The battle over Heathrow

The much-delayed decision about whether to expand airports in southeast England will finally be made this month

What is this Government’s plan?

As things stand, we’ve no idea. In 2003, Labour announced its support for a third runway at Heathrow. But Tony Blair and Gordon Brown dragged their feet, and in 2009 David Cameron declared: “No ifs, no buts, no third runway at Heathrow”. After the 2010 election, the plan was scrapped in favour of the HS2 rail link. But George Osborne still supported the runway, so the issue was reopened and in 2012 the Airports Commission was set up to examine airport capacity in the southeast. Reporting after the 2015 election, it recommended the Heathrow option. But Cameron again kicked the decision into the long grass, postponing it until after the EU referendum. Theresa May has promised that a cabinet committee will decide by the end of October.

Does London need more airport capacity?

There’s a strong economic case for it. There are more flights in and out of London than to any other metropolitan area, and its connections are thought vital to the city’s position as a world commercial capital and to the UK economy as a whole. Heathrow has only two runways: most of its competitors have at least four. It has been running at capacity for years; Gatwick runs at 85%. The Commission examined various options: two plans to expand Heathrow; one to add a new runway at Gatwick; and Boris Johnson’s proposal for a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

And why did it think that Heathrow was best?

Essentially, because it’s already there. It is the UK’S “hub” airport, used for transfers to 185 other destinations, as well as by people travelling to the capital. An expanded Heathrow would serve UK trade by offering more flights to the fast-growing markets of Asia, Africa and South America, and there would be more flights to British regions, linking them to the world. If Heathrow doesn’t expand, it will lose this business to larger rival hubs: Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt am Main, Dubai. By contrast, Gatwick and London’s other four airports are largely “point-to-point”. Another runway at Gatwick would only serve as a “pressure valve” for Heathrow: you can’t have two hubs, because they work by pooling domestic and foreign passengers to make more routes viable; airlines would not move to a second hub.

Why is Heathrow controversial?

In a word, noise. It is, as the Town and Country Planning Association put it, “one of the country’s truly great planning catastrophes”. Its position, due west of London, means planes landing into the prevailing westerly wind overfly much of the capital, a situation unique in the developed world. It is a testament to British planning – conservative, nimbyish, suspicious of grand projects – that Heathrow was never replaced (see box). The EU recently found that 725,500 people are seriously affected by its noise, compared to 238,700 by Frankfurt’s, 170,000 by Paris Charles de Gaulle’s and 43,700 by Amsterdam’s. And a new runway would mean opening up a new London flight path. The Commission has been studiously vague, but released a video of a possible flight path passing in a straight-ish line from Hyde Park to Heathrow. Noise aside, air pollution around the airport also breaches legal limits – a real obstacle to development.

How feasible is the plan politically?

We shall see, but most influential London-based politicians – including Mayor Sadiq Khan – oppose it vocally. To make it more acceptable, concessions have been offered. The new runway would be to the northwest of the existing runways, so planes would fly higher (disturbing people less) above London. Night flights between 11.30pm and 6am would be banned; the three runways would be used in a way to provide reliable periods of respite for overflown areas; there’d be generous compensation schemes. All that might even improve matters for those already affected. But it would raise the number of flights into Heathrow (472,000 in 2015) by 200,000, and would disturb tens of thousands of as yet unaffected people.

Couldn’t we build a new, better hub?

The Commission rejected the plan for a new Thames Estuary hub, saying it would be “unfeasibly expensive, highly problematic in environmental terms and... hugely disruptive”. Neither the airlines nor the local councils that would be affected support it, and billions would need to be spent on new transport links, quite apart from the huge construction costs. Besides, an entire business ecosystem has built up around Heathrow: of the 469 global companies with an EU or world headquarters in Britain, all but a handful are located within an hour of the airport. In addition, the valuable air freight business is largely geared to Heathrow.

So there’s a deadlock over the plan for Heathrow?

It seems so, especially as Willie Walsh, chairman of IAG, which owns British Airways, thinks that at £18bn, the plan for a third runway is a “rip-off” (it will require digging a tunnel so the M25 can pass under it, and razing 783 homes). Walsh insists that IAG won’t pay the raised airport charges needed to fund it. He thinks expansion is politically impossible, and is expanding operations in Dublin and Madrid instead.

How about doing nothing?

That might be a sensible option. The Commission’s brief was to “maintain the UK’S position as a global hub for aviation”. But other considerations may trump that, given that southeast England is a small, densely populated area; that aviation is a relatively small industry; and that business customers make up only 36% of Heathrow travellers (the rest being holidaymakers). Besides, aircraft now have a longer range than in the past, so in future the hub model may be less dominant. A compromise might be to expand Gatwick (a “credible” option, says the Commission) to at least reduce pressure on Heathrow. But then again, Gatwick’s transport links are weak and that too would be bitterly opposed by people in the area.