26 Oct 2016

The longest take-off in history? Despite reasons to be sceptical, Heathrow expansion should occur

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The announcement yesterday that the Government had expressed approval for a third runway to be built at Heathrow Airport was met with as much exhaustion as elation, even by those who strongly endorse the expansion. The tone of the media coverage was one of scepticism, even cynicism, as to whether the concrete and the tarmac would ever be laid. In part that is because the volume of the opposition to the scheme is at a decibel level to rival that of air transport itself, and that the obstacle course that remains ahead is not inconsequential. 

The process of executing the U-turn from David Cameron’s 2009 pledge that he would block any extension at Heathrow has hardly been swift nor politically elegant. The Cabinet is divided on the issue with Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and Justine Greening, the Education Secretary, awarded a limited licence to dissent from the collective decision of their colleagues. Zac Goldsmith has already resigned his parliamentary seat and is likely to be re-elected as an anti-Heathrow candidate with a thumping majority. 

John McDonnell, both the Shadow Chancellor and the local MP, is staunchly hostile to the Heathrow blueprint and he has been backed in the past on this subject by Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader. Sadiq Khan, the rather more moderate and often business-friendly Mayor of London, is at one with his party leadership on this question. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens are adamantly against it. 

There is a planning consultation to come. The lawyers are stacking up with their applications for judicial review and an array of other objections. The matter will not come to any vote in the House of Commons until the winter of 2017-2018. Bar an early election, that will be in a House with a Tory majority of 12 seats.

If all that politics were not enough, then there is the whole wretched history of airport policy in this part of the country. Put bluntly it has been incoherent for decades. The Abercrombie Committee debated the issue even before World War II had ended and recommended a dramatic upgrade in the site that is now known as Heathrow Airport with four runways and a high-speed train link to Victoria. Only two of those runways were then constructed and it took more than five decades for a high(ish)-speed train connection to open (and to Paddington, not Victoria). The Roskill Commission concluded more than two decades later (1968) that a completely new airport must be built in Buckinghamshire, an argument that the Wilson Government rather tepidly accepted, only for this to be overturned in favour of a new airport in Kent under Edward Heath. This was abandoned when he was ejected from Downing Street and the restored Wilson Government decided it was all too costly. 

On and on it has gone with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and finally Gordon Brown all appearing at one stage or another to be prepared to bite the bullet only for them instead to give said bullet a bit of a lick and a suck and then spit it out again. Why on earth, therefore, should it be different today?

The sceptics may well be proved right again on this occasion. There are, nonetheless, a few reasons to conclude that Heathrow expansion will occur albeit on a slightly delayed timetable.

There is more of a political consensus here than it might appear

The impression that has been left is that the Conservatives are badly divided in their support for a new runway at Heathrow while the Opposition is united in its opposition to it. Such a sense would be misplaced. The division here is not within the Conservatives or between Conservatives and Labour but very largely one of London (even, perhaps, just West London) versus much of the rest of the UK. 

The Heathrow proposal was backed unanimously by the relevant Cabinet sub-committee despite the fact that the constituencies of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Transport Secretary are all on a Heathrow flightpath and all three areas believe that they will be adversely affected if, as is now the notion, the number of flights out of Heathrow annually increases from 480,000 up to 740,000. Apart from Mr Johnson and Ms Greening, no other Cabinet members seem set to break ranks on the matter. Most Conservative MPs are essentially agnostic on it. This is less of a ‘split’ than a ‘splinter’.

The Opposition is not at one in its resistance either. Far from it. Labour too has its own version of a ‘London versus the Rest’ division but this is obscured by the fact that, highly atypically, the Labour leader, Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow Foreign Secretary are all MPs from the capital and hence unrepresentative of wider Parliamentary Labour Party sentiment. In fact, it appears that a majority of Labour MPs from outside London are either actively in favour of or not strongly against the Heathrow masterplan. Most of the major trade unions support Heathrow too. Of the other Opposition forces, the SNP has been vocal in its embrace of the Heathrow runway and the smaller parties from Wales and Northern Ireland are likely to follow them at Westminster. When a vote in the House of Commons finally comes, the majority will be far larger than that of 12 votes. 

The Brexit Factor is a new and very significant argument in favour of a new runway

Ministers were keen to insist yesterday that their embrace of the Heathrow proposal showed that post-Brexit Britain was ‘open for business’. To a degree that is simply a convenient message for them to articulate but there is some hard truth behind it. As matters stand, it is all but impossible to run economic routes to new international markets in China, India and South-East Asia from a so-called ‘hub’ airport that is functioning very close to its absolute capacity. The opportunity costs involved are way too high. 

Only last week, as an illustration, British Airways announced that it was terminating its Heathrow route to Chengdu, China but offering a new set of flights to New Orleans in the United States. No one at the Department for International Trade (or probably at BA either) is of the view that Louisiana is destined to become more important (comparatively) to the UK economy over the next decade than Sichuan Province. If the UK economy is to become (or has to be) more global in its exports and less focused upon Europe, then airport capacity is a compelling necessity.

Court challenges can delay the scheme but they are unlikely to derail the proposal entirely

An array of legal initiatives will be witnessed and they certainly have the capacity to delay the final moment when construction starts until beyond the present early 2020 timetable. Whether they can obstruct matters beyond mid-2021 is much more doubtful. Their main objective is not as an end in themselves but as the means to prevent any work starting before the 2020 election in the hope that something will turn up at the ballot box which will lead ministers or their replacements to retreat. This is not impossible but it is a long-shot. It would be a brave soul who bet his or her shirt or blouse that the new runway will be open for business in 2025, but a delay beyond 2027 would be surprising. 

Do not bet against the case for a second runway at Gatwick being revisited again quite shortly

If the Cabinet had felt that it could have approved runways at both Heathrow and Gatwick then there is a fighting chance that they would have done so. Instead, the advice was that because the terms of reference for the Davies Commission had been Heathrow or Gatwick or ‘Boris Island’ or none of them, to determine at this stage that it was Heathrow and Gatwick would have opened them up to a different scale of legal challenge which would have severely delayed each of these schemes. Yet the case for a second runway at Gatwick, although different from that of Heathrow, remains strong and by this side of the next election might well be compelling, indeed unavoidable. 

How so typical of the British that after failing to build a full-length runway anywhere in South East England since the 1940s we might well end up with two such items having been constructed by the end of the next decade.

Tim Hames, Director General, BVCA

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