It’s not about if but about when

HEATHROW’S owners have been running a consultation, and they have been encouraging people to take part in it.

“This is your chance” their leaflet says “to help us shape our plans for an expanded Heathrow.” Those words say it all - their consultation is not about whether or not there should be a third runway; it’s about how they would incorporate one.

Imagine, if you can, around 260,000 extra flights a year at Heathrow. Imagine the implications of this for air pollution, noise from planes, and increased pollution and congestion from surface traffic to and from the airport.

But Heathrow’s private owners, Heathrow Airport Holdings Limited, want a third runway. Maybe because more flights will mean more profits for them, or so they hope.

The consultation closed on March 28th. If you didn’t respond to it, great.

By responding to it, you would have been legitimising it. Heathrow could claim afterwards that everyone who took part had an opinion on how the airport “should be expanded”. They cannot be trusted – and this is why. In the 1990s, when the airport wanted Terminal 5 to be built, there were fears it would lead to a third runway. Heathrow’s owners – the same ones as now – paid for advertising features in the Gazette, in which they tried to reassure us. This is John Egan, the then chief executive, no less, writing in an advertising feature in the Gazette on 26th March 1999.

“Our position could not be clearer, nor could it be more formally placed on the record: T5 will not lead to a third runway.” And the bold print was his.

Instead of taking part in a loaded consultation, energies should go instead into fighting an autonomous campaign against a third runway being built in the first place - for example through the No 3rd Runway Coalition, which represents campaign groups, local authorities and MPs opposed to expansion.

Simply put, it needs to be stopped. Kevin Gannon Watford