Views on Chancellor, Rachel Reeves’, speech

The Chancellor’s sums don’t add upon the economics or on the environment 

• Expanding airports won’t deliver the ‘growth’ the government so desperately wants, but the costs will be high – to hurt local residents’ health and wellbeing, and to all of us through flying’s big contribution to climate breakdown.
• We shouldn’t be expanding any airports – but with the Chancellor’s backing Heathrow today, that should be the nail in the coffin for a second runway at Gatwick.
• Research from independent experts at New Economics Foundation shows that growth in flying doesn’t mean more business passengers, it doesn’t increase UK GDP and it doesn’t help our economic productivity either.

The benefits really go to a tiny number of jetsetters, who fly a lot.

• It will mean more noise pollution for more people, more air pollution – and there are big problems with how they will treat sewage and waste water.
• Worst of all, it is completely incompatible with our climate goals. The Government’s own independent advisers on climate change, The Climate Change Committee say “stop airport expansion”.
• We’re already seeing the disastrous effects of global heating: terrible harvests, flooding, winds, wildfires in California etc. We’re on track to see 3 deg of warming within my daughter’s lifetime – that means parts of the world dangerously hot, sea level rises, crop failures, species extinctions, and potentially conflict and migration.

More widely:

We agree with the Government that there’s a massive crisis in housing affordability – and that steps are needed to fix that. Building new social housing would help, as would looking again at the Right to Buy, cracking down on second homes and holiday lets, and supporting people in properties that have outgrown their needs to downsize.

There’s also loads of planning permissions already granted that haven’t been built – and space for 1.2m homes on brownfield sites.

But what we’re worried about is the govt acting in the interests of big developers, not people struggling to afford housing – and hurting wildlife and the environment in the process.

The housing targets that have been set are eye-watering – massive increases.

We’re worried that what we’ll see is councils forced to give permission to a handful of big development companies for the wrong homes in the wrong places – potentially without even having to assess the value of the wildlife that’s already on site.

Developers won’t build those houses quickly if that might push house prices down – but the ultimately those sites will be lost for nature, lost for food production, lost as places for people  to enjoy walking the dog or seeing the view.

We’ll need to see the details of exactly what’s proposed from the Government – but what is clear is that the Government risks treating wildlife, the environment and the natural systems that underpin the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat, as unimportant – and keeping the development industry happy as the priority.

And the chancellor’s expected to be greenlighting other developments too. Not only housebuilding that doesn’t provide cheaper housing, but airport expansion that means air pollution, noise pollution for local people and absolutely busting our climate targets.

“Despite overall air passenger departures growing by 26m in the past two decades:

• There has been no net increase in business passengers, meaning the UK saw no business benefit.
• Incoming foreign tourists were outnumbered three‑to‑one by UK residents travelling abroad on their holidays, and spending money overseas.
• Of the extra journeys taken, almost two-thirds were taken by UK-resident frequent flyers, who make up a tiny minority of the UK population.

Previously, New Economics Foundation research also found that the boom in air travel during the four years before the pandemic lockdowns (2015 – 2019) failed to increase either gross domestic product (GDP) or UK productivity.”

Before the Chancellor’s speech:

• the Chair of CPRE Sussex wrote to his MP about Gatwick expansion and the Chancellor’s upcoming speech: Chair of CPRE Sussex letter to Alison Bennett MP
• a CPRE Sussex Trustee wrote to Peter Kyle MP about Gatwick expansion and the Chancellor’s upcoming speech: Letter to Peter Kyle MP