Social Research and Royal Commissions (Routledge Revivals) by Martin Bulmer

Author:Martin Bulmer [Bulmer, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Essays
ISBN: 9781317448914
Google: mGDbCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-06-11T02:47:33+00:00

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Sing a song of sixpence

Cost or benefit

Four and twenty wise men

Picking at a nit

When the costs are counted

They weight them or they fudge

Oh isn’t that a dainty dish

To set before a Judge.

Can mathematics and economics form the basis for a useful public discussion of issues? And can a good piece of research be done when it is thus exposed to public view? These questions, while inward-looking, are significant and may be discussed before raising the outward-looking issue of the effectiveness of public participation in the Commission’s work.

There seems little doubt that the type of public participation which took place was influenced strongly by the type of research carried out. Put crudely, at Stage I the Commission heard the actual interest groups, at Stage II it heard the local people and at Stage V it heard from economists and modellers. Not everyone represented at Stage V brought in these high-powered consultants to defend their alternative cost-benefit studies or to shoot holes in those of the research team, but plenty did, notably the ‘Essex’ group of County Councils, the ‘Buckinghamshire’ group, the Wing Airport Resistance Association, the British Airports Authority and the Thames Aeroport Group.

One might have expected, and I must admit I did expect, that it would be easier to reach agreement on a technical level with these technical chaps. Not a bit of it. The evidence put up and defended by them frequently seemed even more amazingly at variance with the theories as understood by the research team or the facts as we believed them. The Buckinghamshire group’s noise costs were nearly nine times those of the Commission. Professor Lichfield, for the ‘Essex’ group and others, thought 6d (2½p) an hour an appropriate value for leisure time. A trip generation model produced by two groups of county councils and the Thames Aeroport Group suggested that the Foulness system would generate more trips than the Cublington system for every zone except Cornwall. The Thames Estuary Development Company thought that aggregates at Foulness would be £1.25 cheaper than at an inland site as against the research team’s estimate of 50p – which incidentally tends to reduce one’s faith in the argument, put up among others by Peter Hall and Peter Self, that construction costs were more likely to be accurate than the ‘softer’ non-marketed costs and benefits.

Did these marked differences suggest special pleading to make a case for their clients – or does it represent a reasonable difference between professionals? No one argued at the time that the research team was biased, though some, notably George Stern (1976), did later, while Professor Parry Lewis argued that the retention of the research team and their ability to make further calculations to advise the Commission following the Stage V hearings was unfair.

From the research team’s point of view, maintenance of an unbiased position presented a rather different problem. Inevitably during a process of evaluation of argument many points were made, some good, some bad. The good ought to be adopted, clearly, and the bad rejected.

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