simply will
not be enough.
Mr Dyer: May I add a final point
on that? It is interesting to note that a report came out last
year from researchers in the Netherlands that showed that modern
jet aircraft are no more fuel efficient per passenger than the
final prop-driven airlines from the 1950s, the Lockheed Constellation.
The claims that are made for big improvements in technologies
since that time are bogus and they are really about comparing
the very early jets, which were twice as inefficient as the last
prop planes. We need to bear that in mind.
Q603 Mr Caton: Mr Dyer, you have
just mentioned air passenger duty as a useful instrument, but
the Government and the aircraft industry argue that in fact it
is a very blunt instrument. You suggested that it could be improved.
Would one way of improving it be to band it in a similar way to
vehicle excise duty, perhaps on the basis of the fuel efficiency
of a particular aircraft you travelled on or on the basis of the
emissions from the airline?
Mr Dyer: I think you are suggesting
that it should be applied per plane rather than per passenger
as well. That is certainly one approach. It makes sense because
it would hopefully encourage airlines to fill the planes better,
whereas very often they have up to a quarter of empty seats. You
would think that would provide an incentive to do that, which
would be a good thing. The other thing I would hope it would do
would be to encompass freight flights as well, which are entirely
untaxed at the moment. Obviously they pay no air passenger duty
and they benefit from tax-free fuel, which is somewhat unfortunate
when they burn magnitudes more fuel and carbon compared to surface
transport for a lot of freight which does not need to go by air.
A lot of it is not time critical and it does not need to go by
air.
Mr Bullock: There is follow-up
point to that. It is caricatured as being a blunt instrument,
but that is a smokescreen, in my view. It is blunt and they do
not like it because it is effective. If you run it through the
Department for Transport's own models, if used APD to stop the
fall of aviation's cost, then that runs through their models and
massively affects the demand projections for 2030 to the point
that you do not actually need the new runways that they claim
are necessary at the moment. There are not so many problems. APD
does not need to be reformed before it can be increased, basically,
although it could be worthwhile having reform.
Q604 Mr Caton: Have you, as Friends
of the Earth, thought, apart from banning it, of other ways of
reforming APD to make it more effective?
Mr Bullock: You could use it to
cover transfer passengers and freight transport as well. There
is also an issue about political acceptability. People do not
like the idea of having their holidays taxed, even though the
price of flying is falling. It does need to be designed and sold
well. One way of doing it is to say that it is not a tax increase
but to link it with cuts in other taxes. The environmental tax
reform agenda that the committee has talked about before, about
shifting the burden of taxation from employment and income on
to pollution, which is what you could do with APD increases, would
raise a lot more money and you could use that to cut other taxes.
I think that would make it more politically acceptable, particularly
because it is mainly richer people who fly, so that would be a
progressive way of dealing with some tax issues.
Q605 Mr Caton: When we had BAA before
us very recently, we asked them about possible measures which
airlines could take to minimise the formation of contrails and
cirrus clouds, such as altering flight paths and altitudes according
to the conditions. They said that air traffic management systems
could cope with this, even with projected increases in flights.
Have you a view on this?
Mr Dyer: Yes. This is certainly
an interesting area to explore. I have seen some research which
shows that there could be very significant reductions in contrails
and cirrus if you were to adjust the altitude at which planes
fly. There are some warnings there, though. One of the things
that the researchers found is that fuel consumption is significantly
increased when you lower the height at which aircraft fly. Consequently
there are more carbon dioxide emissions. It needs to be borne
in mind that there is a trade-off there. Also, one of the reports
found that there were significant challenges for air traffic control
if you had a system, particularly one that was varying the height
of the aircraft a lot. There are two ways of doing it: perhaps
having a constant lower height for all flights or a more sophisticated
and variable height control. That would result in a greater reduction
in contrails and cirrus but would have significantly more challenges
for air traffic control and more conflicts, and also the likelihood
of altering journey times. You can imagine what that might do
to scheduling at somewhere like Heathrow, which is so busy. There
are big issues to explore there. At the same time, we are encouraged
that the European Commission has certainly indicated in some of
the communications that they are looking at this. It is a big
area to look at and potentially it is very complex. I do not think
we can expect anything to happen soon. It certainly should be
looked into.
Q606 Mr Caton: Something we touched
on earlier is the argument for expansion of airports and one of
the arguments that is put for new runways at Heathrow and Stansted
is that if we do not do it, then the extra air traffic will transfer
to other airports in Europe—Paris, Frankfurt, Schipol. Do
you think that really would happen and could that happen without
those airports themselves having to expand?
Mr Dyer: I come back to the answer
I gave earlier about the fact that there is spare capacity in
London's airports as a whole which is unused. That is worth stating
that there is spare capacity there. Another thing that it is worth
saying about making comparisons with European airports is that
on the face of it many of them have more runways but in most cases
only two of those runways are actually in use. The reason they
have so many runways is to give some respite to the residents
near the airport by alternating the use of the runways. Much of
the increased use of Heathrow since the early 1990s is to accommodate
transfer passengers. The number of destinations served by Heathrow
in total has declined from something over 200 in the early 1990s
to about 180. Gatwick is serving more destinations. This idea
that having all these transfer passengers using Heathrow is giving
more destinations and more choice is not actually the case. I
would question how much the UK benefits from those transfer passengers
using the airport anyway. If some of them were perhaps using other
airports for their transfer journeys, that would not be such a
bad outcome in a sense.
Q607 Ms Barlow: When we were in Sweden,
we were very impressed by the progress that they have made in
switching buses on to alternative fuels such as biogas and ethanol,
and yet if you look at British cities, it is not happening here.
London is the best passenger transport authority and they only
have three hydrogen fuel cell buses and six diesel electric hybrids.
Why is progress so slow here? What can be done to speed it up?
Mr Lipman: It is difficult to
see why progress is so slow because it seems like such an obvious
win-win. I certainly know that big companies are very keen to
become involved in this. British Sugar have a programme where
they have been going round trying to find partners amongst bus
companies, and failing to do that. Maybe the bus companies are
making enough profit as it is and they are not too worried about
having to invest in the infrastructure to do that. You have to
remember that all over the Continent bus companies are typically
at least 50% owned by the local authority. That may be why London
is in advance of there rest of the country on this subject. If
we had a greater degree of Authority top-down ownership and of
local control, then people's concerns about climate change could
be factored in. There is a worry about the move to biofuels. We
are living on a planet where over half of the six billion population
are to some degree malnourished. If there is a large-scale move
towards biofuel, then there is going to be an immediate pressure
on arable land and food, which could have very significant consequences,
and consequences on the price of food as well. If there is going
to be a move towards biofuels, which I would hope there would
be, I think it has to be focused towards public transport and
not towards cars. If it is going to be focused towards public
transport, it really should be focused towards buses and there
should be significant Government pressure on the now privatised
companies to move forward.
Q608 Mr Stuart: Can I ask you about
modal shift? Now only did we visit Sweden, but we went to Holland
and a spokesman for the Environment Assessment Agency said that
basically after 10 or 15 years the Dutch Government had given
up on modal shift because it had not worked and even, in his opinion,
he thought they were probably just as well to do so because it
had been such a flop. I wonder what your thoughts are on modal
shift and the reasons for us to be optimistic.
Mr Lipman: I think there are enormous
reasons to be optimistic. We have carried out some incredibly
detailed travel behaviour research on the Government's three pilot
sustainable travel Demonstration Towns, Darlington, Peterborough
and Worcester. We have looked at not just the trips that people
make by car but we have asked why they make them by car. We have
split their reasoning down into objective and subjective. What
comes out of that is that over 50% of the car trips could today,
with the existing infrastructure, be changed to walking, cycling
or using public transport. We also find that just by giving people
information about walking, cycling or using public transport—not
preaching but just giving them the basic information—you
achieve at least a 10% reduction in car as driver trips. We also
know that if you then ally that with infrastructure interventions,
maybe better bus lanes, restricting car parking spaces or increasing
cycle facilities, you can double that modal shift; in other words,
you can go from 10% to 20%. If we are prepared to put our money
where our priorities should be, then I think, we could achieve
very significant modal shift very rapidly.
Mr Bosworth: I can add one point
to that. One of the key things we have to do is to get the prices
right. One of the reasons why we may not be seeing the modal shift
which we want to see at the moment is that since 1997 the real
terms cost of motoring has fallen by 9%, whereas over the same
period the cost of using trains has gone up by 5% and the cost
of using buses has gone up by 15%. If we want to get people out
of their cars and using public transport more, then we have to
do something about those cost trends.
Mr Lipman: In looking at costs,
it is very important to remember the overall cost to society of
the way we travel. I am not now thinking of environmental costs;
I am just thinking about the burden on the NHS. We are facing
an obesity epidemic which is down, to a large degree, to the lack
of physical exercise. If we could build in active travel—walking
and cycling—we would see enormous savings to the NHS. The
Danish city of Odense carried out a two-year programme to promote
cycling. At the end of that two-year programme, they looked at
the costs implications for the local equivalent of the PCT. They
found that the PCT had saved more than the cost of the interventions
to increase cycling. That is a really nice, simple example of
how we should factor in wider societal costs.
Q609 Colin Challen: I wanted to follow
up on the question of biofuels. The Government believes that by
2050 one-third of transport could be fuelled in that way. I do
not know if that agrees with the figures or analysis that you
may have done. Does it not rather show the paucity of ambition
for biofuels and that really we might be pinning our hopes on
the wrong approach to transport? Biofuels is convincing people
that we are going to have green growth and all the rest of it
but if two-thirds of transport is still fuelled in the old-fashioned
way by 2050, then we are stuffed, are we not?
Mr Lipman: I think the Government's
obsession with biofuels is really an obsession to attempt to avoid
behavioural change, which is perceived to be difficult. What is
an easy techno-fix? Biofuels are perceived to be green. There
are enormous implications underlying biofuels. A lot of the work
done, for example on ethanol from corn, shows that it probably
has a negative net energy. It takes more energy to produce it
than you actually get when you use it. The leading researcher
on this area, David Pimentel, has issued an open challenge to
all ethanol plants: why do you not actually run your plant on
ethanol; why are you all still using oil and gas? None of them
have picked that up. There is an enormous role for biofuels on
a small, local basis where farmers can get together and produce
it and use it locally, for example. As an overall techno-fix for
society, no, it is hopeless.
Mr Bosworth: I think it is important
that we get the benefits that we can from technology, so we do
need to get the benefits from biofuels, such as they are. We need
to be investigating the possibility of a hydrogen-fuelled transport
economy, but we absolutely must not put all our eggs into the
basket of hoping for technological change as a solution because
it is not going to be sufficient and we really do need the behavioural
change. We cannot achieve the reductions in carbon emissions in
transport which we need to see if we are going to cut the nation's
carbon emissions sufficiently to avoid the worst impacts of climate
change from technology alone.
Mr Bullock: There is often a perception
that because people want to travel more, therefore politicians
have to deliver that. It is only a partial story. In some situations,
yes, people do want to travel more but, in other cases, it is
completely the opposite. Nobody wants to travel further to get
to an out-of-town hospital; nobody wants to have to drive their
kid to school because the roads are too dangerous; nobody wants
to have to drive on holiday when they could go by rail but they
are forced to go by car because it is half the price. There is
a story to be told there that there is a real positive way of
selling this that you do not have travel more.
Mr Lipman: There is also a whole
new understanding about what mobility means. We suffer from passive
mobility, in the same way that we suffer from smoking. Across
the whole world, certainly in the developed countries, the average
person travels an hour a day and makes three trips a day, averaged
out. This is a golden rule. What that really means is that you
are not travelling for 23 hours a day and if during that hour
you are impacting on other people, similarly during your 23 hours
of not travelling, you are not being impacted on by other people.
With the right to travel, the freedom to travel, comes a responsibility
to travel in a way that does not damage other people. We need
to start exploring this balance between rights and responsibilities
around how we travel more.
Q610 Colin Challen: Let us briefly
look at roads. How would you characterise the Government's road
building programme?
Mr Bosworth: One of the Department
for Transport's constant mantras is that we cannot build our way
out of congestion, but it has big plans to widen motorways which
are just that. The policy has been tried in the past and it has
not worked. We think it is the triumph of hope over experience;
they think it is going to work if they try it again. Road building
is not the answer to transport problems; it is all too often a
short-term fix. You widen the motorway and the extra capacity
fills up again very quickly. You can see the growth in the Government's
ambitions. In Transport 2010: The 10 Year Plan, they were
talking about roughly an extra 500 additional lane kilometres
on strategic roads. By the Future of Transport White Paper
in 2004, they are talking about an extra 1400 lane kilometres
on strategic roads. There is also big pressure for road building
coming from the regions. The regional funding allocations are
a new way of getting the regions to prioritise their transport
spending. The bids submitted earlier this year by the English
Regions show that they want to spend just about three-quarters
of their regional funding allocation on roads; two regions, the
South East and the East Midlands, said that they wanted to spend
95% of their RFA on roads. The other side of the road building
issue is that the Department for Transport still does not know
what the impacts of many of the schemes in its targeted programme
for improvements are going to be. They do not know the future
traffic levels for one-third of the schemes in the TPI. They do
not know the CO2 impacts for over half of the schemes
in the TPI, despite the fact that there is a requirement to assess
CO2 impacts before they go into the targeted programme
of improvements. Our focus on this is on the Comprehensive Spending
Review next year. The Government will undoubtedly be looking for
the possible cuts in spending and we think that road building
is one of the areas where it can make those cuts. At the time
of the Spending Review in 2004, as part of the Way to Go campaign,
we identified several billion pounds worth of cuts that could
be made in road building expenditure, which would free-up money
which could be much better spent on other things. For example,
the cost of widening the M1 is much more than the cost of providing
safe routes to schools for all the schools in England.
Q611 Colin Challen: Could I take
that point and since the M1 where it meets the M62 in my constituency
is 10-lanes wide, it still becomes congested at peak times. You
say that you could spend the money on alternatives, and some might
go to rail or public transport and various other schemes, but
people will still want to use the roads, will they not? Are you
putting forward alternatives which can be applied on the roads,
like multiple occupancy lanes and things of that sort? Does that
feature in your representations to Government?
Mr Bosworth: Certainly we support
high occupancy vehicle lanes. We think they are an important part
of cutting down on the number of vehicles that are using roads
and motorways. Where we differ from the Government is that they
are, in some cases such as on the M1, saying, "We will build
an extra lane and we will use that as a high occupancy vehicle
lane" and we say, "Provide high occupancy vehicle lanes
but use one of the lanes on the existing road to do it".
Mr Lipman: Average occupancy is
now 1.6 and has been falling steadily for years and years. The
Government really has to reverse that trend.
Q612 David Howarth: I was interested
in what you said about the carbon output of road schemes and the
Government's lack of knowledge. There appears to be an institutional
problem here. One would expect that if there was a choice between
different sorts of transport solution for a particular area, one
of the things that the department should be doing is comparing
carbon output of, say, a light rail system with the other option
of a road system. From what you are saying now seems to be that
they cannot possibly do that because they do not have the information.
Is that right?
Mr Bosworth: They do not have
the information, or they certainly do not have the information
on the carbon impacts of many of the road schemes that they are
building. That is certainly true. We see this as a possible way
of taking forward the Department for Transport's public service
agreement target on contributing to cutting carbon emissions and
that it should be assessing the carbon impacts of the decisions
it is making—what is the carbon impact of this road, what
is the carbon impact of this new tram scheme—before those
decisions are made. That is part of the new approach to appraisal
but it is, unfortunately, one that does not seem to be followed.
Mr Lipman: Unfortunately also,
and it comes back to the energy literacy point, they have completely
failed to build in the carbon impact of building the road itself.
I think it takes 24,000 tonnes of aggregate to build a mile of
motorway. That aggregate has to be mined and transported and dealt
with. There are these enormous up-front infrastructure carbon
costs. If you design a new train which is 10% more efficient and
you use it pretty much every day of the year, it takes 20 years
to recover the energy debt from building the train instead of
continuing to use existing stock. We really need a carbon analysis
which covers the whole of the process rather than just the use
of the infrastructure.
Q613 Joan Walley: Could you help
us out a bit on this? Ten years ago I think there was pretty much
agreement that the traditional appraisal for new road building
needed to be changed. Since then, we have had a lot of understanding
about climate change. We have PSAs and the Comprehensive Spending
Review coming up. I still do not exactly understand why it is
that we have not now got people with a strong voice arguing against
the vested interests that there were 10 years ago saying why road
building had to be the way to deal with the congestion that we
had. Why is it that we do not have this joined-up approach across
government, that we do not have Treasury, DTI and the Department
of the Regions looking at spatial planning and looking at all
the things that you have both set out in your memoranda to us:
safe trips to school and the local transport plans. Why is it
that this is just not featuring on the radar of anybody at the
heart of Government in terms of what transport changes are needed?
Can you help us?
Mr Bosworth: That is a very good
question. I think it comes back to the lack of coherence across
the whole of government in addressing transport policy and transport's
contribution to climate change. We do need that coherent, across
government approach. We do need to have the Department for Communities
and Local Government assessing what the transport impact of its
new communities is going to be. That is absolutely essential.
We need a thorough appraisal system, which is enforced properly
and which does appraise the carbon impacts of potential new construction
of new road schemes or whatever.
Q614 Joan Walley: How would we get
that done? Ten years ago you built a road that went from A to
B or from A to C. It was not about what you needed that might
be better served by other modes of transport. Now we have lack
of an appraisal. Do you think that someone like the National Audit
Office, in terms of the kind of analysis that they do, could somehow
or another get an appraisal method that would look at the carbon
issues that we are facing, and could that be, if you like, a precautionary
part of transport policy, so that we are planning transport to
meet our wider global objectives?
Mr Bullock: This is a really complicated
issue but there are two points or political arguments running
through why we continue to get so much road building. The first
is that there is still the belief that growth is best and that
growth trumps other issues, whether they are environmental or
social.
Q615 Joan Walley: Can I just stop
you there? Mr Bosworth or Mr Lipman mentioned earlier the regional
development agencies and how the regional development agencies
wanted to spend more and more of their allocations on transport.
Why then have we not got the sustainable development imperative
formulating what the policies should be coming out of the regions?
Mr Bullock: I think because the
guidance is driven by national government. There are signs that
it is improving and in Gordon Brown's speech to the United Nations
in April he was saying that we can no longer continue to trade
off environment versus the economy and that we have to match growth
with environmental care. Just to take one step back, even if you
accept that growth does trump everything we would argue strongly
that it does not. In transport there is still the belief that
transport growth is inextricably linked with economic growth and
that just is not true. If you look at the European Union the most
competitive economies have decoupled transport growth through
the freight sector from their economy and for the least competitive
economies in the EU the opposite has happened, so this idea is
not necessarily right that transport infrastructure improvements
are good for economic growth. To get back to the point about how
you deal with it, a large continuing problem is the use of cost/benefit
analyses, not just for road building but also particularly for
the aviation sector.
Q616 Joan Walley: But that is not
fit for purpose, is it?
Mr Bullock: No.
Q617 Joan Walley: The cost/benefit
analysis that is being used is not fit for purpose so where are
the alternative models that could be used that would be fit for
purpose and that need to be adopted in a cross-cutting way because
I do not understand where they are and why they are not being
taken up?
Mr Bullock: There are methods
available. Multi-criteria analysis is not a very sexy term at
all, is it? The University of Sussex have done work on this sort
of thing. Basically what you are trying to do is get away from
having a purely quantitative assessment of whether something goes
ahead or not and then totting up all the costs and benefits, and
if there is a net benefit then it goes ahead. What we would like
to see is an approach that Roger Timm Associates used on assessing
the Aviation White Paper in the south east. They set the Government's
course on the Sustainable Development Strategy. There are 13 criteria
on this from economy to environment to social, and what we should
do is assess all major proposals against those 13 criteria.
Q618 Joan Walley: So are you saying
that the Sustainable Development Commission should be the body
that should be, if you like, informing the different government
departments or regional bodies et cetera to get this model that
could bring us towards a sustainable form of transport?
Mr Bullock: The Sustainable Development
Commission certainly advocate that sort of approach whereby you
are saying that when you look at any major proposal, if it has
a negative impact on any of the major sustainable development
principles, not just environmental ones, say if it was about impacts
on poorer people, then there is a default position that that policy
would not go ahead; you have to integrate. It is a much more complicated
process but it is better in that you have all your discussions
out in the open. It becomes a political, qualitative decision
about what goes ahead rather than burying the decisions in arcane
spreadsheets. As an example, I was looking at the justification
for the Stansted expansion go-ahead and it took me, to go through
three or four different spreadsheets, a few days to come across
the decision they had come to that there was a net £12 billion
benefit to this runway, and that was before you even went into
the flaws of that assessment. It is better from a sustainable
development perspective to have these decisions out in the open.
Mr Lipman: Could I just make a
possibly appallingly simplistic alternative suggestion, which
is that the economic impacts of climate change are already large
and are going to be immense, and the people who are really worried
about it, of course, are the reinsurance companies. I think we
should be led by Treasury on this. I think Treasury now are introducing
the idea of a carbon account. We do not need a carbon account;
we need a reducing carbon budget and government departments should
not be allowed to have any money to spend until they have shown
each year how they are hitting that reducing carbon budget. Treasury
is the obvious place to start. Someone has to take central responsibility,
so either you invent a new climate change department which somehow
is empowered to do that or you say Treasury is the one which gives
the money to spend.
Q619 Joan Walley: When we were in
Holland and Sweden we saw examples of the CIVITAS programme in
terms of how that was helping change attitudes towards transport.
How successfully do you think that programme has been taken up
in the UK?
Mr Lipman: We were a local delivery
partner in CIVITAS in Bristol and it enabled us to deliver with
Bristol some really exciting and innovative projects but it has
just come to an end and there is no funding to do any more, so
it was successful in the way that lots of European programmes
are successful: it kick-starts a pilot, but unless there is something
to follow that pilot up it dies.
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