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9 hours ago
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Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.
The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.
New runaways, as opposed to bigger terminals, are more sensitive, of course, and the big debate in the south-east has always focused on the relative merits of Heathrow versus Gatwick. This column’s view hasn’t changed: if a new runway is deemed essential, Gatwick wins hands-down.
Pollution aside, the problems with the Heathrow option are disruption and delay. The last known cost estimate was £14bn, which will be massively out of date after a couple of rounds of inflation, but the figure gives a feel of the size and complexity of the project. The last iteration imagined lowering the M25 for the new runway to cross, rerouting rivers and building car parks for nearly 50,000 cars. True, the private sector would bear the costs but, in other respects, jokes about “the HS2 of runways” have merit: an expanded Heathrow would be monstrous and difficult. West London was never a good place for an airport.
By contrast, expansion at Gatwick has the virtue of simplicity. The current relief runway would be shifted 12 metres to the north but the project would stay within the airport’s existing footprint. And the cost is put at a relatively modest £2.2bn because it makes better use of existing infrastructure.
The disadvantage, according to theory in the long years of previous inquiries, is that Gatwick isn’t a “hub” airport like Heathrow, so supposedly offers fewer economic gains. Okay, but extra noise and pollution would be imposed on fewer people and Heathrow would get stiffer competition. There’s also a fair argument that the “hub” arguments have less force in an era of bigger point-to-point aircraft. For a growth-seeking chancellor, the fact that Gatwick could complete by 2030 is presumably also a plus.
None of which will remove the objection that the UK risks busting its carbon budget if it gives the green light to any expansion. The New Economics Foundation calculates that expansion of just Gatwick and Luton would wipe out the climate benefit of the government’s clean energy plan by 2050. On the environmental obligations, ministers will have to show their workings, which will have to offer more than hopeful projections about the potential of sustainable aviation fuel. But the sums are easier if Heathrow’s third runway is left on the drawing board.
