A couple of things happened within days of each other last month and I’ve only just picked up on the coincidence. On 22 October, the UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander declared that the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport would “drive economic growth and create jobs across the country.” A few days later, the House of Commons’ Environmental Audit Committee released its report on airport expansion, with the conclusion ” whilst the Government support for airport expansion has been largely based on its expectation of economic growth, the Government has been unable to direct the Committee to any evidence that supports its assertion.” [My emphasis.]

Digging into the latter report, the Committee had received a number of counter-arguments from anti-expansion campaigners that suggest the opposite, most notably the calculation that British tourists heading abroad spend £40bn per annum more overseas than inbound tourists spend here – a substantial economic deficit. While there’s an obvious bias to the sources of such claims, there was nothing from the pro-expansion side to push back on them.  Nothing at all. Tumbleweed.

With Boris Johnson’s much vaunted ‘Jet Zero’ strategy to slash emissions from flying floundering on practical grounds – it would take half the UK’s agricultural land to produce enough biofuel to replace the country’s demand for aircraft kerosene – it is hard to get away from the idea that the Government will blow the UK’s Net Zero target on a misguided whim.

This doesn’t surprise me. I live in the North East of England where networks of dual carriageways were built over decades in the name of growth, yet the region’s economy still relies largely on a single car plant and its supply chain. I often cycle along those big empty roads looking at the vacant ‘development’ sites they link together. And yet the local press is full of calls from local MPs for Government money to upgrade one roundabout on one A-road which is apparently “holding back growth.” What growth? Where? Please tell us what exactly will be unlocked!

Back when I was a callow student engineer, I turned up to a placement in a Government research unit and was promptly handed a photocopy of Richard Feynman’s book chapter ‘Cargo Cult Science’. You’ve probably heard the story: during WWII, the US built air bases on Pacific islands, bribing the inhabitants with handouts of food and consumer goods. When the military packed up and left, the islanders were bereft. They built runways and control towers, complete with a priest wearing mocked up headphones, praying that, if they got the ritual right, the planes and their cargos would return. But they never did. The lesson is: correlation does not mean causation, but often people will cling to misguided ideas in forlorn hope that it does.

Is there a more appropriate metaphor for airport expansion than cargo cult science? If we’re going to massively increase emissions, should we not have some – any – evidence to back up the idea that airports deliver growth?