Runways all round

SIR – Government has been mishandling London’s airports, certainly in the years since I was Aviation Minister in the mid-1980s.

Now the London system (especially Heathrow) is full up and there is not much that can be done about it in the foreseeable future.

Rather than tinker further with London’s airports, would it not be best now to embark on a radical plan to provide adequate capacity into the second half of this century?

Bearing in mind that we are predicted to have a population of 73 million people in the next 25 years, that we are a centrally placed island which will be trading increasingly globally after Brexit, and that Schiphol already has six runways, it would seem that we will need at least eight runways around London by 2050.

A possible configuration of these could be two at Stansted (north), two at Gatwick (south), two at Heathrow (west) and two at a new airport down the Thames (east).

There would have to be a first-class inter-connecting system between these airports. Lord Spicer

Pershore, Worcestershire