The past six months have seen the opening of two big new transport facilities in London. Both involved large expenditure to enhance existing services, both were acclaimed as triumphs of British architecture and engineering, and both were expected to enhance greatly the public’s experience of travel.

Whereas the new St Pancras railway station has been almost universally praised, the same cannot be said for Heathrow’s terminal 5. Its opening last week was marked by spectacular baggage-handling problems, demonstrations and the increasingly acrimonious row about the proposed further expansion of the airport.

In part this is because air travel gets a much worse press on environmental grounds than rail. It would, however, be foolish to write off opposition to the expansion of Heathrow as simply a protest by the hairshirt brigade who would like to stop other people flying. The fact that all the main candidates in next month’s London mayoral election have come out emphatically against expansion speaks volumes.

Many people, like myself, accept the economic case for further airport capacity increases in the UK, and particularly in the southeast, but want to see this implemented in the most sustainable and environmentally responsible way. This is impossible in the case of Heathrow.

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The airport is quite simply in the wrong place. Because of its location, flights into and out of Heathrow have an impact on very large numbers of people who live in the densely populated areas surrounding it. However much technological advances succeed in reducing emissions and aircraft noise, the harsh reality is that an airport catering for up to 700,000 flights and 120m passengers a year is always going to impose a massive environmental cost on its neighbours.

Were there no alternative, this might be seen as a necessary consequence of maintaining the strength of the UK economy, to which London’s main airport makes a big contribution. But it has been recognised for more than 30 years that there is a highly appropriate alternative location for such an airport – the Thames estuary.

The case for siting a new airport away from the main centres of population where it can be approached over water was recognised at the time of the ill-fated Maplin Sands proposal in the 1960s. Since then international examples such as Kansai in Japan have clearly demonstrated the scope for successful airport developments on land reclaimed from the sea.

We have also come to see the importance of regenerating the Thames Gateway area, which stretches east from London Docklands out to the North Sea. The transformation that has been achieved at Canary Wharf is both an indication of the potential for economic development to the east of London and a further strong argument for an airport which would help to drive regeneration further down the river.

Not only would an airport give a substantial boost to the ambitious but tantalisingly slow Thames Gateway scheme, it would also be ideally placed to facilitate fast links to Europe by both air and rail. Unlike Heathrow, an estuary airport could easily connect, at Ebbsfleet, into the High Speed One service that runs through the Channel tunnel.

A further benefit would be the scope to provide far better public transport links to the new airport, thereby easing the appalling traffic congestion that is part and parcel of the Heathrow experience and which, incidentally, is a huge contributor to air-quality problems in the areas surrounding the airport.

Night flights have for many years been a problem for airports located near residential areas and strict controls have had to be imposed to avoid insufferable noise nuisance to those living along the flightpath or close to the airport. This is, of course, irksome to the airlines and passengers travelling from distant time zones. It also reduces airport capacity.

Moving to a location where the vast majority of landings and take-offs would be wholly over water removes at a stroke the need for such curbs.

With so many clear advantages, it is difficult for many people to understand why the case for siting London’s new airport in the Thames estuary has not been pressed more strongly. There are, of course, vested interests, notably BAA, which has long benefited from its monopoly control of London’s existing main airports. That monopoly should be broken.

There are also two arguments based around cost. The first is the potential “waste” of investment that has already gone into Heathrow. That might be persuasive if the corollary of a new estuary airport was the immediate closure of Heathrow, but this is not the case. There will continue to be a need for substantial capacity at Heathrow for decades to come in just the same way as there will be at Gatwick and Stansted.

Second is the cost of building a new airport from scratch, which was deployed by the government in rejecting the half-hearted option for an airport at Cliffe on the Hoo peninsula in Kent. If an airport’s costs are seen in isolation they certainly can appear daunting, but in the context of a 30-to-40-year development, as proposed in the Thames Gateway, the funding options are not unrealistic.

The argument is not whether we can afford a new airport in the Thames Gateway – it is rather whether in the long term economic, environmental and social interests of the UK, we can afford not to.

Nick Raynsford is the Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich.
He served as minister for local and regional government from 2001 until 2005

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