The Buchanan report: 40 years on Available to Purchase

The 1963 Buchanan report made significant contributions to the theory and methodology of planning that are of continuing significance, albeit generally unrecognised. Most important was the concept of absolute environmental standards, basic to Buchanan's entire approach, which led him to fundamental and repeated conflict with the economists’ notion that all standards had an economic price capable of tradeoff. It came to a head in the contemporary criticisms of the Buchanan report by Michael Beesley and Christopher Foster, never resolved in debates at the time, and was repeated in the deliberations of the Roskill Commission on the Third London Airport, when Buchanan's 1971 minority report rejected both the cost-benefit approach of the other commissioners and its conclusion that the new airport should be located at Cublington in the Aylesbury Vale. It continues today in the debates about the environment, where environmentalists take an absolute position and economists a relative one.