Aviation Strategy

Lord Haselhurst Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Haselhurst (Saffron Walden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to address you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a reversal of roles that happens very rarely in this House.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

I was about to welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) to his new duties, but I give way to my hon. Friend.

[Mr Jenkin]

I merely remark that my right hon. Friend used to play Caesar to Caesar’s wife and now he plays Mark Antony to Cleopatra.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that erudition, of which I was not capable.

I must declare an interest because Stansted airport is in my constituency. However, the views that I hold on airports policy were formed when I had the honour to be the Member for Middleton and Prestwich in Greater Manchester. I took the view then, in the wake of the study by the Roskill commission, the last great body to study airports policy, that none of the inland sites, whether Cublington, Nuthampstead, Stansted, Willingale or any other, should be developed, and that if we were to have a proper airport system for London, it should be offshore. My view was that it would be a mistake to urbanise a large part of the countryside in any of the home counties. I never dreamed that, due to the sad early death of Sir Peter Kirk, a vacancy would occur in the Saffron Walden constituency, which I was chosen to fill. I am therefore not simply saying “Not in my back yard”—I have tried to have a wider perspective on the matter.

The subject of the debate is aviation strategy, but looking back, it is difficult to espy that there has ever been a real strategy. The evolution of our policy has been part deception, part confusion and part cowardice. Why? Because as soon as we begin to formulate a strategy, all the opposition from different parts of the country is combined, and Governments tend to run away from that. It is easier, perhaps, to pick off particular parts of the policy and have a bit-by-bit approach, which is what has led us to the current wholly unsatisfactory situation.

If I dare mention it, we got nearest to a policy when Geoff Hoon was Secretary of State for Transport. Certain difficulties arose in the House, and the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), in defence of interests around Heathrow, got to the Mace quicker than I could have, as I was occupying the Chair. I therefore recognise the passion to which the subject gives rise.

I contend, as many other Members have, that it was probably a mistake initially to choose Heathrow for London’s principal aerodrome, as it was then called. I do not think anyone foresaw the increase in civil aviation that would take place. I can remember when the facilities on the north side at Heathrow were in tents, and when it was decided that aviation was going to be a more serious factor in our post-war world, I found it astonishing that the permanent buildings were put between the two runways, so that they had to be reached by a tunnel—what a brilliant way of developing the airport.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does the right hon. Gentleman also feel that the subsequent post-war behaviour in conducting international bilateral air agreements, which for decades stipulated that the London airports should be used for access to the UK, was a mistake, particularly given the bleating and screaming that is now happening in the south-east of England and around London?

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

The hon. Gentleman anticipates me. I will come to that point, but I am starting with Heathrow, the design of which has been a complete disaster. After three terminals were put in the middle of the runways, more were needed, so terminal 4 had to be on the south side. It was sworn that there would be no further expansion, and BAA consistently said that the idea of moving the Perry Oaks sludge works was out of the question—that it was impractical and that those of us who suggested it did not know what we were talking about—but that is where terminal 5 now stands. Had an intelligent approach been taken to the development of Heathrow, that would have been where all the terminals were put. It was not to be.

Giving BAA control of the three London airports was a huge mistake, and it was extraordinary that the person who had to pilot that proposal through the House was the late Nicholas Ridley, who I do not think believed in that type of monopoly being created. With the passage of time, I think very few hon. Members believe that it was the right policy, and it is now being dismantled.

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has just mentioned a good free market Conservative and he spent some time eloquently setting out the degree of capital investment in Heathrow. Will he join me in recognising that if we use the power to tax and direct to throw away that capital investment and force scarce capital into a loss-making project in the estuary, this country will become poorer?

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

I am coming to that. The problem is that the design of Heathrow is not good and expanding it further—although I recognise that that might happen because in some people’s eyes it is the easiest option, what business most wants and so on—runs the risk of compounding the problem.

The next airport to come on to the horizon was Gatwick. A previous Minister of Civil Aviation said in this House in answer to a question that Gatwick would not be a second London airport but would merely be a diversionary airport for Heathrow. Eventually, of course, the truth came out that it was to be the second London airport.

BAA—I have no time for it—then decided to enter into a pact with West Sussex council not to build a second runway at Gatwick for 40 years, which was the equivalent of the Molotov–Ribbentrop treaty as far as I was concerned. That pact expires in 2019. Having done that, BAA was still anxious to go and find a third airport so it must bear a heavy responsibility for the split situation. Had there been competition between those three airports, we might be in a slightly different place—and this is certainly not the best place.

I agree with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), the Chairperson of the Transport Committee, that we need a hub airport for our major city. There has been much talk of late of that being old hat, as everything is now point-to-point. Everything is not point-to-point. Point-to-point becomes increasingly possible when traffic increases and routes become, in the language of the trade, thick routes, meaning that so many flights a day can be justified between those points. That is fine and that will go on, but it will be a long time before there is a daily flight between Denver, Colorado and, say, Naples. There will be a need for passengers to interline at an airport and it would be to our advantage commercially, not just for the businesses in London but for the airlines, if British Airways, Virgin or any other British carrier had part of that business. The argument for the split hub, suggesting that interlining is not important, overlooks the fact that many passengers are now not coming through London. They are going to airports in Europe where interlining is more conveniently executed.

I believe that there needs to be a hub in London and I accept that it is perhaps inevitable that that will be Heathrow, but to build a third runway, possibly a fourth runway and a sixth and seventh terminal for that airport will not make it anything like the new airport in Hong Kong, or Changi in Singapore, or the airport in Beijing. It will still be a confusing mass airport. I do not think that that serves London best, but it might be the best that can be achieved in the circumstances.

I absolutely understand why London deserves a decent airport. Our engineers and architects have designed some of the other airports in the rest of the world, so it is a great shame that we cannot give them the chance to build a decent airport for our city.

I am also concerned, as I have a northern history, about balancing this country. I saw the effect of deciding to develop Stansted. One can still walk around the towns and villages of north-west Essex and find a variety of regional UK accents, as people were drawn down to the area. That is all part of a problem that post-war Governments have contested, unsuccessful by and large—that is, the drift from the north to the south. I think that is a great shame.

I was close to Manchester for a time, and I saw the potential for the development of Manchester airport. It has two runways, so why can that potential not be seen? Why not promote that as at least one other gateway into the country? Most air traffic has to do with leisure, and from Manchester not only can the business community be served in that part of the country—going both west to Liverpool and east to Leeds—but there is access to north Wales, the Derbyshire peak district, the Yorkshire dales, Yorkshire moors, the lake district and so on. We ought to encourage those who visit this country to see parts of it other than just London and the home counties. That would take some of the pressure off London, without—of course—excusing the need for a proper hub. I tell my constituents who occasionally ask, “Should we be spending all this money on HS2?” that when I hear that HS2 would bring Birmingham airport within 36 minutes of London, my eyes water because it is an average of 47 minutes from Stansted airport into London.

That brings me to a point about infrastructure. Over the years, our one consistent failing—there have been many—is that we have not been prepared to back airport development with suitable infrastructure for people to get there. So what happens? Well, I can speak for Stansted with some passion. On the back of an airport that we were unhappy to see develop, we did not get the compensation of a good railway system. In fact, we got one that is worse because priority was given on a two-track railway to the Stansted Express. I am all in favour of a good service to Stansted airport, but that must not be at the expense of all the commuters whom Government policies over the years have encouraged to live in the M11 corridor. They get the worst of both worlds and that is wrong.

On compensation, we have been niggardly over the years in the amount of money we are prepared to give to people—it is all spent on long public inquiries, fighting the case and so on, instead of being paid to those people who might feel most affected by the project. We should provide those people with at least some compensation so that if it is necessary in the national interest to bring about a major project, they will at least get some advantage from that. We must do more on that if we are to get people to settle for whatever strategy—if we actually succeed in getting one at the end of all the further deliberation through the Davies commission.

In the late 1960s and during the period of the Heath Government, it was decided, in the name of the environment, to go for an estuarial solution. That was my wish and that would still be the ideal. I do not believe the most pessimistic forecasts about the time and expense it would take. We lack imagination in this country. We struggled over the channel tunnel; we struggled over the rail link to the channel tunnel—we were going to build half of it at one point, and it would be difficult to imagine anything more crazy. Finally, however, we got there. It took us an awfully long time to think about Crossrail before we began building it. Why cannot we realise that London deserves a good airport? The whole country deserves a better deal, and to level up the north.

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

I am about to come to an end and I have given way once already to the hon. Gentleman. The whole country needs to get some benefit from the people whom we encourage to travel to our country for business or pleasure. We need imagination—that is what I appeal for—and a solution that is worthy of our main city and our country as a whole.