20 Britain The EconomistFebruary 29th 2020
2T
he parisclimate agreement, forged
in 2016, has not made a huge differ-
ence to the world so far. But on February
27th it got its biggest break yet: the Court
of Appeal in London found against the
government and in favour of a coalition
of groups that oppose the expansion of
Heathrow Airport on grounds of climate,
noise, air pollution and economic
growth. The court said that the govern-
ment should have taken the Paris agree-
ment into account. The government is
not going to appeal.
After a decade of lobbying by busi-
ness, the government embraced the
third-runway scheme in 2016. Chris
Grayling, transport secretary at the time,
said in a witness statement that the Paris
agreement was “not relevant” to the
scheme: the government had assessed it
under a previous agreement. But that
agreement was less stringent than the
Paris one.
The decision does not put an end to
airport expansion: it leaves room for the
government to go back to the drawing
board and come up with a plan that takes
the Paris agreement into account. Busi-
nesses will argue passionately that air-
port expansion is essential to the growth
that the government needs in order to
finance its expensive schemes to build
infrastructure elsewhere in the country.
“Without expansion,” says Adam Mar-
shall of the British Chambers of Com-
merce, “firms risk losing crucial regional
connectivity and access to key markets
across the world.” Insisting that it would
fight the decision, Heathrow Airport
invoked Johnsonian language: the run-
way “is essential to achieving the primeminister’s vision of Global Britain...Let’s
get Heathrow done.”
But if there is to be airport expansion,
there is a good chance now that it will not
happen at Heathrow. Boris Johnson has
long been a passionate opponent of the
third runway, famously promising when
he was mayor of London to “lie down in
front of those bulldozers and stop the
construction”. During the election cam-
paign, he said that he would “find some
way” to block it. He has also been under
pressure to do something to show he is
taking seriously cop26, the climate
conference that Britain is due to host
later this year. Giving up on Heathrow’s
expansion would be a powerful gesture.
Mr Johnson is not, by and large, an
enthusiast for judicial activism. But with
this controversial judgment, the Court of
Appeal may have done him a favour.It won’t fly
HeathrowIn a controversial decision, the Court of Appeal has scotched Heathrow’s expansionGrateful greensing on applied research, it was argued,
would not only direct taxpayers’ money to-
wards an area in which decisions were best
made by the private sector, but also risked
crowding out private investment. So al-
though Britain spends around the average
in the oecd club of mostly-rich countries
on basic research, with excellent results, it
is unusually frugal when it comes to the ap-
plied variety; spending just 0.1% of gdpon
it, compared with 0.3% in America and
0.4% in Germany.
But as David Willetts, a former Conser-
vative universities and science minister,
has written, low r&d investment in the
public and private sectors provides a
strong argument for raising spending on
applied research, to which the top univer-
sities will have a weaker claim. Britain’s
poor productivity—around a fifth lower
than Germany, France and America—pro-
vides another one. The example of coun-
tries like South Korea and Germany sug-
gests that, rather than repelling private
investment, well-directed public money
can in fact prompt businesses to increase
r&dspending.
Some Tory think-tankers have suggest-
ed the government should establish re-
search institutes across the country—and
particularly in towns that have just turned
blue—in an attempt to give them a sense of
purpose. Such an approach would create
jobs supported by public money, but it
would not do much else. Richard Jones, a
science-policy expert at the University of
Sheffield whose writing has influenced
Downing Street, cites government nano-
technology investment in the mid-2000s
as an example of how not to do things.
Some £50m was split between 24 centres to
bring the technology to market. Unsurpris-
ingly, none went on to do anything of note.
There are better ways to spread the cash.
As Mr Jones notes, the regions that cur-
rently have higher levels of private r&d
than public r&d, and thus where there is
probably scope to increase public spend-
ing, include the Midlands and the north-
west. These parts of the country have theadditional benefit of cheaper property and
looser planning regimes than Oxford,
Cambridge and London, thus lowering the
cost of expansion. The National Audit Of-
fice, an official watchdog, has criticised the
government for not taking into account the
running costs of new research facilities
when deciding where to place them. Those
decisions dictate where funding goes for
decades to come. Cities in these regions
will have a good claim to new institutions.
Doubling the research budget provides
a lot of money to experiment with. A num-
ber of existing schemes are likely to grow.
ukri’s drearily-named “Strength in Places”
fund, a £236m pot which is disbursed on
the basis of academic excellence and eco-
nomic considerations, could easily bebeefed up. Another likely beneficiary, de-
spite a decidedly mixed record so far, is the
“catapult” programme. Based on Ger-
many’s Fraunhofer Institutes, albeit with
considerably smaller budgets, Catapults
require a mixture of business, university
and government investment. The most
successful one—the amrcin Sheffield—is
home to the local university, as well as Boe-
ing, Rolls-Royce and McLaren Automotive.
Putting more money into applied re-
search outside the golden triangle is un-
likely to supercharge Britain’s ability to
win Nobel prizes or suck in the world’s top
scientists. But done the right way, it might
just fulfil other ambitions more relevant to
voters, and thus to the government’s re-
election chances.^7Dismal scienceSource: OECDResearch and development spending*
% of GDP*Public- and private-sector0123451981 90 2000 10 17ChinaSouth KoreaGermanyBritainUnited States