It is a wise saying that you should beware what you wish for. The white Christmas we are all supposed to dream about is already proving for many people to be far worse than a nightmare. At least with bad dreams you wake up to discover that reality isn’t so bad. But the ordeal of this Christmas has already had to be endured for days and seems set to continue without end. Need it have been like this?
Even if the snow and ice all melted away by tomorrow morning the experience of this Christmas will already have marked it for many people as one to forget. The facts hardly need repeating, they have so dominated the news in recent days. And in any case there is still more to come. How many thousands, by the end of it all, will have been stranded for days in airports, stuck on planes for hours without food or water, trapped on trains, boxed in overnight on motorways as temperatures plunge to the minus teens, or just had all their hopes of seeing their loved ones over Christmas ruined will be something for historians of the future to tot up in writing their account of the worst winter of early twenty-first century.
But more immediately the question arises whether the powers-that-be should have been more prepared for an event that was widely forecast.
The standard defence is that a freeze of this severity is such a rare event that spending the money needed to be able to tackle it better would have gone far beyond prudential planning. If governments, local authorities, airport operators, train companies and the like had forked out the millions needed for all the snow ploughs, de-icers and the like just to have them standing around idle in the barmy winters we have become used to, then we would have all attacked them for wasting our money.
There’s obviously some sense to that in that, at least until last year, those parts of the country which don’t regularly get the bitter winters that afflict the far north, have indeed enjoyed fairly balmy conditions. It’s obviously sensible too for the Government to ask its chief scientific adviser whether we should now be expecting more of this sort of deep freeze before embarking on the major investments to deal with repeats in the future.
But to many that isn’t really the end of the story. After all, they say, the weather may have been bad but it hasn’t been that bad. The older among us can remember much deeper snow in years gone by and should it really be the case that six inches or a foot of snow should cause the country to grind to a halt?
The more fundamental point is that risk assessment is about two things, not one. Working out how prepared you should be for an event happening depends not only on the probability that it will happen but also on the extent of the harm it may do if it does. We now know what that harm is in this case. So there is a genuine question to be answered by government, local authorities and those who run our transport systems as to whether they properly took into account the second element of risk or whether they simply took the view that an extended freeze was an unlikely event so they would save the money.
There is also another question that arises. Is it the case that getting the right answer to questions of risk management depends on who’s taking the decisions? Some people argue that at least part of our current woes has been caused by excessive privatisation of once state-owned services. The example cited is our airports. Selling the British Airports Authority to a heavily indebted private Spanish company was bound to lead, they say, to what has been described as the ‘disgrace’ of Heathrow being all but closed down for three days. Such a company is bound to cut costs where it can and preparedness for rare bad weather is an obvious saving. The result, as one critic put it, is that Europe’s busiest airport has become a high class shopping mall which planes visit in good weather.
Defenders of privatisation, however, say that state-run services were hardly the models of foresighted investment planning that such an argument would imply. Look at the water industry, they say, where private companies are now making good decades of under-investment caused by governments cutting necessary spending on capital projects whenever they needed to save money. Nonetheless, our current transport misery is bound to open up again the debate about which public services should be provided by government and which by private business.
But of course there is a wholly different way of looking at the suffering of those stranded at airports or queuing the length of Euston Road in London waiting to get on a Eurostar train. Why are so many people so keen to travel so much and so far? The journalist, Simon Jenkins, has dubbed the phenomenon ‘hypermobility’. We seem to have developed an expectation, almost a right, that we should be able to travel anywhere in the world at any time without any disruption. The concept of the winter break to the sun has become for many people just part of the annual rhythm of life. It is an outrage if it is interrupted. But shouldn’t we be ordering our lives more in line with the patterns of nature and its weather rather than in a permanent consumer bubble that tries to defy it?
It’s not a case I’d particularly want to make just now to those bedding down for yet another night of sleepless waiting at Heathrow or Gatwick but it’s perhaps something worth considering when we’re all feeling a little less frazzled.
What’s your view?
- How has the bad weather and the chaos in the transport system affected you?
- In your own case, do you think the relevant authorities could have done more to make the system work or do you think they have been doing a good job?
- At a national level, do you accept the argument or not that because freezes of this kind were regarded as unlikely events it was right for the authorities not to spend money preparing for them?
- What do you make of the argument that privatisation of services such as the airports has made things worse?
- And what do you make of the argument that we have become hooked on hypermobility and should get back to ordering our lives in tune with nature and its weather patterns?
