The Chancellor’s growth reset: a missed opportunity?
The Government should look to the skies in their push for growth
By David Starkie, author of Airport Enterprises and formerly a member of the Airport Commission's panel of experts
Before World War 2, early civil aviation in the UK operated a remarkable number of domestic air services, with budding entrepreneurs competing to use what was a still fledgling flight technology. This buccaneering spirit tuned with its age, an age when aviatrixes like Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham were setting record breaking journeys between far flung continents. Domestic routes were at the other end of the scale of distances, always short, sometimes very short. In essence, they were bus-stop services operated by small aircraft of less than 10 seats. Since the 1950s, apart from links connecting off-shore islands, very few domestic air routes have been of a similar ilk: the 1980s saw for a short time an air service between Manchester and the submarine building town of Barrow, more recently an even shorter lived air service existed between the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge.
I was reminded of this aviation history following Rachael Reeves’s keynote speech at the end of January aiming to reset UK economic growth. The long speech included the idea of a science based arc linking Oxford and Cambridge, creating, in hyperbole loved by politicians, ‘Europe’s Silicon Valley’. Stitching together the arc said the Chancellor were plans for transport improvements (creating, according to the script, agglomeration benefits). These include some re-jigged roads, but centre stage was a clunking technology now two centuries old and the butt of many jokes. Proposed new rail links and electrification were slated in the speech to provide a direct rail service between Oxford and Cambridge (constructed no doubt at considerable expense to the taxpayer). It is, unfortunately, a policy prescription which displays a lack of imagination hardly in keeping with the new digital age and certainly not symbolic of a home grown scientific revolution heralded by the policy initiative.
The lack of vision displayed by the Whitehall speech writers is even more surprising considering the transport technology currently being developed within the nominated scientific arc. At the arc’s mid-point lies Cranfield University a specialist post-graduate centre of research claiming world-class expertise and most unusually its own airport which, as it so happens, is the base for path-breaking research into sustainable aviation. The scientific wonks at Cranfield have developed and uniquely integrated a hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain into an electric motor on a small passenger aircraft. The aircraft, a Britten-Norman (B-N) Islander, is built by, astonishingly, the UK’s sole remaining manufacturer of a civil airframe, the last of a long, distinguished line of British conceived and built civil aircraft produced by the likes of De Havilland (builder of the world’s first jet airliner), Vickers (the world’s first turboprop airliner), Hawker and many more.
Cranfield and B-N are collaborating on this venture into zero (tailpipe) emissions and days before the Chancellor’s speech, the company announced that Evia Aero, a pioneering German company, had signed a letter of intent to take delivery of fifteen new Islander aircraft, beginning in 2027, aiming to subsequently convert the aircraft’s propulsion to fuel-cell powered flight. The partnership between Evia and B-N aims to set a new benchmark by providing zero-emissions regional travel with an aircraft noted also for its short runway performance. The requirement for a fast connection between Oxford and Cambridge, currently with journey times approaching three hours whether by road or rail, is a perfect fit for the partnership’s evolutionary technology. Indeed, ‘Varsity Airlines’ could fly a web of bus-stop style routes across the scientific arc, an arc littered with airfields, connecting not only those at Oxford and at Cambridge, but also Cranfield (for Milton Keynes) and, at the eastern end of the arc, Luton International Airport.
It is unfortunate that the Chancellor’s advisors did not share the vision of economic growth in a way that would have showcased British science and bolstered clear aviation export opportunities. Showcased instead was the somewhat outdated, historic technology of rail. Sadly, an opportunity to have illustrated the Chancellor’s basic message of a scientific, forward looking nation was overlooked.