Speech copywriting - BAA
We wrote a whole series of speeches for senior executives of
BAA on everything from the Heathrow Express to the pros and cons of a third runway at Heathrow to the launch of Terminal 5. This was one of the more visionary - a thinkpiece on the Airport of the Future, written for the company's then CEO.
The Airport of the Future
Growth is undoubtedly the overwhelmingly dominant factor confronting my industry - the airport industry - over the foreseeable future. Growth in volumes - certainly. But growth also in other related demands - just to add a twist to the pressure. We are being asked not only to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of passengers, but to accommodate them ever-more safely, ever-more efficiently, in ever pleasanter surroundings and, of course, with more concern for the wider environmental picture.
We are the focus for an infinite and complex combination of demands - demands which present us with an infinite and complex combination of challenges. Fortunately we have no shortage of advisors. Indeed, almost everybody seems to know how airports should be run. Unfortunately the advice rarely proceeds from a comprehensive assessment of the situation.
The problem, of course, is that the advice we receive is all too often single interest advice. Add two single interests and you almost always get a contradiction. Our job is to sort out the contradictions, invariably ending up with a compromise which fails fully to satisfy any one party.
Never are these contradictions more vividly highlighted than in the aftermath of a major incident. Lockerbie, for an example, produced an inevitable barrage of media demands for much tighter security. Demands from the very same organs that during the preceding weeks and months had been demanding less delays. The fact that more security inevitably entails more delay is not the media's problem. Nor is this an isolated example. We at BAA are accustomed to facing mutually exclusive demands. Here are just a few:
•Build more runways (but don't desecrate the countryside)
•Improve security (but don't cause delays)
•Handle ever-increasing volumes (but don't allow congestion)
•Cut back on retailing outlets (but provide a pleasant environment for our customers)
•Spend spend spend (but don't make money)
We are, in a phrase, being constantly asked to square the circle.
Let me take just two recent examples.
We have come under a great deal of pressure from airlines over recent years for dedicating what they see as an untenable proportion of constrained terminal space on retailing. 'Give us more baggage facilities and sign-in desks', they cry, 'you're just being greedy for profits.' Yet the environments we have created such as those at Gatwick North, Heathrow's Terminal 4 and Stansted, have proven enormously popular with the airlines' own customers. People like the fact that London's airports are no longer purely functional - that if they have to wait for their flight, they can at least enjoy the wait. And how better to find the cash for the vast investments involved in meeting the demands of our ever-more discriminating customers than by providing them with facilities for which they are happy to pay?
Given a basic premise of constrained resources and conflicting demands, you simply cannot make all the people happy all the time. What you have to do is try to find some equitable balance. We think we do a pretty good job of achieving just that. We take it as read that we get no credit for our endeavours.
Again, the airlines have been attacking us for years, demanding another runway in the south-east. Many of them, I think, suspect that only financial considerations stand in the way. The reason BAA won't build another runway is simply because runways cost money, and BAA don't like spending money. The fact that we've invested over £1 billion over the last five years, and are set to spend another £1 billion over the next five goes unnoticed. No - we're not building a runway because we're tight-fisted profiteers. Full stop.
To listen to some of the airlines, you'd think providing a new runway was just a question of slapping down a mile of tarmac. The CAA, fortunately, has a rather more realistic assessment of what's involved. In their recent report, they looked at the question of a new runway from two basic angles:
•What would be the implications for ATC of any particular option?
•What would be the implications for customer access for any particular option?
Their conclusions were that with the improvements in ATC currently in progress, ATC could accommodate a new runway just about anywhere - albeit with a bit of jigging - and that customer access would tend to point to Heathrow as the best choice for a new runway, with Gatwick second and Stansted third.
But they also said, and we agree, that 'no additional runway capacity to meet demand in the South East will be justified until the existing capacity at the present major South East airports is virtually full.' We would go further. Not only would new runways be unjustifiable while existing ones offer unused capacity, they would be politically quite impossible.
We would also suggest that the two criteria chosen to assess new runway proposals were too restrictive. Indeed, the CAA could be held to have somewhat overlooked its own insistence on considering the wider implications of major developments.
A runway is not just a runway. A runway needs to be serviced. As a rough rule of thumb, a new runway needs to be serviced by two new terminals. Already the implications in terms of land - in the land-starved south-east - are doubled if not tripled. We also have to consider the impact in the local community: are there houses available for the incoming workforce? What about schools for their children? Can the local hospitals meet the strain? Last but by no means least, what would be the environmental and ecological impact?
A new runway is not just a new strip of tarmac: it is a new complex interconnecting combination of demands, none of which can be ignored or treated in isolation. While assailed on all sides by particular lobbies, we at BAA have to try to take a step back and look at the wider picture.
Here, I think, we are approaching the nub of the question. Because we at BAA represent, I think, the face of airports operators to come. We are not at any one interest's beck and call. We have autonomy, and we are not afraid to exercise it.
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