Airport Expansion: Economic and Environmental Impact

Debate between John Hayes and Andy Slaughter

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) has been assiduous in her defence of her constituents’ interests. She and my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) are beyond question in both the diligence they have exercised and the passion they have shown. Nothing worth while is ever achieved without passion, and no one is more passionate in defending their constituents’ interests than she and he. On that basis, I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. I note that my hon. Friend has already briefly contributed and is here to listen to what I have to say.

Let me be clear: the Government have expressed a preference for airport expansion, on which we are consulting. That is where we are with this. Final decisions will be made as a part of that process, but they have not yet been made. I will certainly consider all the matters raised by the hon. Lady, which she kindly informed me about previously. She set out with great courtesy, as she has many times before, the areas she hoped to cover. I will do my best to try to address them; time is short, but we will try to cover as much ground as we can none the less. This is a timely debate, because it was only yesterday that the Government launched our consultation on the revised national policy statement and published our response to our earlier consultation on airspace reform.

If I may, I will deal at the outset with the matter raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Colin Clark). It is right that we see this subject in the context of what we expect of our regional airports. He is right to say that any consideration about airport expansion needs to be on a strategic basis; it would be quite wrong to see the expansion in the south-east in isolation. He can be assured that the Government think strategically about these things. Part of our ongoing consideration, and the discussion we are having on the back of the consultation, will take full account of the point made by him and others about the need for the relationship between the regions and the south to be secure.

I mention those publications because they are intrinsic to the debate. I am sure that the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth has already taken the opportunity to look at the statement from the Secretary of State for Transport, although she may not have had a chance to work through the full suite of documents, as they are extremely detailed. However, it is inevitable that my response today will repeat much of what was set out in the statement yesterday; she would hardly expect me to do anything else.

The important thing about this subject generally is that the Government are not frightened or nervous about taking big, strategic decisions about infrastructure. Members might think that untypical of Governments in democratic polities; over the last several decades, such Governments have often been reluctant to take big decisions, partly for fear of binding the hands of successors and partly because no one wants to be held responsible for a decision that goes wrong. Governments need to take big, strategic decisions on infrastructure and this Government are determined to do so, notwithstanding the tendency I described—perhaps the inevitable consequence of living in a democracy where we are all, quite properly, answerable to the people whom we serve.

The issue is not about taking the decision but about the process. The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth is right to draw attention to some of the specifics of that, which I will now deal with. We announced last October that the Heathrow north-west runway is our preferred option to deliver extra capacity in the south-east. I have no intention of being excessively partisan, but the hon. Lady knows that her own party’s manifesto made clear the official Opposition’s preference for airport expansion in the south-east. That manifesto set down four serious and unsurprising conditions, many of which she covered in her brief remarks and, indeed, in her many questions to the Government. We have received a number of responses to the major consultation that we launched originally. The draft airports NPS allowed us to solicit views and opinions, and we have received about 70,000 responses in total. In parallel, Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd has been working with airlines to bring down the cost of the scheme.

We are now consulting on the revised draft NPS for a further eight weeks. That is in line with our statutory requirements and is the right thing to do. We expect the Liaison Committee to announce shortly which Select Committee will take forward parliamentary scrutiny. The draft NPS has been revised in the light of the consultation responses already received, to reflect changes to wider Government policy and updated evidence, such as the Government’s air quality plan and the latest aviation passenger demand forecasts.

To respond to what the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth said about Gatwick, I should say that it is really important to realise that some of the advantages are hard to monetarise; they are not entirely financial. I shall try to elaborate on that in a moment. Although of course money matters, it is not all that matters. There will be strategic reasons why we will come to the decision we come to when we have consulted. Further consultation is not unusual. The Planning Act 2008 requires us to consult again.

Let us be clear about the areas that the hon. Lady addressed. The first is the broad economic case—the net economic benefits and demand. The revised passenger demand forecasts, which the Government published yesterday, show that the need for additional capacity in the south-east is even greater than previously thought. They show that all five of London’s main airports will be completely full by the mid-2030s, so doing nothing is not an option.

Our revised analysis shows that the new north-west runway at Heathrow would deliver benefits of up to £74 billion to passengers and the wider economy over a 60-year period. As I have said, the monetarised benefits are part of the strategic approach, and if one looks at the monetarised effects of both the expansion at Heathrow and the possible expansion at Gatwick, one sees that they are fairly evenly balanced over the longer term. Heathrow offers the greatest economic benefits for at least the first 40 to 50 years. The figures, which the hon. Lady will be familiar with, show an evening out of those monetarised benefits in the longer term. She will know that well.

[Andy Slaughter]

The Minister seems to be rewriting history. At the time the commission produced its report, we were told that the economic benefits of Heathrow were much greater than those of Gatwick. The facts have changed. Surely the Government should be looking at the revised facts and not just saying, “We’ve made a decision. We’re going to go on with it whatever happens.”

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is perhaps not quite in the same league as the hon. Lady or my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park, but he is certainly right up there in terms of his interest in this subject. [Interruption.] I do not mean to be unkind to him, but I do not want in any sense to underestimate the contribution made by those two colleagues. The hon. Gentleman will understand the point that I made earlier: not all the strategic benefits, the long-term benefits, can be monetarised—a few moments ago, I said that the two were broadly the same. But let us talk about some of the additional strategic benefits, which are pertinent to the hon. Lady’s initial remarks.

The ability to secure the United Kingdom’s future as an aviation hub is an important part of expansion, as is our ability to compete with other European and middle eastern airports. In 2040, there would be 113,000 additional flights across the UK airport network, equating to 16 million additional long-haul seats. That would help UK businesses to connect to markets across the globe.

I have already mentioned the support for domestic connectivity to the nations and regions of the UK. The importance of freight has often been understated in the debate. Freight is an important part of what Heathrow already handles; I think that it handles more freight by value than all other UK airports combined. We are also talking about up to 114,000 additional jobs in the local area by 2030 and—a subject dear to my heart—very many, perhaps 5,000, additional apprenticeships. I was able to visit very recently the team at Heathrow airport who deal with skills and apprenticeships and saw the effect that they can have on the prospects of, the opportunities for, so many people.

I shall deal quickly with other areas that the hon. Lady would want me to deal with. The Airports Commission estimated the potential costs of the surface access provision for the north-west runway at Heathrow at about £5 billion, but recognised that final details and therefore costs would be determined as part of the statutory planning process. Let me be clear: there will be no planning permission unless a very high bar has been met in environmental terms. It is simply a matter of fact that planning permission cannot be granted unless that high bar is crossed, and I certainly, as Minister of State, would not want it otherwise.

It is right that additional investment will be needed in the infrastructure around the airport. However, I am not sure that I would agree with the Mayor. The Mayor has had a fairly torrid time over the last week. He was criticised in the Chamber last week, and I think I had a go at him yesterday, although, as I said, I do not want to be too partisan about these things. I am not sure that the analysis done by Transport for London takes full account of the infrastructure that we are already committed to improving. None the less, it is right that we have a proper and open debate about the surface access issue, and we will do so.

I have said a little about the growth of regional airports and the Government’s support for that. The Government fully recognise the importance of air services to the nations and regions of the UK, and the draft airports national policy statement published yesterday makes it clear that the expansion of Heathrow will be an opportunity to increase frequency on existing domestic routes and to develop new domestic connections.

On the cost of noise mitigation, I have made it clear that there will be no planning permission unless that is dealt with satisfactorily. Any expansion at Heathrow will be accompanied by a world-class compensation and mitigation package, to mitigate the impact on local communities. That is the least that the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend should expect. While I am Minister of State, they can be guaranteed that that will happen; I know that that is the Secretary of State’s view, too.