Revised Draft Airports National Policy Statement

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord has been a great champion of Luton Airport—and good luck to him. He has admitted that Luton is pretty well full up itself now, so there is a bit of a problem there. I agreed with him when he said that the whole of airport policy was a perfect example of how not to run a government policy. The only qualification I would make is that all three parties have had their hands in this policy, so there is no party-political benefit involved; it is just that the way in which it has been handled in general is a great shame.

The report before us is in many ways rather good. It contains the best euphemism that I have so far seen to describe the present state of affairs: it says that the UK faces a “capacity challenge”. But there is one snag with the report: it is 20 years too late. It should have been done 20 years ago, when the first signs of pressure on London’s airports were already beginning to emerge. We already faced a doubling of passenger throughput every 10 years.

If we go back 30 years—which happens to be the point at which I was Minister for Aviation—we must recognise that Heathrow and the other London airports were the envy of the world. This was where all the airlines wanted to have slots. I remember that we restored grandfather rights to Michael Bishop, as he then was—he is now the noble Lord, Lord Glendonbrook—with British Midland, and how pleased he was. His whole company was pretty well set up on the basis of those grandfather rights at Heathrow; they were like gold dust.

The question arises: why have we come to where we are? In the halcyon days of London’s airport system a lot was done to support it. I seem to remember that I cut the first sod—I think that was what it was called—at Stansted Airport, Heathrow got permission to build another two terminals and Gatwick got one. We doubled the ATMS limits, we had an open skies policy, which brought great benefit to the airports, and we privatised them, which gave them access to capital. We did everything at that time to back them up.

Since then, despite the pleas of several noble Lords—such as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, who told me last night he had a very important engagement; he desperately wanted to be here today but he has not been able to make it—for the airports, including Luton, nothing much has happened. We have had commissions and inquiries, we have had government statements, and we have even had jokes. One of those was about Ministers who kept on saying “shortly”, because they thought that was the Cornish for “now or never”. In fact the correct Cornish word should have been “dreckly”; it is a great joke in Cornwall that they used the wrong word.

We have had all that, but we have not had any action, and Heathrow, for example, has moved down from being by far the world’s number one international airport to the second league. If we wanted to give a runway batting order, we would say Heathrow 2, Beijing 3 and Schiphol 6. Because Schiphol now has six runways, it is not terribly surprising that Heathrow is fading in the airport league, to the great detriment of this country.

May I take up your Lordships’ time by giving you one anecdote that sums the whole thing up for me? When I did not know that I was coming to this House, my wife and I decided to rent out our house in Westminster, which we had had when I was a Member of the House of Commons. The tenant was a Chinese gentleman whose title was chief executive of China Oil (Africa) Ltd. I got quite friendly with this man, and one day I asked him, “Why do you run your Rhodes-type operation—your empire, which you have taken over from us—from my humble house in the middle of London?” He said, “There’s one reason for that. It’s because I can get more quickly between Kenya and Zambia and the other various parts of my ‘empire’, as you call it”—he did not accept that term, and called me an imperialist—“by coming back to Heathrow and flying back from there, flying backwards and forwards between my various responsibilities. That is, until we do something in Beijing. Then I shall move out straightaway. And by the way, I may be using your humble house, but I’ve got very big offices round the corner; we have a big operation here. I shall move out the moment I discover that Beijing has better opportunities than Heathrow”.

Sure enough, two or three years ago he started to pile up Chinese goods. When the Chinese are going home they buy up Chinese goods to take home; apparently that is a clever thing to do. He piled up all those white goods in my house; then he was on his way, and that was that. That was a salutary experience for me, and a clear example of the effect of the rundown of Heathrow compared with other airports around the world, which generates business elsewhere and not with us.

The question is: what do we do about it? I think we have effectively run out of time now to do anything simple. Schiphol is such an attraction for many new routes and new businesses that it is quite difficult for us. We have gone past the point at which we can compete properly with Schiphol. The only thing to do is to be quite radical. This is not just a question of an extra runway here or there, for Heathrow or wherever. We now have to think of London as a total system, which will mean a tremendous regurgitating of the space control systems.

We need an airport with two runways to the north of London; that would have to be Stansted. We need one to the south, which would have to be Gatwick. By the way, Luton would have to be included in this too. We need one to the west, which would be Heathrow, and then perhaps, just to please Mr Johnson, we would have one runway down the Thames, which would serve the eastern side. We have to think radically, because we are now thinking about 2030. We cannot possibly be thinking about a date much closer than that: it is just not going to happen.

The Minister today gave the least cheerful government response to this issue that I have heard in recent times. She was, probably accurately, reflecting the fact that it will take ages to get through all the planning process, especially as the Government have not even decided to do anything properly yet. We have to think realistically and to have an adequate time horizon, which will be getting towards 2030, and then have a really radical scheme to meet the needs of the 2030s.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Kramer]

I think the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, was perhaps more honest than most. A lot of the PR that comes from Heathrow and much of the aviation industry suggests that every new increment will always be the last and it never is, because there is always a rationale and always money to be made from continually trying to expand capacity, particularly when the underlying strategy is to strip flights out of other airports in the UK. That ownership is no longer held in common has added great fire to that underpinning strategy.

I hope that the Government will reconsider again the whole notion of a third runway at Heathrow; there are other and better options. I understand that it is in some ways a sop to business because business tends just to assume that a third runway would be good without looking into the detail. This seemed a way to pacify businesses infuriated by Brexit.

[Lord Spicer]

The noble Baroness is making a very interesting speech, but how will we get in and out of the country—we are an island—as the population becomes larger and we do not expand our airports?

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, there are many regional airports—I personally look at Birmingham as the most obvious way to expand and it is part of our regional strategy. There are many alternatives to the third runway at Heathrow that were not considered by the Davies commission. There are mechanisms. Rail will be taking a different part of the strain domestically in future, so we are part of a changing pattern.

I do not want to keep the House longer.

[Lord Spicer]

You are passing the problem to Birmingham.