Transcript
INTERVIEWER:
It took quite a long time to get here, didn’t it? I mean, BAA – and it goes back well before your time, and the chap before you’s time, and probably the chap before him – what do you think of that planning system that took so many years?
COLIN MATTHEWS:
Well, I think it took about 18 years for T5 to go through planning. And that’s just too long. That’s not serving the interests of the UK, to take that long over thinking about important bits of national infrastructure.
Having said that, though, I don’t think that’s all down to the planning process. For a planning process to work really well, it needs to happen in a framework of good, clear, stable government policy. And for policy to be stable, I think it needs to last more than one Parliament. For a project that’s going to take 10 years to deliver, that’s at least two political cycles. So we need stable policy that isn’t party political and changes every time there’s an election, and it needs to be clear. Because then the planners have something to refer against.
And I think one of the challenges for T5 planning that wasn’t that clear. So the planners themselves had to try and figure out what’s in the national interest from the point of view of infrastructure.
So of course we should discuss the details of the planning process. We also need really clear government policies.
INTERVIEWER:
How, in a company like BAA – maybe you don’t, but how do you encourage, promote innovation, doing things better?
COLIN MATTHEWS:
I think sometimes small companies, again, to be more agile than a big one like ours. But every company cares about innovation. We’re in T5. At the other end of this terminal, you could hop in a driverless vehicle that’ll take you to the business car park. That’s a specific innovation that happened from my company over the last few years. It’s a really great bit of technology. It works well. I don’t know if you’ve tried it. Give it a go. But yes, we do need to be innovative.
I think more often than that is the innovation every day of someone thinking, OK, we’ve got to carry out specific, say, security processes. How do we do that in a way that’s more comfortable for business people, more comfortable for families travelling with children, more comfortable for people who are struggling to take their shoes off or put them back on? So I think it’s a day to day issue of getting people to think, how do we make this work better for passengers, as well, of course, as satisfying every single technical requirement that an operation like this has to.
INTERVIEWER:
Take the little pods that take people to the business car park here. That is an innovation, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s done anywhere else in the world, as I understand it. Where did it come from?
COLIN MATTHEWS:
It came from an idea that with sophisticated programming, you could have a vehicle which is available for anyone to use, where you just push a button and say, I want to go to this location. In this case, if you’re in T5, you can say which part of the car park you wish to go to. And it’s driverless. It’s driven by battery. So it’s much more efficient from an environmental point of view than having diesel buses travel backwards and forwards whether or not they’re full. Often, you’ll see they’ve only got one or two people on them.
So it’s a good environmental solution. It’s a good technology solution. It’s comfortable. It’s fun. It works great.
INTERVIEWER:
Did it come from inside BAA, to your recollection, or did it come from an outside company that said hey, we’ve got a great idea for you.
COLIN MATTHEWS:
The idea was developed within BAA. The original idea, I’m not sure where that came from. I suspect not from a BAA employee. But it was developed by the company.