A long time ago, in an article I can no longer find, the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole developed the idea of “cargo cults” as the objects of politics. Heathrow and its expansion has long been such a cargo cult in British politics. To save non-anthropologist readers among you from having to google it, a cargo cult refers originally to the belief among Melanesian islanders that material wealth can be achieved through the ritual worship of an object. Pleasingly, some of the Melanesian cargo cults involved building models of runways and planes. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

The flaws

No matter how you stack it up, the notion that further expanding Heathrow makes sense falls apart as soon as you touch it, at least for anyone except the Airports Commission and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling.

I’ve written about this on The Next Wave before (here and here); Chris Goodall’s forensic analysis on Carbon Commentary over the years points out some of the flaws:

• Business travel is falling. Heathrow is about flying for leisure.
• Most business travellers are going to an internal company meeting, not to see customers.
• The airport is not operating at capacity.
• The share of long-haul flights at Heathrow is falling, not rising.

Of course, this is without even starting on the environmental arguments. But there’s no way that Britain can hit its climate change targets if it keeps increasing the Heathrow numbers.

In the face of this evidence, the Airports Commission’s case ended up being about improving access to leisure flights, although this has little or nothing to do with economic growth. As Goodall notes, “PwC’s empirical analysis [on behalf of the Commission] shows that people who take holidays are happier.” It’s worth noting that initially the Airports Commission assumed that although present demand for business flights is flat it would increase again, but they abandoned that before the final report.

Poor investments

And even if you believe that the UK does need more airport capacity, which in 2016 is definitely a “used future”, Heathrow isn’t the sensible choice, as others have been quick to point out. Indeed, John Kay went one stage further and suggested that large-scale investment projects were generally a poor investment.

A rough rule of thumb:  if the project is one you would ask the Queen to inaugurate, strike it off the list.  Hinkley Point and HS2 are very bad value for money.  A new runway at Heathrow is a better proposition, but not at an estimated cost of £23bn.

Of course, the Airports Commission was set up to produce a pro-Heathrow outcome. Sir Howard Davies hasn’t got where he is today without having a well-tuned ear for political preferences. It achieved this with some of the dodgiest cost benefit analysis seen in a publicly funded report. Even using the government’s own cost benefit analysis method any benefit all but disappears. (There are lies, damned lies, and cost benefit analysis, as Disraeli almost said.) And while the Aviation Environment Federation is broadly against airport expansion, they have spent time with the Airport Commission’s cost benefit numbers, and observe the following holes in the assumptions:

• too much weighting being given to the assumption that increased seat capacity will lead to wider benefits (for example in terms of increased trade), given that the direction of causality is in some cases unclear:
• likely double counting between the direct and wider impact channels in the PwC calculations; and
• inexplicable results, such as GDP impacts of more than twice the size of the direct welfare and wider economic benefit gains (while it might be expected that they would be lower)

In other words, although the Guardian positioned the argument over expansion as being about growth versus the environment, this is taking the government’s claims at face value. It’s no such thing. It’s about an empty promise of growth against an all-but-certain envionmental impact.

Subsidising the rich

Whatever the claims made about growth, the actual outcome of building a third runway at Heathrow would be to give a large public subsidy to the more affluent who travel abroad by air on holiday multiple times each year. As the new economics foundation observed, expanding Heathrow is a subsidy to the rich:

The need for airport expansion is being driven by a small, wealthy section of the population taking numerous leisure flights in a year. 70% of flights are taken by 15% of the population; … The mean income of leisure passengers at Heathrow in 2014 was £61,000 – nearly three times the UK median income.

But for the Conservative Party, the ritualistic attraction of Heathrow is so great that it is willing to take all sorts of risks to announce its approval for the third runway at Heathrow:

• A potential split in Cabinet (along different lines from the hard/soft Brexit split)
• A by-election that has no upside
• A long period before the likely Parliamentary vote that allows the divisions to continue
• Abandoning the last vestiges of any claim to be pro-environmental to opposition parties
• Several years of campaigns against the runway on environmental and public health grounds, much of it in the courts, that make the political opposition look good
• Undermining the modest credibility their Northern Powerhouse/Midlands Engine strategy has
• While also making Theresa May look even more like a flip-flopper with no principles, given [her opposition](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37766708) in 2009.

Of course, if you really wanted to improve the UK’s economic performance, you’d invest in skills and improve the way that local labour markets work through incremental improvements in buses and local train services. The kind of public investment that Heathrow’s third runway would require could make a decent difference here.

But Cabinet ministers use Heathrow and don’t use local buses. Indeed, they are happy to push through ideologically driven legislation that will likely make bus services worse.

So what’s going on here?

My best guess is that this is politics as performance.

A government that knows that it is hamstrung by Brexit needs to be seen to be being decisive about the international economy, and despite the evidence, Heathrow is a symbol of this for ministers. But at the same time, the legal issues around Heathrow (such as air pollution) are not likely to get resolved any time soon, so the thing is not actually likely to get built.

In one of the manifestations of the cargo cult, islanders would build a hut in the forest and then place money inside it in the hope it would grow. Unfortunately, it often got stolen. It all sounds strangely familiar.

The photo at the top of the post is by Andrew Curry, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence. The chart is from the Carbon Commentary blog, and is used with thanks.

John Maynard Keynes said, famously, that ‘practical men’ were usually ‘slaves to some defunct economist’. Something similar is true in futures work. There are some views of the world that are so embedded that no amount of good futures analysis can dislodge them from the minds of their adherents. Indeed, the futurist Jamais Cascio has coined a term for this, “legacy futures“, which describes futures that are trapped in a moment that has already passed, a “now” that is already history.

These thoughts are prompted by the latest wave of lobbying by British business interests for a third runway at Heathrow. I get weary writing about this: I went through the relevant trends at length a couple of years ago and found that in terms of air transport in the richer world almost all the trends were headwinds. More recently Chris Goodall at Carbon Commentary has noted that demand for business air travel from the UK was declining for some years before the crisis. (Since then he has returned to the subject, most recently using Civil Aviation Authority data to lay into the misleading numbers deployed by the campaigns that promote the expansion of Heathrow.) It’s worth noting that all that stuff about flights to China, trotted out again by the CBI in the past month, is more or less just plain wrong. It disregards the huge number of flights to Hong Kong from Heathrow, compared to the negligible numbers from other European hubs, which expansionist advocates contrive to overlook.

The capacity myth
As the environmentalist Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith pointed out, the idea that Heathrow’s capacity is full is something of a myth. Or at least: it’s only true while flights to destinations such as Malta and Cyprus continue to take slots at the airport rather than being moved to Stansted or Gatwick. There’s an evident market failure there.

Despite my weariness, it is worth noting a couple of recent reports – from opponents of Heathrow expansion – that have taken on the economic case for the Third Runway.

The first is a paper (opens pdf) from PRIME, the economics consultancy, written by Ann Pettifor and Jeremy Smith. They took the underlying argument made by the expansionists – that expansion is essential to sustain the continued growth of the British economy – and tested it against data. (Who knows? This wild idea might just catch on.) If the claim is correct, it should be possible to see changes in national or regional economic performance as a result of aviation expansion.

Whilst Heathrow has grown only modestly in passenger numbers over the 11 years from 2000 to 2011, and Frankfurt not very much more, Schiphol and Paris CDG have both expanded by over 25% in passenger numbers. Can we notice any impact on GDP? The answer seems to us to be negative.

If a decade of major growth in passenger numbers was to have any significant impact, it should be in favour of France and the Netherlands. In fact the differences are marginal and the variables so many that it is impossible to assign cause and effect – other than to note Germany’s strength in 2010 and 2011 which no one has suggested results in any significant way from the steady growth of Frankfurt airport. And so far in 2012, the economies of France, the Netherlands and the UK are all around or below zero, while Germany’s early-year growth seems to be ending.

They also note that although expansionists often talk about the impact of an airport on the regional rather than the national economy (as if the UK needs London to be any more dominant than it is today, but that’s another story), it’s not possible to find data that would allow this claim to be tested.

No Social Return on Investment
The second report is from New Economics Foundation (disclosure: I am a Supporter) which takes the Department of Transport’s own model, but updates the input data on economic growth rates, exchange rates, carbon prices, fuel prices and other variables. They also estimated the costs of a new runway to the local community near Heathrow, re-visiting and re-evaluating the DfT’s estimates for this. Small changes in assumptions pretty much demolish the expansionist case. Whereas the DfT’s calculations suggest the third runway would produce a net benefit of £5.5 billion to the British economy, nef’s point towards a net cost of £5 billion.

In the foreword to their report, Ian Cheshire of the B&Q group writes:

“the case for a third runway at Heathrow is at best incomplete and at worst completely flawed… By taking an approach based on Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis, nef has produced a more rounded and realistic analysis of the costs and benefits of Runway 3.”

Predict and provide
Of course, it is worth remembering that one of the data claims that underpins the whole expansionist case – that aviation demand will double by 2030 – is itself a shockingly simplistic piece of forecasting. It assumes (forecasts are always assumptions) that the rapid growth in aviation seen during the 25 years to 2000, during years of relatively cheap energy, a benign global economic climate, and a rapid increase in globally connected trade, will continue out to 2030. It is a classic example of the predict and provide model that bedevilled domestic transport planning in the UK from the 1960s to the 1990s. Typically, eventually, such approaches lead to under-used infrastructure which is being paid off for decades afterwards. I’m going to guess, by the way, that little of these competing perspectives will be found in the work of George Osborne’s hastily convened commission, to be chaired by Howard Davies. Davies is an intelligent man, but his career suggests something of a tin ear for views which run against those of the current political or business mainstream.

The normalisation of aviation
One of the things that’s striking about the whole debate is the extent to which aviation has been normalised as part of our culture, with all of the infrastructure and noise that it entails. I got a sense of this last year when I was working on a scenarios project for a client. It turned out that a member of the client’s board was concerned that the scenarios needed to be ‘plausible’, and mentioned as implausible a scenario for 2050 in which the Heathrow site was used as a reservoir. I’d written the scenario, as it happened, and the purpose of it (as part of a set of scenarios) was to provoke people into imagining a world in which water resources were more important to the working of the city than an airport. (The argument for the location: Heathrow is poorly positioned as an airport, upwind of the city it serves; the geology and topography are ideally suited to water courses; and because it is a large site with a single owner it is relatively simple to acquire.)

One piece of work which tries to disrupt this normalisation is ‘Quiet Skies‘ by the artists Hollingworth & Kyprianou. Their short film is built around video of Heathrow taken during 2010, when the airportwas closed by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. The soundtrack is from the manifesto of the Italian Futurists, written in the earliest days of the plane. It’s not possible to embed the video here, but is four and half minutes well spent.

The images in this post are from Quiet Skies by Hollington & Kyprianou, and are used with thanks.