A dogma that has had its day

Last week, Gordon Brown went a striking shade of bright green, talking about the need to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80%. This week, we appear to be back to normal, with a speech to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) that called for the expansion of Heathrow, an overhaul of the planning system (which will very likely increase climate-changing emissions from new infrastructure, including incinerators and bigger roads), and a reminder that new nuclear power stations remain high on the agenda.

On airports, the prime minister said that “We have to respond to a clear business imperative and increase capacity at our airports … our prosperity depends on it … And this week, we demonstrated our determination not to shirk the long-term decisions, but to press ahead with a third runway” (at Heathrow). While last week the business imperative was, quite rightly, on low-carbon development, this week the old economic dogmas have resurfaced, and as usual, they are covered in tarmac.


Similarly short-term and ecologically flawed logic has been applied to an analysis of the planning system. “Planning – which we all know that despite recent changes remains too inflexible. Following the case put in the Eddington and Barker reports, the legislation which will be published tomorrow will put in place a streamlined system for making decisions on key national infrastructure projects,” he said.

The streamlining that ministers have in mind will downgrade environmental considerations and will limit the say that communities and people have in decisions that affect them. If the government’s proposals are turned into new laws, your role in determining whether or not you will get an incinerator at the end of the street will in future be far more limited, to not much more than having an input to the design of the gates.

On both counts, the proposals from government are conceived from a rather outdated view of competitiveness. Because the French have a growing national airport outside Paris, we must have one that is bigger still outside London in order to compete. That is basically the message being put by ministers last week in the context of a process to consider if we should build a third runway at Heathrow. Even in conventional terms, the economics of airport expansion are arguable, and if we look at the issue through the prism of the findings of the Stern review on climate change (which told of the economic costs of continuing with high emissions), then surely a different conclusion should be reached.

Guardian