Tag Archives: tim leunig

Stephen Tall

A longer read for the weekend: Tim Leunig on how to increase airport capacity in the UK

By Stephen Tall | Sat 29th June 2013 - 3:45 pm

leunig bigger and quieterCongratulations to Tim Leunig — these days a senior adviser in the Department for Education, but until recently chief economist at the CentreForum think-tank — whose report Bigger and quieter: the right answer for aviation was the winner this week of the economic and financial category at Prospect Magazine’s Think Tank of the Year Awards 2013.

Tim’s report, published jointly by CentreForum and Policy Exchange, examined all the options for increasing airport capacity in the UK. It supports placing four runways immediately west of the current Heathrow site, doubling the existing capacity to 130 million passengers, and cementing it as Europe’s premier hub:

We argue that the first best solution is to build four new parallel runways, arranged in two sets of pairs, immediately to the west of the existing Heathrow airport. These would run above the M25, and Wraysbury reservoir. The Poyle industrial estate and a relatively limited amount of housing would need to be demolished. Clearly the problem with Heathrow at present is noise. Moving the runways west reduces noise over west London, since the planes will be higher over any given place. We will reinforce this noise reduction by banning the noisiest planes. This is not possible in the short run, but could be achieved by 2030, a plausible date for this airport to open.

In addition, narrow bodied planes will be required to land more steeply, as they do in London City. Again, this means that they are further up when they are above any particular place, reducing the amount of noise that reaches the ground. Finally there would be an absolute ban on night flights.

Interested in reading more? Here’s the link, and below’s the full document…

Bigger and quieter: the right answer for aviation — Tim Leunig for CentreForum / Policy Exchange (October…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , , and | 21 Comments
Mark Pack

In conversation with Tim Leunig… Sunday opening

By Mark Pack | Thu 6th September 2012 - 12:50 pm

Welcome to another experiment with our ‘in discussion’ style blog posts, which today features myself and the CentreForum’s Tim Leunig looking at Sunday opening.

Mark: In the recent debate about Sunday opening hours, many people were doubtful that longer opening hours would boost the economy, making comments such as “Would you really buy more things if all the shops were open on Sunday? Or would you buy the same amount of total stuff and just not buy it on one of the other days of the week?”

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Posted in Op-eds | 18 Comments
Mark Pack

How to write, with the help of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Tim Leunig

By Mark Pack | Mon 3rd September 2012 - 11:50 am

How to speak. That’s a common topic in training for would-be candidates and a frequent chapter in books for would-be campaigners. How to write? Much less so.

That’s an omission I plead guilty to, for 101 Ways To Win An Election has a chapter called “Making speeches” with no accompanying “Writing words”. Implicit in many of the other chapters are ideas that will help you to write effectively. Yet on reflection there should really have been explicit advice too.

Short, sharp writing has always been important for leaflets and news …

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Posted in Campaign Corner | Also tagged , and | 4 Comments
Caron Lindsay

LibLink: Tim Leunig – David Cameron should know better than this Housing Benefit gimmick

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 27th June 2012 - 9:27 am

I wrote the other day that I wanted to see our party in general and Nick Clegg in particular come out and roundly condemn David Cameron’s ridiculous plan to stop under 25s from claiming Housing Benefit. Centre Forum director Tim Leunig did just that in an article for the Guardian on Monday.

His calm and forensic evisceration of Cameron’s argument put me in mind of the way Nick Clegg took apart the Tory Marriage Tax Break plan ahead of the 2010 election. This, of course, has been kicked into the long grass because of the Liberal Democrats. I’m also reminded of …

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , , , and | 13 Comments
Stephen Tall

Nick Clegg on the double-dip recession: “our answers are the right ones to repair the damage done”

By Stephen Tall | Wed 25th April 2012 - 1:45 pm

Nick Clegg spoke this morning to the Institute of Directors, shortly after the announcement that the Office of National Statistics estimates that the economy contracted by 0.2% in the first three months of 2012 — a second quarter of shrinkage that officially means the UK is once again in recession. Here’s what he had to say:

As you may have heard, the first set of GDP figures for this year have just been released. And so, if I may, I would like to start by addressing what is disappointing news. The ONS’s preliminary estimate for Q1 GDP has

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 63 Comments
NewsHound

LibLink: Tim Leunig – I’d pay extra to fill my little girl’s paddling pool

By NewsHound | Mon 16th April 2012 - 7:35 am

In the Telegraph, Tim Leunig argues that the hosepipe ban falls unfairly on domestic users, and that there are other ways to use less water:

We are among the 20 million people in southern and eastern England affected by a crude prohibition that falls unfairly and disproportionately on domestic users. Drought orders are about to be extended to the Midlands and the South West. Yet there is a better alternative: why can’t those of us who want to fill up our children’s paddling pools, or turn on

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged | 33 Comments
Chris Nicholson

Opinion: A note to my successor (Part1)

By Chris Nicholson | Sat 24th March 2012 - 12:23 pm

Liam Byrne famously left a handover note to his successor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, saying “There’s no money left – good luck!” I was reminded of this as, after a very enjoyable 21 months as Chief Executive of CentreForum, I start on Monday as one of Ed Davey’s Special Advisers at DECC. I suppose the think tank equivalent would be “There are no ideas left – good luck!”

In fact that is far from being the case. One of the joys of running a think tank is that there is never a shortage of ideas to be …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 30 Comments
Mark Pack

Housing: six things that could be done

By Mark Pack | Tue 1st November 2011 - 8:46 am

As Tim Leunig pointed out last week, housing plays an important role in most people’s concept of social mobility, a point highlighted in Stephen Gilbert’s piece over the summer recounting his own personal circumstances:

Last year I was probably the only MP to be elected while still living with my parents. Of course, I’d moved out of home and, like many others, had to move back again. It’s a symptom of the fact that housing policy in the UK is in crisis. We have millions of people languishing on social housing waiting lists, first-time-buyers priced out of the market

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , and | 14 Comments
Mark Pack

How do the university application figures match up against my five questions?

By Mark Pack | Mon 24th October 2011 - 11:00 pm

On Sunday, ahead of the publication of the first tranche of university application figures, I posed five questions for judging what they meant. Now the full figures are out, how to do they compare to those five tests?

Let’s see…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 22 Comments
Stephen Tall

What Lib Dem members think about the Coalition’s spending and welfare cuts

By Stephen Tall | Sun 2nd October 2011 - 2:45 pm

Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 550 party members responded, and we’ve been publishing the results in recent days.

Party members back Coalition spending cuts and welfare cuts by 2:1 majorities

LDV asked: Do you think the government has on the whole made the right decisions or the wrong decisions about where spending cuts should be made?

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Also tagged | 5 Comments
Nick T

LibLink: Tim Leunig – Land auctions will help give us the homes we need

By Nick T | Sun 20th March 2011 - 2:25 pm

Tim Leunig, CentreForum’s chief economist, has written a piece for the Local Government Chronicle on the benefits that could be gained from the introduction of Community Land Auctions. This is a policy that has been debated previously in Liberal Democrat circles, but which was rejected at party conference in 2007.

Anyway, here’s how Tim explains the policy:

It works like this. The council first asks all landowners to name the price at which they are willing to sell their land. By naming a price, the landowner gives the council the right to buy the land for 18 months at that

…

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Posted in LibLink | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

Changes at CentreForum

By Mark Pack | Fri 25th February 2011 - 5:55 pm

Two significant changes of staff are happening at the CentreForum think tank, with current director Julian Astle leaving in April after three years as director and with Tim Leunig joining as Chief Economist. Tim will be familiar to many of our readers as a regular commenter and occasional contributor on this site.

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 2 Comments
NewsHound

LibLink: Tim Leunig – Was David Laws’s resignation necessary?

By NewsHound | Tue 1st June 2010 - 7:10 pm

Over at The Guardian, Dr Tim Leunig, a Lib Dem member and economist, argues for speedy due process to determine any future MPs’ expenses controversies to avoid unnecessary ministerial resignations driven by the demands of rolling news:

The public need the independent parliamentary commissioner for standards, John Lyon, to judge MPs’ conduct. But the public also need the best people in government. Rules must apply to ministers, but we need the parliamentary commissioner to act expeditiously when a minister is referred. … When the facts are clear, should it really take more than 24 hours to make a decision? … If

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged | 16 Comments
The Voice

CommentIsLinked@LDV: Tim Leunig – Co-ordinated inflation could bail us all out

By The Voice | Sun 15th February 2009 - 10:40 pm

Over at the Financial Times, Tim Leunig – occasional contributor to LDV, and reader in economics at the London School of Economics – considers the unusual financial origins of the current recession. Here’s an excerpt:

The global economy would benefit from a pre-announced, temporary, globally co-ordinated bout of moderate inflation. Since it takes about two years for central-bank policy fully to influence inflation, a sensible policy would be to target 4 per cent inflation for the five years from 2011, followed by 2 per cent thereafter. … An increase in inflation by an extra 2 percentage points for a period

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , and | 5 Comments
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