Dear Sirs,

RAIL COSTS

I see that Mr Carne appeared before you following the “astonishing” cost escalation of the Great Western Electrification; up from an original £874 million to £2.8 billion and rising.
That reminds me of the scandal of the West Cost Main Line Modernisation programme. It was to cost £2.35bn in 1997, £2.95 bn in March 1999, £4.75bn in October 1999, £5.56bn in January 2000 and £5.8bn at the start of the Public Inquiry in February 2001. The price rose to £6.3bn during the inquiry when there were press reports that it would cost £9bn. By August 2002 the press was reporting £13bn, but that was cut to £10bn after the Regulator struck out the enhancements required for 150 mph speeds. (Pity, such trains would have negated the “need” for HS2. ……).

Worse still, and among other, Mr Carne said that the reopening of the Borders line in Scotland had been completed on time and within budget. Rubbish, the original capital cost was £72m, at Parliamentary approval, £155m. Now nobody knows because £60m of land acquisition and preparatory costs were taken out and all the quite massive road realignments shifted to the roads budget. Statements of “over £360m” are not challenged by the rail lobby. On budget? On bodger more like it – the man must be “joking”.
Separately from costs, Bombardier said to the Transport Committee of the House of Commons, during an Inquiry into the Future of the Railway that, “To give a few figures. To carry 50,000 people in one direction we would need:

• A 175 m road used by cars, or
• A 35 m wide road used by buses, or
• A 9 m wide track bed for a metro or commuter railway”
(Ev 479 in Volume 2 of the Seventh Report of Session 2003-04).

In contrast, in New York we have a contra flow express coach lane 11 feet wide and 4 miles long, including 1.5 miles in tunnel. It carries close to 700 45-seat coaches in the peak hour, offering 30,000 seats. The coaches may as well be 75-seaters. At 100 kph and with 1,000 per hour the headways would average 100metres, or over 80 bumper to bumper; more than is commonly seen on motorways. That would provide 75,000 seats per hour. Hence, rather than the metro providing the greater capacity, it is the express coach with a dedicated track. That combination would provide seats for all in place of the metro’s standing and crushed conditions and at a fraction the cost.

Against that background why does anyone believe anything that the railway lobby says?
Yours faithfully

Paul F Withrington
Director Transport-Watch

More evidence on how government “cooked the books” to justify HS2

The previous Transport Watch press release showed that the percentage on business, assumed by HS2 in its latest economic analyses, is far above that suggested by survey data. Without that boost the scheme would fail the cost benefit test, but it gets worse.

The table below sets out the sources of the supposed benefits in £(millions).

Item                                                                        Phase 1          Full Network
(1).Improved Access ………………………………1,094 …………….1,115
(2) Reduced crowding …………………………… 4,068 …………….7,514
(3) Quicker interchange ……………………………. 810 …………….4,146
(4) Reduced waiting ……………………………….3,508 ……………. 8,081
(5) Reduced walking ……………………………….. 404 ……………..1,330
(6) Reduced train time …………………………..11,518 …………… 31,007
(7) Improved reliability ……………………………. 2,624 ……………. 5,496
Totals …………………………………………….. 24,026 …………… 58,689
Benefits to road users ……………………………… 568 ……………. 1,162
Total excluding Wider Economic benefits ………24,594 …………… 59,851
Contentious Items total [(1)+(3)+(5)+(7)] ………..4,932 …………… 12,087

Astonishingly only circa 50% of the benefits are due to reduced train time, a factor not hitherto noticed by the Transport Committee of the House of Commons or by the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords.

Transport watch points out that out that several of the other items are implausible.

• Why on earth will access, item (1) above, be better. It may well be worse. Stations may be more remote.
• The trains are immensely long, up to 200 metres. The new platforms will be relatively remote from other services. Hence, Interchange may be worse, item (3) above, and walking, item (5) may be extended rather than shortened. Certainly that is the case at Euston.
• Improved reliability, item (7) above is supposed to generate £5.5 billion for the full network. For heaven’s sake; surely the trains can be made to run on time without building a vastly expensive, heavily loss making, high-speed rail network?

Striking those contentious items out would remove benefits worth £5bn from Phase 1 and £12bn from the full network. That alone would destroy the economic case for both.

Paul Withrington, director of Transport Watch comments:
“The more one digs into the detail the weaker that case becomes. It is insupportable that £50 billion should be hazarded on such fragile grounds”.
“The supposed benefits put forward by HS2 Ltd do not stand examination. At the least a risk factor should be applied in case the forecast passenger do not arise and in recognition of the fragility of the other assumptions. An overall reduction of as little as 20% would destroy the case which, even in its present optimistic form, is desperately weak.

For more details, or to arrange an interview, please contact Paul Withrington on 01604 847438 or pwith@transport-watch.co.uk and open topic 17.

About Transport Watch Transport Watch is an independent think tank founded in October 2002. Our objective is to become the non-governmental point of reference for factual data dealing with transport generally and road and rail in particular. For full details visit: http://www.transport-watch.co.uk/

Percentage on business: The evidence suggests government “cooked the books” to justify HS2

The evidence suggests the government has “cooked the books” in order to exaggerate the economic benefits of High Speed 2.

The Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords found that that the government dramatically ramped up the percentage of business travel in its latest modelling. The new values are far in excess of those available from the National Rail Passenger Survey.

Weekday proportion on business
Route HS2………………. “Model” …………Actual values
London-Manchester……… 64% ……………….39.9%
London-Liverpool …………48%………………..33.2%
London-Sheffield…………..65%………………..56.5%
London-Leeds……………..56%………………..45.1%
London-Birmingham………55%………………..42.5%
Sources: House of Lords, Prout letter, National Rail Passenger Survey

Transport Watch finds that the government now assumes roughly 40% of HS2 trips over a 7-day week will be on business compared to an actual figure of under 30%.

Because business time is valued five times as highly as other time this provides a massive boost to the economic case for HS2, conveniently compensating for the Government’s admission that business users can actually work on trains.

Without that boost (and other significant sleight of hand) the economic case for HS2 would have collapsed – the benefit to cost ratios would have fallen to just 1.0 for Phase 1 and to 1.3 for the full network – extremely poor value compared with alternative transport projects.
When the wider costs of the tax funding for HS2 are factored in, this suggests there is a high risk that the costs of the scheme will outweigh the benefits – benefits which are, in any case, highly contentious.
………………………………………
Paul Withrington of Transport-Watch comments:

“The apparent manipulation of the travel forecasts is a smoking gun for HS2”.
“The government has dramatically increased the proportion of business trips compared with the real-world data, massively inflating the business case”
“A realistic assessment would show that the all important benefit to cost ratios for HS2 are likely to be far below those which would justify the project”.
“This should be the final nail in the coffin for this ill-conceived scheme”
“Nobody contests the fact that this vastly expensive scheme will make a financial loss in the tens of billions of pounds”.

For more details, or to arrange an interview, please contact Paul Withrington on 01604 847438 or pwith@transport-watch.co.uk and open topic 17.

About Transport Watch
Transport Watch is an independent think tank founded in October 2002. Our objective is to become the non-governmental point of reference for factual data dealing with transport generally and road and rail in particular. For full details visit: http://www.transport-watch.co.uk/

The values of time used in the January 2012 and October 2013 studies are as follows

£ per hour              Business       Commute    Leisure
January 2012           47.18                6.46              5.71
October 2013           31.96               6.81              6.04

The Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords is scathing. Here is a sample from the Committee’s report, ‘The Economics of High Speed 2’ published in March 2015.

At paragraph 378:
“The values of non-work travel time savings are based on surveys of motorists from 1994. We are not convinced that basing values of time on outdated surveys of motorists is the best way of calculating some of the benefits of a major rail project; rail users can use journey time productively. 33 per cent of the net transport benefits of HS2 are derived from these values (£19.3 billion). The Department for Transport has conceded that the data are old and that fresh evidence is required.”

At paragraphs 395 and 396:-
“The values of working time savings for rail do not take account of the fact that time on a train can be used productively. The Institute of Transport Studies at the University of Leeds concluded that the evidence behind the values was unclear. 70 per cent of the net transport benefits of HS2 derived from these values (£40.5 billion)”.

“82 per cent of the estimated total benefits of HS2 are derived from the value placed on work and non-work travel time. We find it difficult to have any faith in benefits that have been estimated on the basis of these values, particularly as the Department for Transport has recently concluded that fresh evidence is required and has commissioned further research”.

We comment, the fact that HS2 Ltd and the Government hang over £50bn of expenditure off values subject to such criticism is quite extraordinary, but it gets far worse.

We pick out two key finding from the report by Mott Macdonald of June 2009 with the title “Productive Use of Rail Travel Time and the Valuation of Travel Time Savings for Rail Business Travellers” produced for the DfT.

“It was found that the proportion of business travellers working on the train was, in Spring 2008, 82% for an outbound journey, and 77% on the return journey, a significantly higher value than the figure of 52% obtained from the National Passenger Survey (NPS) in Autumn 2004, the last comparable dataset. For those that spent some time working, the percentage of journey time spent working was 60% on the outward leg, and 54% on the return leg. For both directions combined, this corresponds to 46% of journey time by all business travellers being spent working”

“In economic appraisal, if work is done on the train, it has to be appraised in terms of the working time needed were that to be done in the usual office environment. The SPURT surveys showed that some two-thirds (68%) of working business travellers would take “about the same” amount of time, 8% would take “more” time (on average 29 minutes more) and a quarter (24%) would take “less” time (on average 18 minutes less). Across all journey lengths a slight saving of 1.7 minutes per journey would be realised in the usual workplace as compared to the train, this corresponds approximately to a 97% efficiency of working on-train compared with at-workplace”

Unfortunately the report does not tell us the proportion of time used when an employee arrives at work. That will vary according to the task but, with coffee breaks, dream time and interruptions one can well imagine only half is truly heads down for people likely to be sent off on business trips. The other office time may be used similarly to the non-working time when on a train. A report in the Times of a study carried out by Microsoft said that typically workers wasted, or were not working for, three hours of each working day, not counting lunch breaks. If so then the value of train time savings for people on business may reasonable be set close to zero – obviously destroying the economic case for HS2.

We also have the Institute of Transport studies (Leeds) report of April 2013 with the title Valuation of Travel Time for Business passengers. The conclusion on page 10 says “It is clear that there is no consensus on the theoretical underpinnings of the business value of time. Whilst the Cost Saving Approach dominates international appraisal practice, several practitioners have reservations about its theoretical underpinning”. Table 6.4 provides a range for the values of business time for rail with 60% of seats taken of £19 to £60 per hour for long distance rail depending on the methodology used.
………………………………………………………
We comment:
“With uncertainty on that scale lurking in the background, why is this scheme even being considered? Even on the incredibly optimistic assumptions embedded within the analysis it is a loser.”

“These analysis are not worth the paper they are written on. Instead decisions should be made on a financial basis – namely if it makes a loss in the tens of of billions of pounds, for heaves sake do not build it”

“High speed rail is not a ‘public Service’ worthy of subsidy. Neither is Rail. After all rail is used overwhelmingly by the better off. Why should they be subsidised?”
………………………………………………………
For more details, or to arrange an interview, please contact Paul Withrington on 01604 847438 or pwith@transport-watch.co.uk and open topic 17.

This post provides the abstract to Part 2 of our paper Better User of Railways, the first of which formed the background to the IEA publication “Paving over the Tracks” February 2015. Parts 1 and 2 are both here .

The height of Government fantasy is represented by the Greenwash diagrams taken from Cm 7996: Creating Growth, Cutting Carbon – Making Sustainable Local Transport Happen Jamuary 2014. The diagrams are at pages 23 and 24 within the Website copy of the full Part 2.

“Abstract and a question.

This note provides snapshots from the dawn of the railway age to the present (2013), touching the week of terror, 1847, Black Friday, 1866, railway closures since the Great War, early ring roads for London, the ever rising losses on the railways, the endless presumption that profit was just round the corner, contrary views, (Brigadier’ Lloyd’s seminal paper of 1955, Stewart Joy’s book, “The train that ran away”, the Hall smith report of 1976, “Better use of Rail Ways”), Beeching, Serpell, the endless white papers, the Prescott plans (better for everyone) perhaps a thousand bullet points; all against the background of the rail’s share falling to 1.7% of passenger journeys before rising to today’s trivial 3%, representing a slightly less trivial 8.7% of passenger-miles, along with 8.5% of tonne-miles.

• Endless policy statements in defiance of the numbers – declaring for ever and a day that rail is essential to the nation, that congestion can be solved by investing in pubic transport (a mode carrying only 12% of passenger miles), despite the obvious impossibility of buses, let alone trains serving the dispersed land-use enabled by the car.
• Unreality reaches new levels with cartoons illustrating how, in 2011, Whitehall envisaged the future. “Anytown” and “Anyvillage” are magic places from which the car has vanished in favour of the bus, cycle lanes, railway stations, travel plans tempting us to walk and bicycle sheds, let alone the green paint.
• High speed rail in defiance of Sir Rod Eddington’s careful analysis – as always, a wilful disregard for the numbers

We make no apology for repetition since the history is one and the same; an endless sequence of doing the same as yesterday while expecting a different result.

We do not analyse the reasons believing them to be self-evident and institutional, namely vested interests on a grand scale coupled with subsidy, running to hundreds of billions of pounds. That has perpetuated a system which would, under market forces, vanish overnight, see Part 1.

But first we ask a question. Is it all an historical accident?

Had the technology of tar and bitumen Macadam, road building and the pneumatic tyre existed in 1825, the dawn of the railway age, would the railways ever have existed? As it was it seemed obvious that the only way to drag large loads was on steel or iron tracks secured by cross pieces and to the ground below. However there were penalties. For reasonable speed, the track had to be laid to a very high tolerance and maintained at that tolerance. The stopping distances, and hence headways for the very heavy vehicles had to be large. (Today the distances used in design are about four times as great as required for roads). The vehicles lacked manoeuvrability; a broken down train could not be simply pushed to one side as can a road vehicle, and is much more difficult to rescue due to access problems. No other vehicles could use the track and the trains could not leave it.

Once these superb rights of way were paved with railway lines it became impossible, or at least impossible in imagination, to remove the steel in favour of the far more efficient and less costly road surface. Reason was blighted by the seeming order, imagined efficiency and the beauty of a pair of railway tracks curving away in the distance, gleaming in the morning sun, even though the pair would generally be empty of trains. It was as though, having gone down one evolutionary path, it was impossibly for the beast to evolve as it might otherwise have.

In reality that inflexibility grew out of vested interest and because of the dead hand of Government subsidy. The railway lobby had enormous influence in Parliament. Consequently the decades which followed were, as noted above, a catalogue of doing today what was done yesterday, in defiance of the numbers, and expecting a different result.

If instead there had been a fiat to the effect that land already committed to transport should be retained in that use for the good of the community as a whole, whilst denying subsidy, the market and financial realism would have driven the network owners to make the only sensible decision. That would be to pave the railways. The rights of way would then have been immensely profitable, as are the roads where tax-take far exceeds expenditure. Furthermore all those crushed London surface rail commuters would have seats at fraction of the rail fares they now suffer.

The value of the opportunity lost is beyond calculation, a dreadful indictment of Government interference in the market. Remember, even in the peak hour, in highway terms London’s vast, often grade-separated rail network, is substantially disused, see Part 1 and Topic 15.

The IEA publication “Paving over the Tracks” highlights the opportunity lost by preserving the railway as a railway. The background analysis supporting that is here. The critics, mostly from the railway lobby, illustrate the scandal that the railways have been for over half a century. Here are the facts, none of which are our fault.

• A double track railway offers 7.3 metres between tunnel and viaduct walls, the same width as the carriageway of a two-way trunk road, and 8.5 metres elsewhere. It is not our fault that roads built on such railway alignments would be vastly superior to the tarmacked cow trails which so often double as A-roads in the UK. Likewise it is not our fault that the widths are vast on the approaches to towns and cities. Despite that the railway lobby persist in the notion that the rights of way are “too narrow”. In the 1960s a Permanent Under-Secretary told his Minister that it was “impossible” to make a road from a railway because it was , “too straight and too level”, for heaven’s sake.

• A contra-flow express coach lane in New York 11 feet wide offers 30,000 seats in the peak hour whilst the trains carrying 30,000 crushed passengers into Victoria Main line require four inbound tracks. Despite that Bombardier scandalously told the Transport Committee’s inquiry into the Future of the Railway, 2003-2004 that, “to carry 50,000 people per hour in one direction we need: a 175 metre road used by cars, or a 35 metre road used by buses or a 9 metre bed for a metro or commuter railway”. Likewise Professor Begg, DfT Staff and others are prepared to mislead Ministers and the Secretary of State by saying that HS2 will have the same capacity as a 12-lane motorway when, in fact, one lane of such a road may, if dedicated to express coaches, have four times the seating capacity of HS2.

• It is not our fault that, if London’s vast grade- separated rail network were paved, all those crushed peak-hour surface rail commuters would find seats in express coaches sufficient to fill only one seventh of the capacity available at a fraction the fare, nor is it our fault that, averaged over the network, Rail carries half as much per track-km as does the strategic road system per lane-km.

• The plain fact is that the rail function could be discharged by a daily flow as low as 450 express coaches plus lorries per day per track, averaged over the network, a flow so low it would be imperceptible in one lane of a motor road. Yet this vast clunking network serves the hearts of our towns and cities.

• Dividing costs to Government by passenger-miles or tonne-miles provides unit costs by rail which are five to seven times higher than the comparable costs by road.

• And. Oh gosh! the replacement Express coaches and lorries would use 30% less energy than the trains, while emitting less carbon. Furthermore there would be an immense additional saving in fuel and emissions from the tens of thousands of other vehicles which could divert from the unsuitable roads and city streets which they now clog. Nevertheless the Railway lobby, in defiance of the facts, persists in presenting Rail as though it were uniquely “green”.

• Amazingly the arithmetic shows that when deaths by rail, including trespassers but not suicides, are divided by passenger-miles, the death rate is higher than the corresponding value for the strategic road network. Meanwhile the railway lobby exaggerates in favour of rail by a factor of around 400 by citing statistics which ignore usage and which confine rail deaths to those killed as passengers in Train Accidents, deaths which amount to less than 5% of all those killed on the network.

• A sensible budget for converting the national rail system to a system of reserved motor roads is £20bn – a mere peanut compared with the anticipated expenditure on national rail for the decade to 2018/19, namely, £89bn including finance charges or £76bn excluding those charges. Till income for the decade is only circa £24bn (thats the income to Netwrk Rail, not the fares income to the TOCs). Hence the implied subsidy is £65bn (where the data excludes Cross rail and HS2).

• In comparison to that vast expenditure on rail, perhaps £30bn will be spent on the strategic road network over the decade but the tax take may exceed £170bn.

In short, rail commuters travelling in crushed conditions to London terminals on week-day mornings will be dismayed to know that, if the railways were not a kind of religion, they would all be seated and at a fraction of the cost of the train; that in Central London and in the peak hour, our immense, clunking rail network is, in highway terms, used to perhaps one seventh of its capacity if paved; that even in tunnels a double-track railway offers a right of way the same width as the carriageway of a two-way trunk road; that if the rails were removed in favour of asphalt, productivity would increase by a factor of two to three; that the replacement express coaches would match the train for journey times (except for the longest 10% of journeys); that subsidy would be turned to profit; that countless lorries and other vehicles would divert from the unsuitable rural roads and city streets which they now clog; that energy consumption and emissions would be reduced; that deaths would be reduced and that endless acres of derelict railway land would become intensely valuable.

The reason for this scandalous state of affairs is that the railway lobby, and all those train spotters, have indeed succeeded in elevating rail to a kind of religion, failing only because of man’s failure and quite beyond reason.

Truth is that the system passed its sell-by date in 1945. Consequently we now have a fully modernised transport museum pretending to be a transport system at great inconvenience and cost to rail commuters and to the nation as a whole.

From our archive at item 25, in topic 6, we have Frances Cairncross, when Economics Correspondent for The Guardian, cited as writing, on 29 April 1974 that, “when trains are still the theme of nursery rhymes and children’s stories, it is small wonder that the railways have a romantic fascination for most adults. Only years of nursery conditioning can explain the calm with which the public has accepted a bill of £3,000 millions (£37bn at 2014 prices) to subsidise British Rail over the last decade …”. The pity is that it is the same today but with one difference namely, subsidy for decades to 2018/19 is likely to be £65bn, not counting Crossrail and HS2. So, real progress there then.

In today’s Times (23rd January 2015) there is an item reporting that the Highways Agency “is testing the feasibility of installing wireless technology beneath roads which would charge electric and hybrid cars on the go”- so called “scalextric roads”. The study is to cost £200,000 and to be completed by the summer before progressing to full off road trials, for heavens sake..

We can only wring our hands at the folly of the thing.

Ours at second below, and at topic 32 in our web site, shows that the electric car emits as much or more carbon than does a diesel. Likewise, ours immediately below shows that the effect on health of particulates from road traffic is likely to be between zero and negligible.

The cost of this “Scalextric” proposal would be overwhelming, or as Professor Glaister, of the RAC Foundation, puts it, “enormous”.

Leave politicians with a free hand and there is no end to the ways in which they will spend other people’s money. At the same time one does wonder at the integrity of the Engineering profession. Rather than telling politicians the truth we Engineers seem content do or say anything, provided a decent fee, or a vast salary, is guaranteed…….. HS2 springs to mind.

UPDATED February 2015 File Ref. The Great Dirty Diesel Scare 03

The media headline, that man-made air pollution causes “29,000 premature deaths” in the UK is from a report, dated 2010, by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, COMEAP. The snazzy title is The Mortality Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution in the United Kingdom. The report runs to 98 pages. Paragraph 2 of the Executive summary provides:

• At sub-para (a): “The current (2008) burden of anthropogenic particulate matter air pollution is, with some simplifying assumptions, an effect on mortality in 2008 equivalent to nearly 29,000 deaths in the UK at typical ages and an associated loss of total population life of 340,000 life-years. The burden can also be represented as a loss of life expectancy from birth of approximately six months”.
• At sub-para (d): “The uncertainties in these estimates need to be recognised: they could vary from about a sixth to double the figures shown”

However:

(1) The range cited represents “75% plausibility limits”. Had the more usual 95% limits been used they would have embraced zero, meaning that, in statistical terms, the forecast shortening in life expectance due to particulates is no different from zero

(2) The saving may be achieved only if all man-made particulates are eliminated

(3) Only about one tenth of man-made particulates are from road traffic. Separately from the report, COMEAP say that removing all particles attributable to local traffic may increase average life-expectancy by approximately 16 days for England and Wales and approximately 41 days in Inner London.

Furthermore, the computation and assumptions underlying the data are opaque. The report refers to an earlier report with the title, “Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution: Effect on Mortality”, published in 2009, 186 pages. That report refers to “Relative Risk” coefficients derived from the “American Cancer Society (ACS) study (Pope et al, 1995, 2002)”. COMEAP uses those coefficients, together with other sources, to compute the changes in life expectancy. However, the complexity and opacity of the whole undermines confidence. Indeed common sense suggests that it may be nigh on impossible to isolate the effects of particulates from the other factors.

Additionally, many of the estimates and error ranges depend on “eliciting” from “experts” their views. That process, known as elicitation, is heavily criticised by Professor P. K. Hopke in the earlier COMEAP report, “Long-term Exposure to Air Pollution: Effect on Mortality”, cited above.

There is also a critique of the ACS paper by Joel Schwartz, Adjunct Scholar of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The executive summary, available here, makes compelling reading. It suggests that the ACS paper is deeply flawed and that, probably, particulates have no effect whatsoever on lifespan. That conclusion is consistent with the COMEAP findings, where, at section 3.1.3, risk coefficients range from unity to 1.15. A value of unity implies that particulates have no effect.

Conclusion

The data from COMEAP suggests trivial average life expectancy gains from banning all diesel vehicles. The plausibility limits on those gains are extraordinarily wide. The basis for the numbers is opaque. Some have argued the American ACS study, upon which the whole depends, is junk science. In truth these particulates may very well have no effect on lifespan whatsoever.

For those reasons it seems that the present attack on the diesel vehicle has no solid basis.

Paul Withrington

The following was published in the professional magazine Local Transport Today (issue 665 dated 5th September 2014). It tells the story of our failed complaint against an advertisement claiming zero carbon dioxide emissions from the Renault Zoe electric car.

Ref, LTT 89 electric cars ASA letter 01

THE ZERO EMISSIONS ELECTRIC CAR.

In May of last year Transport-Watch lodged a complaint against an advert placed by Renault which claimed that the official fuel consumption for the Renault Zoe range of electric cars was “not available” and that the official CO2 emissions were zero, but (strangely) that the latter may vary according to driving conditions.

Both claims seem ludicrous since the electricity consumption is known along with the carbon emission per kW hour of power supplied. Hence, we were astonished when our complaint was summarily rejected within about a week. We then pointed out that a similar advert by BMW, placed in 2010, had suffered a similar complaint and that ASA had told BMW not to repeat the zero emission claim.

It took ASA a year to respond, but when it did it again rejected our complaint, concluding with the words: “We investigated the ad under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising), 3.9 (Qualification), 11.1, 11.4 and 11.7 (Environmental claims), but did not find it in breach”. Well, here is what the guidance says:-

3.1: Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
3.3: Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material.
3.9: Marketing communications must state significant limitations and qualifications.
11.1: The basis of environmental claims must be clear. Unqualified claims could mislead if they omit significant information.
11.4 Marketers must base environmental claims on the full life cycle of the advertised product, unless the marketing communication states otherwise, and must make clear the limits of the life cycle. If a general claim cannot be justified, a more limited claim about specific aspects of a product might be justifiable. Marketers must ensure claims that are based on only part of the advertised product’s life cycle do not mislead consumers about the product’s total environmental impact.
11.7: Marketing communications must not mislead consumers about the environmental benefit etc.

We were bemused. It could not be more obvious that a claim of zero emissions breaks every one of those guidelines. Hence we appealed. In that appeal we showed that the energy burnt in power stations and used to power the ZOE car provided a fuel consumption equivalent to only 56 miles per gallon and that the carbon emission amounted to 79 gms of CO2 per km, if the energy used in battery manufacture is ignored, and to 118 gms if the latter is taken into account. We compared that with advertised data for the Peugeot 108. After increasing the fuel consumption and carbon emission by 10%, to allow for refinery and distribution losses, that vehicle returns 60mpg and emits 109gms of CO2 per km.

At that point that it seemed obvious to us that no one could deny us the appeal. How wrong we were. Instead the independent adjudicator, in the form of Sir Hayden Phillips GCB DL, wrote that ASA had acted entirely properly and within the legal framework. Among other he provides;

“I see from your review request that you attached an email response from the VCA which says: “Following the 2013 amendment to the regulation, it became necessary to display the CO2 and fuel consumption figures for all vehicles – including electric vehicles, albeit that the results will be ‘0’ for CO2 emissions and ‘N/A’ (not applicable) for fuel consumption”. The advertisement you complain of follows this guidance precisely and I cannot see how you can reasonably expect the ASA not to follow the guidance of the responsible authority in this area. For them not to have done so could well have been a substantial flaw; but to do so was both defensible and reasonable and therefore not flawed”.

The fact that the VCA Guidelines are (a) not binding (its introduction says that “It is not offered as an authoritative legal interpretation of the meaning of the Regulations”) and (b) are in contradiction to the engineering reality, ASA’s own guidance and to similar guidance in the Green Claims Code published by DEFRA and BIS, the UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP Code) and the International Standard, ISO 14021:5.7h did not carry any weight. Instead Sir Hayden stood firmly behind the non-binding VCA guidance, a stance which we find incredible.

We conclude that ASA and the adjudicator are not fit for purpose. At any rate it is clear that this extraordinarily misleading advert will continue until someone in high places forces the VCA to bring its guidelines into line with reality, or the ASA decided that its own guidance trumps the ludicrous guidance published by the VCA.

Alternatively, could it be that (a) the ASA lacks scientists or (b) the adjudicator should be one in such cases or (c) the issue is in the grip of politics and vested interests, such as car manufacturers paid to promote electric cars on the contested premise that they will reduce carbon emissions?

More detail about this extraordinary matter is at topic 32 in the Transport-Watch web site.

Paul Withrington

The stand easy seats (or not as the case may be) canvassed by Airbus, see Rhys Blakely’s report on page 33 of The Times of 16th July would solve the alleged capacity problems on the West Coast Main line at a stroke thereby neutering one of the key arguments now being used in support of HS2.