Oral evidence: The Airports Commission report: Carbon emissions, air quality and noise inquiry, HC 389Wednesday 14 October 2015

Oral evidence, 14 October 2015.

Witnesses

Lord True CBE, Leader, Richmond Council, 2M Boroughs, Daniel Moylan, TfL Board Member/Mayor’s Adviser on Aviation and Crossrail 2, Transport for London, Richard de Cani, Managing Director, Planning, Transport for London, and Councillor Amrit Mann, Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Portfolio Holder for Environment, London Borough of Hounslow, gave evidence.

Chair

Good afternoon, and thank you for your patience in waiting for us. It has been a very interesting first session. Thank you for your time, in advance, in coming to give evidence to this inquiry. Because time is always against us, if you will put up with it, we will go straight into the inquiry and the questions. If I could kick off with a question: Heathrow and the Commission argue that with the exception of NO2 levels at Bath Road the air quality impact of expansion will not impact any local receptors with implications for human health, nor will it endanger UK compliance with national air quality targets. Do you accept that, and if not why not?

Richard de Cani

If I could kick off, the Commission has adopted a particular interpretation of EU guidance, which basically allows air quality to get worse provided it is no worse than the worst link in the zone, and that is the assessment they have adopted. The proposals do not improve air quality anywhere. They make it worse. As a basic approach we would disagree with their interpretation of the guidance that they have adopted.

Chair

Why is it the wrong approach?

Richard de Cani

Because the spirit of the guidance and the Commission’s own appraisal criteria is to improve air quality, not just to seek the minimum compliance by not being the worst zone in London, so we would have expected them to look at improvements across the board in air quality. On the points about receptors, the Davies Commission does identify a number of receptors that experience a worsening in air quality, including a number of primary schools. To what extent that impacts on public health has, as far as we can see, not been assessed as part of their assessment, but there is a worsening of air quality at those receptor sites.

Chair

Does anybody want to add to that?

Councillor Amrit Mann

If I may. Certainly in Hounslow we have a particular problem, because five of the receptors often exceed the permitted levels of 40 micrograms per metre cubed, and these are always in excess of 50 micrograms per metre cubed at five of the seven sites. So there is that. There is also the health impact that we have. We have heard from the previous speakers with regard to cardiovascular and also respiratory problems. The Davies Commission identifies that there is a cost of about £10.8 million. The question that we would like to pose is: who is going to bear that cost? Is it going to be a local authority, or is it going to be national health, or is it going to be central Government?

Chair

Do you have a clear answer to that at the moment?

Councillor Amrit Mann

It is not going to be us.

Lord True

That is something a Labour councillor can say and everyone can agree on. Our view is that the Commission was very complacent on this point, and there is a legal framework here and I am sure the Committee has had ddrawn to its attention the latest legal opinion on the point affecting the sheer legality of going ahead where we are already in breach. Just on the precautionary issue of safety, setting aside the politics of going off to negotiate with the European Union when you are saying, “I am going to build an airport that is in breach of your standards”—that may or may not be a good negotiating tactic, I do not know—our view is that DEFRA’s own current limit values compliance map shows breaches, as my colleague has said. We think it is not good enough to say that somewhere else in London the situation is worse. We simply have no meeting point with Davies’s basis for assessment of the risk here.

Chair

Thank you for that. Can I ask something slightly different as well? It is in relation to the global awareness of what has been going on in the background, in a different context. There is a gap between this and what is happening with vehicle emissions, which do impact on this, and between what is recorded and what is real life. Do you anticipate that that has any relevance for air quality given what we are now learning? It is not simply the VW issue, it is the gap generally between recorded and real-life emissions in this area.

Lord True

It does have an impact, yes. There is no doubt that although it is essentially wider than the VW issue, certainly the VW issue does have a substantial impact because even if we take the Heathrow view that, “It is not down to us, boys, it is all those cars around”, there has to be certainty in the mix if you are basing a sensible environmental policy. But I would make a wider point, if I may, Chair, which is that there is a huge issue of trust here in delivering great infrastructure projects, which this would be, whether it goes ahead here or anywhere else. It does depend to a great deal on the public, who are the people who are most affected both in the benefits and the disbenefits, believing it is being sold to them on a true and accurate basis. At the moment, what has happened, as you say, obviously diminishes public trust.

Councillor Amrit Mann

If I can just add to that, it depends on whether the Davies Commission used the vehicle manufacturers’ numbers as the baseline or whether they were obtained somewhere else from some of the receptors, in which case the data is valid. But if it is vehicle manufacturers’ data then, yes, there is a particular problem with that and we would require a reassessment of the air quality assessment.

Chair

Zac, you wanted to come in on that.

Zac Goldsmith

Just very quickly, I could go to anyone with this question. The estimate is that a third runway would lead to 25 million extra road passenger journeys every year to and from Heathrow. In their calculations, both Heathrow and the Airports Commission had to make an assessment of the contribution of those journeys in terms of air quality, but we now know that the data on which those calculations was made is flawed—it is wrong, categorically wrong. So does that not mean that the pronouncements made by the Airports Commission in relation to air quality are more or less worth nothing at this stage? You would have to go back to the drawing board. Likewise, with the DEFRA air consultation that is currently live, it is hard to understand how any of those calculations could be regarded as valid in any sense at all, given that everything they are based on has just been fundamentally discredited. Is that not the case, and does that not pose real legal problems for the Government and Heathrow?

Daniel Moylan

There are a number of things that have changed—including since we submitted our written evidence to the Committee—but it is just starting by remembering that the Government is under no obligation to approve an expansion of Heathrow, but it is under a very firm obligation to meet certain air quality targets. The Davies Commission’s own approach to the assessment of air quality was rather strange. They were well aware of this as an issue from the outset. In fact, their consultation on it was split into two parts. The first was at a very high generic level, and the second appeared right towards the end of the process with only a few weeks—I think three weeks—for people to respond, and it was issued in a form that was impenetrable to anybody but a small number of experts. On that basis they made an assessment that is effectively to the effect that it will not be worse on the Bath Road than it is in Marylebone Road, which we dispute, because they have not taken into account the effects of the ultra-low emission zone that is now a committed scheme that the Mayor is bringing in. We also dispute, as has been said, that that is the right test that should be applied either under law or in terms of how social benefits of improvements should be distributed. Why should they all accrue to the airline industry and not to the people of London? That is a political judgment, but it is one that one can form a view on. They managed to take that approach and then said, “But if we are wrong you can build the runway but you cannot use it,” which is even more bizarre because it becomes unfinancial, I would have thought, in the private sector if you cannot use it either for lengthy periods or simply because the wind is blowing the wrong way from Holland on a particular day and you have to stop using it. How does that work? Nobody has an answer on any of that. Then we have a revised air quality framework but, as Mr Goldsmith has said, it was published before the news of the Volkswagen scandal came out. That is evidence of deceit. I have no reason for thinking that deceit or deception is practised by other manufacturers, but it is certainly the case that the relationship between what comes out and what happens on the road must now be in question. Experts have always understood this, and it is fair to say the DfT allow for it by a certain factor when they do their assessments, but whether that factor is correct and whether it can be tested more robustly is another question.

Chair

You are obviously querying some of the assumptions and some of the baseline modelling, but in light of the fact that the baseline data has now been revised—we have different baseline data—and in light of other queries over what the real difference might be in terms of road emissions, your feeling is that the Government should look at this, or that the Commission or somebody else should use the new data to feed into the model.

Daniel Moylan

Yes, but first you have to have a robust and accepted air quality action plan that shows that you can meet your European Union legal obligations. The draft published by DEFRA does not include any assumption about Heathrow expansion, but it is of course only a draft for consultation. We need to see a final version, and that also ultimately requires Commission approval, and maybe to be tested in the courts for all I know—the UK courts or elsewhere. We need to have some certainty of that. Then you can see what margin you think you have, but there is still the technical question: is the margin robust? There is also the political question: should that margin accrue to people—to Londoners—or to the airline industry? Just one final point: even if you meet the limits, it is still the case that you have poor air quality, it is just not as poor as it was before. There are health impacts from poor air quality even at levels below the limit, so it is a genuine question how that margin should be distributed as a social benefit.

Chair

I want to bring Caroline in, but Richard de Cani, do you want to add to that?

Richard de Cani

I just have a broader point about how the air quality assessment has been undertaken and the forecast it is derived from. The Davies Commission has tested a particular scenario in terms of Heathrow demand in 2030, based on certain assumptions around passenger movement, employees and mode splits. We would normally, for something so significant, look beyond the year of opening to a full utilisation and test that in a number of different scenarios so we can see the best and the worst case from it. Our interpretation of the Davies Commission’s assessment is that it is a very optimistic view of what the number of people travelling to and from the airport will be, and if you looked at it through a different set of assumptions around a busier airport, a faster utilisation, different employee numbers and not such an optimistic mode share, you would get a different number of road traffic vehicles, which would then feed into your air quality assessment. So there is a more fundamental issue about the range of scenarios that have been tested and the range that you would expect to be tested for a development of this size.

Caroline Lucas

There is disagreement between the Airports Commission and some of the witnesses to our inquiry about the Commission’s interpretation of the Air Quality Directive, and I want to know what would be the implications for the Commission’s recommendation if the “does not delay” compliance test was ruled insufficient. If it was ruled insufficient, what additional mitigation would be required?

Lord True

If their interpretation is wrong, it casts doubt over the viability of the whole project. The mitigation possibilities have flowed from some of the things we have been discussing on the previous question. I do not know if TfL want to come in on that.

Daniel Moylan

One approach you could take is to say, “You cannot build a runway”, and Davies could try, but it is not going to work on air quality grounds. The other is to take the Davies fall-back approach of building it but not using it, but then there is no reassessment made of the economic benefit—the whole Davies case in the end comes down to economic benefit. It never started out that way, but that is how it ended up in the final report, “This is what we go for, and it has the greatest economic benefit”. If you cannot use the wretched thing you have to reassess what the economic benefits are. So the whole case comes into question.

Lord True

One can never of course prove an assertion; it could be a very unworthy thing to assert. But it has already been said that the air quality effort that was made by Davies, however you assess it, was done in two different stages. Suddenly there is this rushed late assessment. One of my more loquacious colleagues said that the work they had done on air quality so far opened them to legal challenge—possibly the law of coincidence, but I think the law of actuality that they thought they would try to block that hole. I do not think the hole is blocked at all.

Richard de Cani

A different way to look at this would be to seek to achieve no overall deterioration from the proposal, so you end up where you start off. That requires a transformational change in the proposition in terms of the overall approach to surface access, travel demand management and the operation of the airport, and introduces a whole range of issues around public transport charging and those sorts of things. That would be a different way to look at it. That is not what we are presenting—

Daniel Moylan

But that is the test that the DfT applies to new roads, so it is the test that is being applied to the Mayor’s proposal for a new river crossing, for example—that it demonstrates no deterioration in air quality. That seems quite a sensible thing, and you can get that through tolling and charging and so forth. It has to be shown that you can, but that is our view. That should be the test, should it not, at a minimum?

Chair

This has been quite useful in laying out some quite big areas of your concern. You are fundamentally saying that this could be the project that you approve in principle, but you could go ahead and find that it is undeliverable, because you are going to hit up against either legal challenges or issues of air pollution that cannot be reconciled and so on. But let us test the model a little bit further.

Zac Goldsmith

Just a tail question on that one. If this investment happens, if the expansion goes ahead, and if the legal obligations in relation to air quality mean that the infrastructure is going to lie idle and not be used, being a cynic I would imagine that the legal levels would be the first thing to shift. You would see pressure on Government to change the legal definition of an acceptable level of air pollution. Is there anything preventing the Government from doing that?

Daniel Moylan

I do not think we can do that within the confines of European law, but Mr Goldsmith’s instinct is correct, because on noise parameters the 57 LDA—I mumble a bit over the suffixes, but the 57 limit—was recommended for tightening to 55 some 12 or 13 years ago as a measure to comply with World Health Organisation limits, and the Government refused to implement it because of the limiting effect it would have had on Heathrow’s operation. The instinct is well-evidenced.

Zac Goldsmith

I am going to move on. I think I know what the answer is going to be. The evidence that we have had suggests that by far the biggest contributor to air pollution would be surface transport linked to Heathrow expansion, so the question is, to what extent is the responsibility for mitigating that impact with Government, local government, TfL or Heathrow itself? Where do you think the principal responsibility lies in term of dealing with the additional air pollution?

Daniel Moylan

It all comes back to the Government. The Government is under the legal obligation. The UK Government is the party to the legal obligation to meet certain air quality limits. The UK Government is the entity that can or cannot—Parliament can or cannot—approve a national planning policy statement that would allow Heathrow expansion or otherwise. TfL of course has obligations that are derived from that and has the money to do it, and works for the Government to approve air quality in a whole host of areas, and will want to do so for its own sake because it is a good thing for Londoners. But even that has to be done in collaboration with Government, and sometimes on the basis of Government funding, which incidentally we do not think is adequate for the purpose, but that is another point.

Lord True

I strongly agree with that, and I am going to also agree with what Amrit has said. Local authorities are not going to be in a position to pick up these kinds of tabs. It must be a cascading line of responsibility, as Daniel has said. The key is that Government must comply with its legal obligations. You cannot just come along and build a coal mine in Richmond Park and then say to the local council, “Look, boys, you sort out the pollution”. Some people are taking the decision to create the entity with whom the responsibility lays.

Councillor Amrit Mann

In terms of noise and certainly in terms of air pollution, both these factors do not see any boundaries, so we are limited in our scope as to what we can do as a local authority. Hence we would shift the onus on to Heathrow Airports Ltd, but also the Government. The way I see it—and I see it from a legal standpoint—is the good neighbour principle. In English court law we talk about Donoghue v. Stevenson, which is the duty of care. The duty of care lies not with the local authority but certainly with Heathrow Airport, and also with central Government, who, if they are minded to support Davies, are going to endorse the third runway. We would not want to pick up the pieces. The residents in Hounslow, our community, are looking to fund the costs of all the pollution, the air noise and what goes with it, and then on top of that we are lumbered with trying to clean all the mess up. So we would shift the onus back on to central Government and Heathrow Airports Ltd.

Zac Goldsmith

Can I ask a question of TfL? I know that Heathrow and the Airports Commission have both estimated that the cost of adapting our service transport infrastructure to accommodate the extra traffic backwards and forwards from Heathrow is somewhere between £3 billion and £4 billion. I know that TfL have done their own assessment of those figures. The cost, incidentally, is being borne not by Heathrow but by the taxpayer. I know you questioned those figures. Can you explain what figure you reached and why?

Richard de Cani

It is important to just remind ourselves of the geography of Heathrow, because it is to the west of London, surrounded by built-up areas. When we look at the transport needs of London as a whole we take into account the population employment growth for the future. Since the Davies Commission finalised their report we have had a revised population employment forecast for London. The employment forecasts are an extra 650,000 people working in London from what they were then. All those people will be travelling on our rail, bus and road networks, getting to and from work and other journeys. We look at it in terms of the totality, and we look at the overlay of the Heathrow demand on top of the background demand we will get from population employment growth. We do not believe the assessment undertaken by the Davies Commission is the right assessment. It does not look at the right year. It does not take into account the right background growth. When we look at it through our own forecasts for the future, we see a much greater need for more capacity across London as a whole. Some of those are schemes that Davies has identified, and the schemes will be funded by 2030. They are not currently in anyone’s funding plans. So we have identified quite a considerable gap between what Davies identifies as the minimum necessary and what we think is necessary for London, as a whole, including an expanded Heathrow, in terms of public transport improvements in particular.

Zac Goldsmith

Can you give us a figure?

Richard de Cani

There are a number of schemes that we think are essential to support growth in that part of London, including Heathrow. Some of those are identified by Davies: southern rail access, Crossrail improvements, and Crossrail 2 is needed to support general growth in London by 2030. Davies assumes that is funded. It is not funded at the moment. There are other improvements to the national rail network and the road network that Davies assumes are funded, which are not currently in anyone’s plans. So if you take into account all of the schemes that are identified as being necessary but do not have clear funding plans, then the cost, the gap, is in the order of around £20 billion. Not all of those are absolutely essential just for Heathrow, but they are needed for growth in its totality, including Heathrow.

Zac Goldsmith

Are you able to give us an indication of how much of that £20 billion gap would not be necessary if the Heathrow expansion did not happen?

Richard de Cani

It is difficult to desegregate it in that way, because many of the people travelling to and from Heathrow are also people travelling to and from work elsewhere in London. So if you look at the Piccadilly line, that has people who live in Hounslow travelling to work and people travelling to Heathrow. It is difficult to separate out, but the scale of demand that you get with Heathrow expansion is clear, and if you want to push it in the right direction towards increased public transport that is a big generator activity on top of what is already a large increase in demand by 2030.

Chair

I just want to bring in Peter here, because he has a question very relevant to this modal shift of quite a scale.

Peter Heaton-Jones

Thank you, Chair, absolutely. The Commission and Heathrow in their evidence to the Commission envisaged this fairly significant shift away from private road transport to get to the airport and on to public transport. It envisages that more than half of all the surface journeys to the airport—53% I think is the figure—will be via public transport; a big shift. I just want to ask simply: do you think that is credible?

Richard de Cani

Without expansion it is the right objective to seek to achieve, but it can only be delivered with the right plans in place. At the moment the public transport mode share for passengers at Heathrow by public transport is around 41%. So we are talking about a big increase in the quantum of people travelling to and from Heathrow. That is just passengers. Employees at Heathrow use 28% public transport, so there is a bigger increase to achieve for employees. That requires an integrated approach looking at new capacity, looking at demand management, looking at the approach to parking, looking at how staff travel is dealt with, looking at incentives. What Davies has put forward at the moment does not address all those issues. So the scale that Heathrow would have to move to get to that is quite considerable. It is absolutely the right ambition to seek a higher public transport mode share, but it needs more investment in rail, in particular, to get to those figures.

Daniel Moylan

Can I just draw attention to the staff figures there? They must not be thought of as trivial? There are approximately 70,000 people employed on the Heathrow site, and we have figures of 28% travelling only by public transport and the balance largely by car and taxi. Moreover, it is fair to say—I think one of the earlier witnesses referred to this—that Heathrow does already have quite good staff travel plans for an employer, they are not negligent in this regard, yet they are still only achieving this very low public transport mode share, despite the efforts they have put in.

Peter Heaton-Jones

Just a follow-up, then: is there an example anywhere else in the country where there has been such a significant modal shift from private to public transport? Has that been achieved anywhere else?

Richard de Cani

When you look at London as a whole over the last 15 years and how people travel in London, we have seen a shift away from the car towards public transport through a massive investment in rail capacity, the introduction of the congestion charging scheme and investment in our bus network. We have seen a shift on that scale. At Heathrow, you need to look in detail at where the markets are for people travelling to and from the airport and how you can target improvements on those particular corridors. At the moment, Heathrow has quite good public transport mode share on particular corridors to and from the airport, and much worse on others. What is needed is more a targeted, focused approach on how you can drive that mode share, but it requires a huge amount of investment beyond what is currently identified in the Davies Commission report.

Chair

Can I just ask a supplementary? Is it all a carrot? Is it to do with improving the infrastructure, giving people the choice to switch to other modes of public transport, or would you argue that in order to fuel that big transition in the way that we move people about through land—you called it a transformation—you would have to have more aggressive measures and more expansion of charging, to try to push people away from cars as well as to encourage them on to public transport?

Daniel Moylan

You might, but it does not get you away from the fact that you still need the public transport investment in order to carry them. If you told all the staff that they would be charged £10 a day if they brought their car to work—I am not suggesting that—then if they gave up using their car you would have to have a night tube on the Piccadilly line, because there are many different shifts and so on, a total upgrade of the Piccadilly line, which we need anyway, and additional Crossrail trains. Of course, many of the staff do not come from central London. I think we had the figure of 1,000 staff at Heathrow—slightly out of date, maybe—who live in Brighton, and you come across people who work at Heathrow who live in Oxford. I think even the chief executive may come from Oxford on a daily basis.

Lord True

We would all endorse all the things that have been said and the aspirations, but I think when you are looking at making policy, you also have to, sadly, consider human nature. The reality of people who go on particularly long flights is that they tend to like the sort of kiss and tell arrangement—not kiss and tell, kiss and go.

Daniel Moylan

Kiss and wave.

Lord True

Kiss and wave.

Chair

Sorry, yes. This is a public session, be careful.

Lord True

I think it is perhaps the recent excitement we have had in the House of Lords with the Lord Chairman of Committees. I do apologise. The fact is, getting people who want to drop off a loved one with three or four heavy cases to make the rational choice is probably slightly more difficult than it ought to be, and it may need both carrot and stick. I do not think that is going to be possible.

Chair

Just before we bring John in, you are saying we would have to do a huge transformation with a number of things, including massive investment in infrastructure beyond what has already been assumed within the model, as well as affecting consumer behaviour. Are you saying it is unachievable, or are you saying it is achievable, but that the scale of things we would need to do would be transformational not only in terms of the infrastructure, but in terms of the way people move and the choices we would be limited to?

Councillor Amrit Mann

I personally think that it is possible, but I will go back to a word that you used, which is “aggressive”. I think there has to be an aggressive approach to this. Certainly in the communities that I represent, we would like to see the Piccadilly line beefed up more, because currently it is quite dire. We would like to see an increase in the frequency of the trains that run and the modernisation of that entire Piccadilly line, because it is very, very key to taking people to and fro into Heathrow. We want to also look at the introduction of travel free zones and the charging fare structure with the Oyster card. It is possible, but it needs to have an aggressive approach.

Chair

This is wider than Heathrow, this is clearly beyond—

Daniel Moylan

The whole thing has to be embedded in the transport solution.

Chair

Whereas I suspect Heathrow would say to us, “This is just a Heathrow issue that we can deal with here”.

Daniel Moylan

But Heathrow adds significantly to it, and there are costs associated that are sometimes difficult to disaggregate. You have to ask yourself why you are doing it, because the objective is to mitigate a harm that is caused from this. Perhaps the answer is not to create a harm in the first place. We could tie ourselves up in knots working out how you mitigate an unnecessary harm and how you disaggregate the costs of doing so. We could happily spend days talking about that—Richard can, of course, because that is his job, in practice.

Chair

But we are not going to let him do that now.

Daniel Moylan

I would like to go back to the root of it: it is an avoidable harm that one is seeking to mitigate. It is very expensive and difficult, and one needs to be quite aggressive with people, as has been said, in order to achieve that mitigation. Of course, everything is possible in the end if you are sufficiently aggressive. Some of these things are desirable in their own right and necessary in their own right.

Chair

John, I would like to bring you in at that point.

John McNally

Thank you, and thank the good Lord for refocusing our attention quite quickly there. You have argued that the definition of the vicinity of the airport is crucial to assessing the Commission’s proposals on air quality. Where did the Commission draw the line; where should it be drawn; what are the implications for the Commission’s findings?

Councillor Amrit Mann

I would like to see it drawn to include my community, because at the moment, under Davies, it would be drawn around the borders of Heathrow Airport Ltd. I think because the issues regarding noise and pollution are much wider, it needs to be much wider in terms of context and in terms looking at it where the environmental insults are being produced. It should not just be within Heathrow Airport Ltd’s perimeter, because they could achieve some of the issues if they carried electric cars and charged for entry into the perimeter, but then all that does is displace the issues and problems to a much wider problem down to Hounslow and Richmond and others. We would like to see a much wider context of the vicinity being defined.

Lord True

I obviously endorse that. Yes, Heathrow has a giant impact. It is the biggest significant impact on a wide area of west London, and that social environmental impact has to be taken into account by Government, if not by Heathrow.

Caroline Ansell

This is a question for TfL—a risky question, given the previous comment that you could talk for days on mitigation; I fear we have just the dying gasps of this session. You say in your submission that before there is any sort of green light for development, there should be a fully worked mitigation plan that goes into detail. How realistic is it to expect that at this point, as we are just in principle at this stage and there are many, many rafts of approval and planning processes to go through?

Daniel Moylan

It is expected of every other major transport scheme that is put forward, not least road schemes, and of course any mitigation plan will contain certain assumptions that may not turn out to be wholly accurate, but it does not mean to say that you cannot start the job. Before you make a decision that is in principle capable of meeting your international legal obligations, you should have a plan as to how you are going to mitigate that effect. I am sorry, that is sort of the answer, is it not?

Richard de Cani

It is, sort of. Just to add to the answer, it is about the scale of what is proposed here as well, which is very significant from a surface access perspective in terms of the number of people moving to and from the airport. These are not minor matters of detail that can be dealt with downstream, they are quite significant points of principle that have to be seen to be workable in the context of what is happening in the rest of the city.

Councillor Amrit Mann

Davies talks about a £1 billion mitigation package, but if we look at that, £250 million is set aside for compulsory purchase of properties; £750 million of that is for the rest of London, and I have to fight it out with my good friend Nick here as to what sizeable chunk of the £750 million we get. We commissioned a report in Hounslow by Bureau Veritas and they came up with a figure of £250 million just for mitigating the noise factor in Hounslow. That is current, never mind the expansion. I think we need to look at the levels of mitigation monies that are being provided. I do not think that the £1 billion goes sufficiently far. I also think that in terms of deliverability, a lot of the mitigating factors need to be instigated now, before any expansion takes place. As we have heard, with terminal 5 there has been foot-dragging and dishonoured promises, and in that time we have had to go back to our residents and say, “Look, this is what we can and cannot do, given our circumstances”.

Chair

But Caroline’s point is surely that if the Minister was sitting here, the Minister would say to you, let alone to Heathrow, “Look, this is such a massive project that we cannot fill in all the gaps yet. It is not practical to do that, but we know what the gaps are likely to be, we know the known unknowns—we will do this. We will fill it in”. Your answer is, “Every other project does that”. They will say, “This is a big complex one, but we know it has to be done”. Why would the Minister not be reasonable in saying that?

Councillor Amrit Mann

If the Minister was minded to take that position, we would like to see legal and binding conditions in place before expansion comes about. We are quite happy to have enforceable and legal and binding conditions set upon it. This is what has been failing with the terminal 5 conditions, because we have not received any of the mitigating circumstances that should have been delivered back then.

Chair

So you are worried that with things like this being open-ended, you or somebody else is left carrying the can. Okay.

Daniel Moylan

Any alternative solution is further delayed if you head off down a cul-de-sac. It might be a very long cul-de-sac, it might take you a long time to discover you are in a cul-de-sac, but if you have people telling you you are in a cul-de-sac, and even Davies saying it could be a cul-de-sac—in which case you can get all the way down it and then not use it—then maybe you should prove it is not a cul-de-sac before you head off by showing what the exit strategy is. I do not have this right at all now—the metaphors are wrong, but the sentiment is sound.

Lord True

The real problem is that what is there already is breaching the air quality limits, as we have discussed before in this session. It is providing noise pollution that equates to that provided by a whole sackful of other airports in London. I deeply resent when my residents and Amrit’s are called NIMBYs. We make an enormous contribution in tolerance already in putting up with what is going on in Heathrow. We are not calling for it to be closed down, but I think in those circumstances it does behove Government or any public authority—given, as has been said, the background of repeated past broken promises—to make crystal clear not only, “It will be all right on the night, boys,” but that there will testable, clear mitigation programmes. Frankly, if those are not there, my own local authority will certainly be interested in testing some of these things in the courts.

Chair

Which would delay the project, and would delay compliance and so on.

Lord True

Yes.

Chair

Interesting.

Holly Lynch

I want to pick up on some of those issues. I am particularly interested in the Airports Commission’s proposal of a noise envelope and how deliverable and achievable that is. Given that it would also rely on the creation of a community engagement board and an independent aviation noise authority, which we have already heard the airports are a little bit reluctant to commit to, how achievable is that noise envelope, would you say?

Daniel Moylan

What is it? Mr Chairman, I do not know if Ms Lynch would like to tell us what she thinks it is. I don’t think we have any idea, do we? You may.

Richard de Cani

No.

Holly Lynch

I think there is still some discussion on that.

Lord True

We are slightly baffled by this concept. I think Daniel said it very briefly. Theoretically, of course you might be able to negotiate your way to something that is called a noise envelope, whatever it means, but there are so many complicating factors. It has to be based on real measurement. You can measure the number of flights, but once you get into the issues of noise it gets much more difficult, particularly in the case of the proposition that is on the table. There are going to be very large numbers of people who are going to be affected who have not been affected by aircraft noise before. When I gave evidence to the Davies Commission, I spoke afterwards to Mr Holland-Kaye and he said to me, “Oh, it was a terrible mistake that we had those experiments on the trial flights, because suddenly people were mobilised about what might happen in Heathrow”. Indeed, in my own council area I have a very active and effective campaign group in Teddington, where there was no visible concern about Heathrow until they heard what was going on over them. With this new model, it may well be that the kind of assessments of what is acceptable or unacceptable noise, for example, which are based on very long ago survey, back 30 years ago—there has been no recent social attitude survey of this kind. I think that finding a proper mechanism for that part of how you might create a noise envelope would be extremely difficult. We may be able to get there, but certainly not overnight.

Chair

The Commission has suggested some approach to a noise envelope. You are very well aware: the physical area, particular noise contours, the number of people within particular corridors, some sort of points-based system. The Commission would say that you could develop a noise envelope model.

Daniel Moylan

As I say, I don’t know. Is a noise envelope like a bucket of noise that you carry around and have a bit here and bit there, and then when you have doled it all out for that particular day, you cannot have any more noise? I do not know what a noise envelope is. Or is it a contour you draw on a map? Well, the contours are drawn by aeroplanes and what their flight paths are, so they are not drawn by decisions on how you allocate an envelope, it is about where they fly. Reference has been made to using modern technology that allows much more precision in terms of landing and taking off and where the planes fly. It is very interesting, Heathrow’s approach to that, because in the Government’s aviation strategy, the suggestion or the recommendation is that that is used to concentrate flight paths. The assumption here is that this is for airports that are surrounded by fields, more or less, or where you have a field between two villages, so if you concentrate the planes going over that part, you have less effect on the villages. It makes a lot of sense. What Heathrow is proposing to use this technology for is not to concentrate flights but to disperse them, so that you are going to have an awful lot more people affected by noise, but potentially at levels just below the standard to which it is measured. That of course would be a very nice noise envelope then, because you could have a lot more noise, a lot more people affected and Heathrow would be able to say, “Nobody can hear a thing, it is inaudible because it is below the limit”. It is very interesting how this noise envelope concept can be flexed.

Jo Churchill

So we go from a little envelope to a big envelope then, would you say?

Daniel Moylan

Yes. Essentially they are aiming to go to a big envelope, but one where the measurement will tend to fall below the limit and then you will be able to say, “Nobody can hear it”. If it is 54 as opposed to 55, it falls below and you have achieved it, job done.

Lord True

But my point of course is that the 55 might not be acceptable to all the new victims, and then you have potential health impacts, following on from what we heard in the earlier session, because the rest of us might be inured to 55 or 57, but there will be hundreds and thousands of people who have not experienced that before.

Daniel Moylan

There will be much less respite than before—I think that is a point worth making.

Chair

Councillor Mann wanted to come in as well.

Councillor Amrit Mann

Just two points: first, I welcome the concept of noise envelopes. There needs to be a bit more work on defining the area and the number of flights going through. Also in terms of noise, I think my colleagues have picked up some of the issues, because noise affects people differently, as we found in the Wright study of 2005. Young kids are cognitively affected by noise. The other issue for me is that you mentioned community engagement boards. We do not know their governance, we do not know the make-up, and we do not know how they are going to be funded. We would not want to have them funded by the aviation industry. I would rather have them centrally funded. What are the terms of reference? All those have not been defined as yet, and we would like to see a lot more work around that, and also for them to be up and running before any expansion takes place. There is no point having expansion and then having these bodies materialise, because they are ineffective at that point.

Daniel Moylan

We have multiple community engagement arrangements with Heathrow already. They fall down essentially on the question of trust. In the model pointed to by Sir Howard in the Netherlands—which seems to work better, he believes, and I think it does—I think he ignores the years of effort and work that went into creating and re-establishing an element of trust on the part of Schiphol with local communities to allow that to become something that people locally bought into. It is not just a question of setting up another community engagement forum, of which there are numerous ones, and expecting it to work in the same way.

Lord True

Schiphol is also publicly owned. I do not think they will be discussing in the Chinese Politburo how they can engage with their residents. They are the owners of Heathrow.

Chair

Holly, did you want to follow through on that?

Holly Lynch

Yes, just to expand slightly, I know that as part of that negotiation between Heathrow and those local communities, there is this offer in the region of £1 billion compensation. I think it is £700 million that would go towards insulation of properties. Transport for London have been quite critical that that would not go far enough to insulate the numbers of homes that would be affected by the noise pollution. Is that true?

Richard de Cani

Our starting point was that people who were experiencing a noise impact from Heathrow should benefit from the compensation, and the size of the pot should be set accordingly. Based on our calculations, looking at a more pessimistic view of the number of people who would be affected by noise, that figure was not enough. I think it is more the basic principle we would seek to protect—that people who have an impact are offered the right compensation to mitigate that impact. It is not clear that that is what is being offered at the moment.

Councillor Amrit Mann

I just want to put it on record that with the new team at Heathrow Airport Limited under John Holland-Kaye, they have been a lot more engaging with certainly our community in Hounslow in terms of providing mitigation. It is years too late, but it is a great gesture and we would like to see a lot more of it. In terms of the airport, I know my colleague, Nick, said that he did not want it shut down. We too do not want it shut down, hence our mantra, “We want it better, not bigger”. If they can somehow put the mitigation package together that delivers respite to our residents— and this is for existing issues, not the expanded Heathrow—that would go a long way in building up trust, which is what has been lacking.

Lord True

You are very generous. We have not felt the same warmth from Mr Holland-Kaye as you perhaps have, and maybe that is in a fault in me. But I do repeat a point that I made: this is on top of already intolerable limits, so the fundamental thing here is that if this project goes ahead, it is picking the site where it is most expensive to provide any form of mitigation and also doing it against the background of people being at the limits of their tolerance, health risk and other things.

Jo Churchill

Just playing a bit of devil’s advocate, given that the expansion will not be completed for around a decade, and given the improvements in technology and so on, how sure can we be that the new flight paths, new technologies and operational improvements will not mitigate the problems, notwithstanding that we cannot crystal ball-gaze, as you said?

Daniel Moylan

Just a few things. You have already heard that there is a limit to improvements in carbon emissions on aero engines that does not impact on noise. If you put it the other way around, you have a converse limit in relation to noise, so that you cannot make the engines very much quieter without increasing the carbon emissions, if you see what I am trying to say.

Jo Churchill

Yes, I do.

Daniel Moylan

Or perhaps I can put it the other way, on failing to reduce carbon emissions. Our view is that much of the noise improvement has already been achieved, and the aero engine manufacturers confirm that they do not expect to see very much more. It takes time for that to arrive on the airfield, because of course planes have a life of about 30 or 40 years, so you will expect to see some improvement continuing as existing modern technology is rolled out into the fleet, but there is a limit to it. As far precision landing and take-off is concerned, I look with a degree of suspicion at what in fact it is trying to achieve, given that it has been used for the opposite purpose that was envisaged by the Government. The steeper angles of descent and take-off are quite small angles, but nonetheless have an effect on noise. We are still be to be persuaded that they can be applied to the very largest planes—it can be achieved on the smaller planes, but we are not persuaded they it can applied on the largest planes, which tend to be the more noisy ones. I would simply say to Ms Churchill that it is inherently implausible that you can have 50% more flights, a third runway and an improved noise situation. As the Mayor once said, there would be more pigs flying over Heathrow than aeroplanes if you believed that. I think one can start with the view that it is inherently implausible. There is the issue of respite. At the moment it is 50:50, so that the alternation between two runways allows respite for half the affected population, or all of the affected population for half of the day and so on. But when you have three runways, you cannot do that. One of the runways has to operate in mixed mode, and Davies admits that the respite period will, on average, fall to a third of the flying day rather than half at the moment. But our analysis shows that while that figure of a third, as an average, is about right, for over half of the communities it will fall to only 25% of the day and for the others it will be 50%, so that the 30% is an average and includes 50% of the affected population. A larger population will have only 25% of the flying day as respite. That is something people are not aware of that is coming down the road at them.

Chair

Mr de Cani, you want to come in on that?

Richard de Cani

Just with a small point about process. Where you are faced with a situation where the future is uncertain and you are relying on assumptions, what one would normally do with something of this scale is to apply a range of sensitivity tests to look at the best case and the worst case, and not always plan for the best case, but plan for the worst case as well and look at what mitigation would be necessary to deal with that. Some of the scenarios that have been tested through the Davies Commission process have been quite optimistic in their use of assumptions. Because we do not know, and there are no guarantees about whether these things will be borne out, it would be prudent to look at the best case and the worst case and perhaps plan mitigation around the worst case, so that if that does materialise, the impacts will not happen. That has not been part of the proposals to date.

Jo Churchill

May I just confirm that that is all within what the Commission has stated, that the noise envelope should be agreed and Heathrow must stay within the limit, no higher than today, so you have to keep those limits where they are while jacking up?

Daniel Moylan

I have this difficulty with the whole concept of that, because noise is not a thing that you have, noise is an experience.

Jo Churchill

However, one can measure it.

Daniel Moylan

One can, but then if I have half the noise and I share the other half with Nick, is that an improvement or not? Given how you measure noise in logarithmic scales, it might be a significant improvement. That might solve the problem, but I have huge difficulties with the whole notion of a noise envelope that people have to stick to—contour is another matter—because it is not a quantum of something.

Chair

I am going to draw this to a conclusion, but before I do, can I just ask you something? I am going to come you last, Mr Moylan, for what might appear a very good reason. With all the reservations, both fundamental but also detailed, that this can be achieved without delays through legal challenge, or because the costs will have to be negotiated as to where they fall or on customers and so on and so forth, you are in a strange situation as a group of organisations and elected representatives. You have those reservations, but also the Government and Heathrow are saying, “We need to work with you in case this is given the go-ahead”. Very simply, with all those concerns and reservations, if the Minister said, “We are going to proceed with it,” given the hurdles you have been describing, can it be done? I do not mean commercially and so on, because it might hit all the hurdles, but can it be done and protect your constituents and the people around the area from air pollution, noise pollution and emissions? Perhaps I will start with you, Councillor Mann.

Councillor Amrit Mann

Given the scenario that the Government recommends the third runway, we would work with Heathrow Airport Limited, because we are in a unique position, being the worst affected borough. Also, we recognise that there are 370,000 jobs directly and indirectly linked to Heathrow, so we have a duty of care to those residents who work, or whose relatives work, at the airport. It is a big employer and a big chunk of the local economy. If we were minded to have legally binding conditions placed upon Heathrow Airport Limited and the expansion—up to this moment, we are still looking at the deliverability of mitigating circumstances for the previous expansion, terminal 5—and we had rock-solid deliverability, so that the trust that has been missing kicked in, then yes, we would be willing to work with Heathrow.

Chair

That was not quite my question. The question was, do you have a degree of confidence that in the focus of this Committee on air quality, noise and emissions, you may be able to help deliver it? Can that be delivered for the people who are going to be affected by this?

Councillor Amrit Mann

That is a very difficult question.

Chair

Okay, thank you. Lord True.

Lord True

I do not think it can, because there are so many imponderables. Everything we have heard in this session, including the very interesting point, “When all these wonderful silent planes come in, the world will be wonderful”, is all asking people to take things on the best possible assumption, which runs so much through Davies. I do not think I would survive, frankly, as a local politician, as there is so much distrust. When we had a referendum run by the Electoral Reform Society—not an opinion poll—in Hillingdon and Richmond, 100,000 people voted. These were real people in a real vote, in real ballot boxes, saying that in no circumstances could they accept this. I think it would be extremely difficult in terms of democratic leadership to gain consent from the population. I am doubtful about the technical feasibility, particularly in terms of surface transport and air quality. I would also, if I may, say one other thing, which I do not think has been mentioned enough. I know a lot of people do not agree with me, but as a person who carries public responsibility, given the current international security position, I think the biggest environmental disaster of all—yes, the oil industry creates problems, but it is the Exxon Valdez and the Torrey Canyon—the last thing we would ever want would be to have a massive environmental disaster of a plane being brought down over the main centre of our population, one of the biggest international terrorist targets imaginable. We know airport security is easily penetrated in various parts of the world, and it is an environmental question, and also a question of social responsibility, not to double up the risk with 250,000 more flights a year and more in this particular area over our population. I think that is also an environmental question. I would find it very hard to give consent.

Chair

Extremely doubtful.

Lord True

I do not think our population will.

Chair

Extremely doubtful, okay. Can we deliver the environmental imperatives?

Richard de Cani

I would say from a technical perspective that the right assessments have not been done to demonstrate whether that is the case or not. First, the baseline has changed, not through the fault of the Davies Commission, just because of the pace of change that we have in London and the south-east through population and employment. The baseline has changed from the DEFRA report, but we have not done the right assessments to look at the full range of possible impacts to convince ourselves whether this is workable in terms of air quality, noise and other environment impacts, so further work is needed.

Chair

Okay, thank you.

Daniel Moylan

I know quite what the good reason was, but I have to look at it a little bit from the point of view of the Mayor. It is worth remembering that the Mayor has views on this question, but he has responsibilities on which he is elected that relate to spatial geography, economic development, planning, housing and all sorts of aspects of London. An airport, and indeed a new runway at an airport and the number of flights involved, represent a very violent and powerful intervention in all those responsibilities. Even if it could be shown that it would be compliant with EU air quality limits—I do not myself believe that it is ever likely to be, so I think that is going be hugely challenging—you would still be left with the question, “But why would I want to do that? Why would I, as Mayor, with all these responsibilities, in a city with a population of already 8.6 million, and forecast very reliably to be 10 million by this time this runway opens, want to do that and impose that on all of these people when we need a better solution?” He of course will not be Mayor for very much longer, and his views on the matter will be not those of the Mayor; there will be somebody else in position. You can ask them yourselves, but I find it difficult to see any of the contenders who have been nominated or declared for the post sitting down and saying, “Yes, you have solved it. Let’s just get on with it”. I do not see it happening.

Chair

I cannot believe you are drawing him into the area of political speculation.

Daniel Moylan

Not at all. I think it is fair to say that on Saturday at the mass rally that took place in Parliament Square—which it was my privilege to attend, and I think you (Lord True) were there as well—every declared candidate for the mayoralty was already up there, quite irrespective of party. I was not making a party political comment at all.

Chair

Okay. Can I, on behalf of my Committee members, thank you very much for attending and the evidence you submitted before, but also for being here today and the generosity with your time? If you do have any further thoughts, feel free to put them through to us, but thank you very much indeed. It has been a very interesting session, and thanks as well to all who have attended to listen to this. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: The Airports Commission report, HC 389 33