Airport Expansion
Debate between Baroness Boycott and Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord will of course recognise that things should have moved on from 2018 but have not. This Government are determined for the first time to move forward with the expansion of the UK’s only hub airport. The statements made in the Airports National Policy Statement in 2018 will be reviewed in the light of the two proposals the Government are currently pursuing, and we will choose one of them before the end of November. The necessary alterations to the draft new airports national policy statement will be available next summer.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, can the Minister answer a question that is very puzzling to me? When we proposed airport expansion, it was about increasing business traffic into this country. Since Covid, that has simply not been the case; so much business is done online, and in fact, what we are benefiting is tourism. A recent report from the New Economics Foundation found that in 2023, we exported £41 billion abroad, and this is a deficit. What is the logic, given that we are all encouraged to do things online, of vastly expanding our airports right now?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
Heathrow is as congested now as it was before Covid, and it will remain congested unless more capacity is given to it. The previous questions on this subject in a short debate we had a few days ago rightly suggested that not only human traffic but goods and services are important—although we did have a debate about whether books or salmon were the most valuable or frequent commodity to be transported. The point is this: the airport is full, it remains full and for the benefit of the British economy, we need to expand it in order to get more flights and build the economy in this country.