The Heathrow Consultation and Democracy

March 6th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:22 pm

My last post addressed what I see as one of the key problems that resonates throughout contemporary societies – namely, how power seeks to govern and regulate our collective relationship with an uncertain future.

Staying with this theme, the Heathrow Consultation ended last week. The Government had invited responses from the public before the end of February on the expected environmental effects of a third runway at Heathrow. As campaigners against this expansion of capacity at the airport have pointed out, the Government had therefore invited the public to a highly constrained town hall meeting, where questions about whether or not there should be a third runway at all would not be admitted, as the FAQs on the DFT’s website made clear, in circular language that avoided giving any reason for this decision:

The Air Transport White Paper stated the Government’s support for the further development of Heathrow, including a third runway and additional terminal capacity subject to stringent local environmental limits being met. It also said that scope for making greater use of the two existing runways should be explored, subject to the same environmental limits. The consultation presents the outcome of our assessment of these options and invites views.

The justification for the Government’s restriction of the consultation to questions concerning how the impact of a third runway might best be mitigated, compensated for, and so on, lies deep in the transport policy background, you’ll be thrilled to hear. This includes the Eddington Report (2006) and and the Air Transport White Paper of 2003. What is actually interesting about this justification, in the present context, is how it represents an attempt to negotiate between what we know of the present and the uncertain future, and how this undermines the possibility of democratic politics. The tools that are used to produce it represent a way of mediating between the known and the unknown that raises many vital political questions, which arguably form the background to the various campaigns for a genuine consultation on Heathrow.

OK: first, a quick survey of past events. The policy context for the Heathrow expansion goes back to the 1998 White Paper, A New Deal for Transport, in which air transport policy was placed within a 30-year panning framework. Two consultation exercises in 2000 and 2002 (which had a more general remit than the current one) fed into the production of the 2003 Aviation White Paper The Future of Air Transport, mentioned in the passage from the Heathrow FAQs quoted above. In this document, the Government proclaimed its general role vis-a-vis infrastructure development to consist in (i) facilitating markets and regulating competition, and (ii) fulfilling its duty to ‘minimise’ harms to citizens to acceptable levels (as opposed to preventing harms, leaving aside the question of how these are defined). This development itself represents the quintessence of NuLabour: the union of deeply dull managerialism and radical anti-democratic political innovation.

What is important here is that, in picturing the nature of governance in these terms, the White Paper is already selecting certain policy tools, and with them, ways of understanding the relationship between our present and the future. Along with these tools come the political problems to which the anti-expansion campaigns are ultimately responding. If the Government is essentially a facilitator of certain forms of economic transaction (e.g. the selling of travel privileges), and minimiser of harms, then it needs certain practical tools to carry out this role. As market facilitator, it needs to understand the future of the markets it is concerned with. As minimiser of harms, it needs to understand the potential costs and benefits of policies. As we shall see, one of the most important aspects of this self-understanding on the part of the Government is the fact that, by selecting these two roles for itself, it has ruled out others.

In the 2003 White Paper, the Government relied on long-term econometric forecasting methods to predict a set of air transport growth scenarios for the 30 years to 2030. It argued that the past thirty years have witnessed a five-fold increase in air travel in and out of the UK. In relation to future demand, it asserted that “all the evidence suggests that the growth in popularity and importance of air travel is set to continue over the next 30 years” (s. 2.8). In deciding how to balance its two roles in the case of expanding infrastructure to facilitate forecasted demand growth, the Government decided in 2003 that it should expand existing capacity to cater for the forecasted growth in air travel demand, where existing infrastructure was already saturated (as at Heathrow), whilst minimising the environmental impacts that facilitating growth may entail. To understand the relationship between the potential costs and benefits of facilitating aviation growth, the Government has relied on the framework of full cost-benefit analysis recommended by (former head of BA…) Sir Rod Eddington in the 2006 “Eddington Report”, The Case for Action.

Now, what’s interesting about the dual role the Government (not the electorate) has decided circumscribes the reach of its legitimate activities is how the policy tools used to support the one side of it relate to those used to support the other. By deciding to respond to the 30-year forecasts of increasing air transport, the Government has also decided that a simple, continuous increase in economic growth is necessarily the best measure of social progress (despite the advice of some of its own advisors in their work with DEFRA).

Now, if the social good and the national interest can be treated as a monetised measure such as the rate of increase of GDP, then all that needs to be done in order to achieve progress, and with it, maximum net benefit, is to arrange economic incentives so that the benefits of social activities outweigh their costs. This takes us from how the Government understands the future of society as such to Eddington’s framework for assessing cost and benefit, and how such assessments can be used to ‘minimise harms’. For Eddington, the use of cost-benefit analysis should be ‘comprehensive’. Policy should take into account incentives that cause the costs of different policies to be externalised onto those who have no power to refuse to pay them, such as unconsulted communities living under the flight paths of new airports. Eddington writes that to avoid market failures of this kind, and therefore to maximise the democratic legitimacy of the government’s actions in its role as facilitator of markets, all costing must take into the “full social, environmental and economic costs and benefits of policy options”. Only then will a true picture of the net economic yield of a given option be possible.

The main strength of this approach is held to lie in the way it ‘gives a voice to the voiceless’, by translating prima facie non-economic impacts (which may otherwise be entirely discounted) into the language of a monetized measure that allows them to be weighed against expected benefits. In this way, the negative outcomes of policy are treated as objective costs which must be included in any calculation of net benefit.

Before we take the Government’s case apart, a short summary of where we’ve got to so far. The Government’s decision (arguably without any specific popular mandate) to define its responsibilities in a particular way, leads to the adoption of certain econometric tools in order to carry out these responsibilities. To choose linear growth as the measure of what is socially desirable policy is, by extension, to choose CBA as an assessment tool. But these choices are all political choices, in themselves. Neither quantitative growth nor CBA are self-evidently the only principles to work with here in negotiating with an uncertain future. Indeed, the current conjuncture is precisely one where such assumptions are no longer simply left unquestioned, even in the mainstream of political debate (ask anyone working for the SDC).

Why are these assumptions so questionable? Let’s take the use of long-term econometric forecasting first. Such forecasting is designed to carve out from the chaos of long-term uncertainty a set of scenarios which give intelligible shape to the future, and allow planning in the present. But it does so only on the basis of certain fixed presuppositions, and it is these that assign a general ‘character’ to the futures which the forecasts envision. The uncertainty affecting such forecasts is admitted very clearly in the policy papers leading up to the 2003 White Paper (a wise scepticism which of course is missing from Ruth Kelly’s confident pronouncements about the dire consequences for you and your kiddies of not laying down more tarmac as soon as possible). It’s interesting that the key assumption which seeks to allay fears of the unknown is one which does the opposite: the White Paper stated that its forecasts were based on the assumption of “unconstrained demand”. In other words that, mutatis mutandis (those two words on which economists depend for their living), we can expect growth in air travel to continue increasing just as it had done over previous decades. Now, a lot of things can intervene in the interactions between economic variables – international policy on carbon emissions and massive rises in oil prices being just two. But many of these have to do with political decisions, and not with economic ‘laws’. By assuming that the social world can, for forecasting purposes, be unproblematically reduced in complexity to level of a natural phenomenon isolated for study in a controlled laboratory environment, econometric forecasts demand to be treated with the utmost circumspection and scepticism. But instead, the Government has, by restricting its role to that of facilitator of markets and minimiser of harms, baptised forecasting as its major weapon for conquering uncertainty.

By invoking the principle of unconstrained demand, especially in a historical conjuncture where ‘constraints’ of various sorts are a major political preoccupation around the world, the Government is inviting more questions to be raised, and practically demanding a wider consultation on matters such as the third Heathrow runway, rather than justifying restricting such consultation to technical matters of harm reduction and compensation.

Now, let’s move on to the ‘comprehensive’ cost-benefit analysis (CBA) demanded by Eddington, and which is aimed at deciding how to ‘mitigate’ the harms that, ‘we have to accept’, will result from ‘our’ commitment to aviation growth.

Comprehensive CBA assumes that all impacts can in principle be assigned a monetary value. But this is arguably illegitimate because the kinds of things people value are not necessarily commensurable with one another. To assume that monetary value can be universally assigned is to presume that a common measure can serve as a universal point of comparison – in other words, that there is at least one feature (monetary value) in respect of which all the different things people find valuable are comparable. But why is this, given the diverse natures of the things people care about?

In the case of some values, it is arguably part of what people find valuable about them that they cannot be exchanged for other goods, either in a one-to-one transaction, or as part of a sacrificial transaction geared to achieving a further end. For example, to place a monetary value on friendship could only be thought of as a tool for assessing the relative importance to us of different friends if we were prepared to misunderstand what is actually meant by friendship (Joseph Raz’s point in The Morality of Freedom, 1986). The reason why it is wrong to treat friends as instrumental means to an end and therefore as readily exchangeable units is contained in the social practices by which friendship is enacted. The problem, when values that are incommensurable with each other in this sense are threatened (e.g., when values such as ‘biodiversity’, landscape, community cohesion and silence are affected), is how to rank them ordinally (i..e first, second, third, etc.) in terms of importance.

How they are assigned a ranking of this kind has to be a matter of public and transparent deliberation, a process which cannot be submitted to a pre-decided algorithmic decision procedure such as that offered by CBA. Indeed – and this is the vital point for my wider argument here – to assume such a process of deliberation could be substituted for by CBA is to already have made a judgement concerning the ordinal ranking of values in general. The outcome of this judgement (which informs the Government’s choice of role) has been that to adopt a monetary measure of harm and benefit yields greater social value in general, than any other approach to understanding how people care about goods and bads.

A second reason why transparency (and therefore, an expansion of the terms of any consultation) is necessary here has to do with the implicit assumptions built into CBA (even Eddington’s ‘comprehensive’ variety) concerning the ethical and political status of future generations. Crudely put, it violates the entirely liberal principle of equity by assuming that the further into the future the costs and benefits of a policy may be located, the less monetary value they have in relation to the present. Just as reliance on CBA masks the political problem of how to rank values, its assumption that the future can be discounted relative to the present masks the political problem of how the present generation is to manage its responsibilities to future ones. The Government’s avowed goal in its published sustainability strategy Securing the Future (2005) [PDF] is precisely to decide how best to do this. However, CBA as a policy tool is at odds with this stated goal, as it undermines the goal of equity by defining the value of future goods for the future, and the severity of future costs, using a metric which is biased towards the interests of the present.

The illegitimacy of the Government’s consultation on Heathrow is symptomatic of a general realignment towards the relationship between present and future, which is tied very much to the selectively acknowledged ‘economic realities’ mentioned by commenters on my last post. When the campaigns against Heathrow expansion seek to foreground what people consider to be the real inequalities and injustices such policies may impose upon them, they are ultimately interrogating this basic shift in the Government’s relationship with the rest of us. Just as recent social policy reflects an ‘entrepreneurial’ interpretation of how the individual should respond to the life-chances provided by social provision of education, health care and welfare, wider development policy reflects a marketised interpretation of the future (as an empty, colonisable space) that has changed the basic character of the democratic settlement embodied in governance. A wider consultation is needed to expose these entirely political choices that have taken place, and which are now shaping and constraining the conditions of all our lives.