UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 765-vii HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE TRANSPORT COMMITTEE AVIATION STRATEGY MONDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2013 ED MITCHELL and COLIN POWLESLAND BORIS JOHNSON and COUNCILLOR DANIEL MOYLAN RT HON PATRICK McLOUGHLIN MP and JONATHAN MOOR Evidence heard in Public Questions 737 - 846 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Transport Committee on Monday 11 February 2013 Members present: Mrs Louise Ellman (Chair) Steve Baker Sarah Champion Kwasi Kwarteng Karen Lumley Karl McCartney Lucy Powell Adrian Sanders Iain Stewart ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ed Mitchell, Director of Environment and Business, and Colin Powlesland, Environment and Business Manager (Health and Emerging Issues), Environment Agency, gave evidence. Q737 Chair: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Could we have your name and organisation, please? Ed Mitchell: I am Ed Mitchell. I am Director of Environment and Business at the Environment Agency. Colin Powlesland: I am Colin Powlesland. I am an Environment and Business Manager looking after Health and Emerging Issues, also with the Environment Agency. Q738 Chair: Can the UK’s further airport capacity needs be met while still protecting the environment? Can it be done? Ed Mitchell: There are a number of factors that need to be looked at in terms of sustainable airports, aircraft and air travel—from the carbon emissions from those and the impact on climate change, flooding, water quality, water use, biodiversity, noise and local air quality. There are a lot of aspects to that. Our role in particular in the Environment Agency is as a statutory consultee to the planning process, and we also regulate major industrial processes, including some aspects of airport operations but not airport operations per se. We would explore with any potential developer of an airport the environmental aspects and the constraints to those. It is quite difficult to answer that question succinctly without knowing more about the detail of the airport and where it would be. Q739 Chair: But you must have an opinion. You hear numerous debates about airport capacity, what might be needed and what the challenges to the environment might be. You must have some view. When you hear these, do you think, “Yes, this can be resolved”? Are you thinking of particular things that need to be done? 2 Ed Mitchell: If you take, for instance, the climate change aspects of aviation, the Climate Change Committee has been reasonably clear in stating that it believes you could have a 60% expansion of traffic and still meet the 2050 Government targets around climate change. That would require quite considerable reductions in emissions from individual aircraft and individual flights, but the Committee clearly thinks that that is possible. If you take local air quality, the primary issues are particulates and oxides of nitrogen. Again, depending on location and design and, in particular, the interplay between aircraft ground operations and local traffic, you probably can find a sustainable way of operating airports. Q740 Chair: What do you think the major challenges are? Ed Mitchell: Again, it so depends on location. It is quite a difficult question to answer. Meeting the Government climate change targets by 2050 is a challenge. Meeting local air quality EU requirements is quite a challenge, particularly around oxides of nitrogen. The Environment Agency has a very limited role in noise terms on airports and air traffic, but from what I understand of that, it is a significant challenge. There are undoubtedly challenges. On flood risk, airports can obviously be inundated themselves but they can also affect other people’s flood risk due to run-off from surfaces or changing pattern of water flow depending on location. There are a number of challenges. Q741 Chair: At what stage of plans or thoughts about developing new airports or additional runways should contact be made with the Environment Agency? Ed Mitchell: Our experience is that the earlier we get into conversation with potential developers, the more likely we are to be able to work with them to find solutions to the environmental issues that they raise. It is not just in this area but across the piece. If we are engaged early, then we are also able to provide a degree of certainty to developers, which helps in terms of their planning, their project management and, therefore, their costs. Frankly, the answer is as early as possible. Q742 Chair: Mr Powlesland, do you want to add anything? Colin Powlesland: No; that is a very good answer. There is also a need to think about what is meant by sustainable development. It is quite usefully set out in the national planning policy framework. That is a helpful definition. Q743 Lucy Powell: Following from the Chair’s questioning, when you say that things depend upon location, do you have a view about what would be a preferable location for airport expansion, say, in the south-east? We have had some proposals coming forward for a Thames estuary airport versus expanding existing airports. What do you think would have the least environmental impact of those two? Ed Mitchell: I am sorry if this sounds obfuscating but the issues are very different. If you take Heathrow, other than the noise, which I mentioned earlier but in which we have a limited role, the particular challenge in relation to our role is around oxides of nitrogen and ground level concentrations, which are on occasion already close to or above EU limits. If you go to an estuary site—two of those have been mooted—other challenges are likely to be more significant. Flood risk is a key one, because if you build an island in an estuary, not only do you have to worry about inundation of that island but it can, and probably would, have an effect on the mainland in terms of flood risk. There are also some very important designated habitat sites in the Thames estuary, which would need protecting. It is genuinely difficult to express a preference, particularly when details about the different options are relatively sketchy. 3 Q744 Chair: There have been a number of proposals mooted for an estuary site. Have any of those been discussed with you? Ed Mitchell: We went to a presentation by the architects of one of those sites and we have had very early discussions—but very early. Q745 Iain Stewart: The Chair asked almost the exact question I was going to ask, but let me try and come to the same point from a different angle. Is there anything in any of the Thames estuary proposals you have seen that would rule it out from the word go, or do you think that it would depend on the specifics of the design whether the concerns about flooding and wildlife habitats could be overcome? Is there something there to work with? That is what I am trying to get at. Ed Mitchell: My take on it is that some of the challenges are harder to resolve than others. If you take the estuary airport, then probably the habitat protection requirements are quite a stiff challenge. My gut instinct is that it is possible, though not easy or cheap, to find solutions. It is so dependent on siting and detail that it is pretty difficult to draw any firm conclusions at the minute. Q746 Sarah Champion: Mr Mitchell, you said that the estuary sites are going to create problems with flooding. Could you expand a little on that? Ed Mitchell: The first issue is that obviously you do not want an airport to be subject to flooding because of all the disruption and problems that would cause. An estuary site will have connection to the mainland and presumably to a lot of services on the mainland, most of which is in the Thames flood plain as well. There are flood risks to any possible estuary site, depending on where it is in the estuary. We have a series of flood defences that link with the Thames barrier to protect London, the inner part of the estuary and to a degree the outer part of the estuary. It would be a case of assessing the specific risks, depending on the design, against the protections that are already in place and possible improvements that we could make to those protections. Whatever the model was, constructing an island and reclaiming a load of land on the boundary of the estuary or within the estuary does potentially create an increased flood risk elsewhere that needs to be carefully modelled and dealt with as part of the process of designing and building an airport. Q747 Sarah Champion: There seems to be a lot of evidence that the sea level is rising. I might be being very naive about this, but my concern is about the long-term impact.