Análisis Integral

It may have came as a surprise to the government when the Cumbrian council decided to withdraw from the siting process given that their last formal feedback from the public was positive (2012 survey). Many reasons were suggested for this swing in opinion and I pay special attention to one of these; the deadline extension biased the engagement process and changed decision outcome.

I investigated this by allowing the partnership to continue to operate past the initial decision deadline in my model, where they would go into a fourth stakeholder engagement period (I call this PSE4) that is active up until the decision is made at the end of January 2013. During PSE4 I assume the partnership would carry out similar activities as they did in PSE3, which is not a far-fetched assumption given the increasing partnership activity. I also assumed slightly increased activity from the NGOs that would actively try to combat some of the events organised by the Partnership. The model produced for this subsection is the ’Deadline Extension’ model from Table 5.2.

As the Cumbrian Council was the sole council to reject the proposal, I focused on the differences in the public and council opinion in the ’rest of Cumbria’ as both Allerdale and

Copeland already had a positive vote (made more positive by the change to Partnership activity). The final vote of the Cumbrian Council was 3 for and 7 against the proposal and if the deadline extension biased the result, I may expect that this final vote would change to more in favour of proceeding with the proposal when the Partnership is active in the final few months. The results are given below in Figures 5.10 and 5.11.

5.10a.

5.10b.

Figure 5.10: a and b shows the Cumbrian public support for proceeding with the siting process over the 4 year lifespan of the proposal for models 1 (top) & 2 (bottom) when PSE4 is included. The vertical dashed lines indicate the start and end point of each stakeholder engagement period the partnership organised.

Figure 5.10 shows that the public has responded in the way I may expect, and that the introduction of PSE4 has largely stopped the rapid decline in support observed near the end

of the siting process. However, given PSE4 has been designed such that the Partnership is just as active as it was in PSE3, it is a little surprising to see that there is only a very minor increase in public support during PSE4. This can be explained by the Partnership being roughly on par with the NGOs in their influence on the public at this stage. However, PSE4 has at least been enough to maintain support of the proposal. Keep in mind that very similar patterns are shown for both Allerdale and Copeland.

Sensitivity tests were carried out, such as those seen in Appendix D, to check how much these changes depended on a variety of factors, and the same trends were observed as for the original model with no deadline extension. Additionally, I are primarily interested in the overall trends rather than using the model for accurate predictions, and so it is likely that the displayed results are to some extent already biased. However, this bias has been consistent throughout models, allowing for a fairer comparison of trends.

From Figure 5.11, I can see a more dramatic difference than was observed in the public. In the original process, the Cumbrian Council was losing more and more support for the government’s proposal over the last few months, resulting in the negative vote that was given at the end of January 2013. However when the partnership has been allowed to continue its activity with PSE4, I see that this loss of support is quickly reversed. While only the results for model 2 have been shown, model 1 shows a very similar trend. One conclusion I could draw from this is that the quickly declining support for the proposal in the public had a significant effect on the council’s decision in the original process. However, when the Partnership is allowed to continue activity to possibly prevent this decline, it meant that the Cumbrian Council had little reason to change their opinions so drastically.

The behaviour of the councils are purely conjecture given the lack of any significant data, and while I have performed sensitivity analysis to attempt to calibrate the councils better, and understand how changing model parameters affects them, it is unknown if they follow the historical process of what happened. Additionally, the experts used in validation of the model were also uncertain. However, the results of the council had no impact or feedback to the rest of the model, they were an isolated module. They have been designed roughly to follow the opinions that could be found on the MRWS Partnership’s website. However, given the lack of insight into how the council members would have voted earlier in the process it is difficult to validate this. It must also be considered that the vote on whether to continue now occurs directly at the end of a stakeholder engagement period, which is where support is generally highest. If the decision had been delayed by until at least 3 months after the end of PSE4 I could have seen a similar loss of support as in the original process, despite the Partnership being more active. My overall conclusion I can draw from the experiment

of introducing PSE4 to the process is that the extension of the decision deadline could have biased the engagement process. However, some care should be taken when interpreting these graphs, especially those concerning council opinions.

5.11a.

5.11b.

Figure 5.11: a and b shows the Cumbrian Council support for proceeding with the siting process over the 4 year lifespan of the proposal for model 2 when PSE4 is excluded (top) or included (bottom).