The prime minister should summon his relevant ministers and decide not to
proceed with Heathrow’s third runway. As protesters were festooning the
Palace of Westminster with banners on Wednesday, Gordon Brown rightly told
the Commons that decisions on such matters should be taken in the house and
not on its roof.
But he knows that the House of Commons does not take decisions; the government
does. His government has acquired a dreadful reputation for not taking them
or fudging them or reversing them or just umming and ahing. Now he has an
opportunity to bang the table and say, no runway.
Last autumn Ruth Kelly, his new transport secretary, felt the full heat of
commercial lobbying as BAA, the London airport operator, and BA, Britain’s
flag carrier, told the government to break its historic pledge to the people
of west London “for all time” that there would be no new runway at Heathrow.
As recently as 2001 they had agreed that a new runway was “totally
unacceptable”, but this was a tactic to secure permission for terminal 5. It
was blatant corporate mendacity, like BA’s claim that a third runway would
reduce carbon emissions. Now they claim to want a terminal 6 and a fourth
runway. Will they, we wonder, be content to leave the Queen safe in Windsor
Castle?
The government, having allowed yet another giant travel warehouse to be built
at terminal 5, has been thrown into a total dither. Its business friends
told it that it should agree to the runway but it could not face saying so.
Ministers first suggested a smaller runway, then a bigger one. They did what
Brown always does when reluctant to decide and “went out to consultation”.
This is a signal to interested parties to spend money like water on public
relations to ease any eventual ministerial pain.
The result was apparently unforeseen, a deluge of 18,000 objections, a direct
action campaign and sustained abuse of ministers for what, with every
passing month, seems a dumb, not to mention antediluvian, retreat before the
Big Carbon lobby.
The Civil Aviation Authority unhelpfully published a map of the noise zones
for landings and takeoffs for jets using the new runway, apparently
embracing everywhere with a W in its postcode, not least Hampstead,
Kensington and Chiswick. It also published a new set of stacking patterns
over the London area. Some seemed craftily located plumb over outer London
marginal constituencies.
London’s airport planning has yet to arrive in the 20th century, let alone the
21st. Short of converting jumbo jets to gliders, the present pandemonium in
the sky over Richmond and Windsor is to be extended to much of west London.
Such has been the deluge of protest that ministerial faces are said to
blanch, despite a countervailing burst of the most frantic wining, dining,
job-offering and expenses-paying campaign known to Whitehall lobbying.
The biggest chicken now coming home to roost at Heathrow is the failure, in
the 1970s, to locate London’s third airport on Maplin Sands in the Thames
estuary, as recommended by all pundits apart from those interested in
seabirds. Instead it was put at Stansted, which the airlines hated and where
every countryside lobby would fight future growth. The same was true of
Gatwick, whose residents were given a similar pledge to Heathrow’s but in
their case one that has been honoured, so far.
The pressure duly reverted to Heathrow. Surrounded by dense development and
with landings and takeoffs being over residential neighbourhoods, this must
be the craziest place in Europe to site a large modern airport. That
Heathrow still has only two runways, when most international hubs have at
least three, is testament to the stupidity of allowing Heathrow to expand at
all.
The predictable has happened. Heathrow became the “flag carrier” hub of
British aviation and its relentless growth a test of government machismo.
While expanding Gatwick and Stansted would have affected fewer people, they
were not where BAA and BA wanted to be. Money talked.
The disastrous privatisation of BAA as a de facto monopoly saw it slide into
the hands of the Spanish giant Ferrovial. This is one of many European
corporations able to use its domestic security to stage highly geared
takeover bids of British quasi-monopolies, bids that would not be tolerated
by any other European state. It bought BAA two years ago for £10.1 billion,
saddling the company in the process with a colossal £9.3 billion of debt.
Sceptics wondered how this could possibly be serviced.
Handling this debt has dominated BAA management ever since, as Heathrow’s
users have witnessed to their horror. An inability to handle lunatic
decisions on airline security has left queues everywhere. Each last penny
has been squeezed out of the company, so that the airports look like
downmarket shopping malls with retail outlets cramming every corner, while
delayed passengers sleep miserably on the floors. One reason BA is
slithering down the airline performance league table is its deathly embrace
with BAA.
In desperation BAA is selling both its property arm and its retail business,
World Duty Free. There are persistent rumours in the City that it may be
forced to stop all airport maintenance and terminal renewal – right before
the London Olympics. Its debt is threatened with junk status, making it
highly expensive to service. This is what happens with dumb privatisations.
Last week push came to shove and Stephen Nelson, the BAA chief executive,
was fired after less than two years in the job.
BAA may say it needs a third runway but this conforms to no known canon of
planning, except possibly that of concentrating all the miseries of modern
transport where they already exist. While the relative carbon footprint of
air travel is often overstated by lobbyists, it must be mad to plan to allow
such travel to double over the next two decades with no attempt to curb
demand with higher taxes.
Business may like good air links, and having London as a European hub may have
beneficial side effects (for some), but the atrocious state of Heathrow does
not appear to have impeded London’s advance over the past decade. And it
defies common sense to confuse the market for commercial travel with a
separate, carbon-crazy boom in cut-price foreign holidays that cannot be
considered a national economic necessity.
Only a third of travellers using Heathrow are classified as business, and even
fewer of London airports overall. The claim that Heathrow expansion is
“vital” for British business is palpable rubbish. The fiscal indulgence of
the cheap travel market by the Treasury over the past decade has been a
political indulgence, in effect buying votes.
The solution to Heathrow’s manifest problems would be to expel to other
airports all destinations that can as quickly be reached by train, all that
are primarily for leisure and all private jets. A lot of prestige national
airlines might be upset, and a few tycoons. But travel is always a balance
of inconveniences. If Heathrow is facing a crisis, then curb the monster; do
not just feed it.
Most normal people are now persuaded that, whatever else should guide planning
policy, a concern to reduce waste and conserve energy should be uppermost.
It would be appropriate to use the tax system to reduce Britain’s
carbon-heavy holidays. It would make sense to boost domestic tourism by
discouraging foreign travel. Britain is heavily in the red on its tourism
account. It would also make sense not to build another airport anywhere in
London but direct traffic, whether it likes it or not, to regional and local
airports and reduce pressure on the roads.
The truth is that on a fiscally level field, we have no knowledge of what
might be the demand for air travel, as against a propensity to take more
holidays at home. Either way the question deserves consideration. Or do
Brown and Kelly have absolutely no commitment to joined-up government?
Sometimes a prime minister must lead rather than follow. Sometimes he must go
in unpopular directions. Yet one of the achievements of the green movement
has been to make its concerns both global and popular. That popularity
should help this ever timid prime minister to reject the third runway and
get his air travel policy into some sort of order.
