Airport Expansion: East Anglia

Debate between Oliver Heald and Lord Haselhurst

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effect of airport expansion on the Anglian Region.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Pritchard. It is an honour to serve under you for the first time, and I am glad to see that you are enjoying being a member of the Panel of Chairs. I also welcome the Minister—if he grimaces at any stage in the course of my remarks, it may well be because he feels he has heard it all before—and I welcome colleagues from the region and others who have come to take an interest in the debate.

I will give a little history, if I may. In 1977, I became very fortuitously the successor to R.A. Butler and Sir Peter Kirk as the Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden. They had fought successfully up to that point against the proposition that Stansted should become London’s third airport. Despite their efforts, the fascination of officials in Whitehall persisted. Here was this very long runway built by the Americans for their bombers in the 1940s; surely it could be put to civilian use.

When I came to Saffron Walden, I had previous, as they say: I had been the Member of Parliament for Middleton and Prestwich in Greater Manchester between 1970 and 1974 and had very much absorbed the findings of the Roskill commission—a long-time predecessor to the Davies commission that had been asked to advise the Government on where to provide extra accommodation, specifically in terms of a third airport. The commission rejected Stansted, even on its shortlist, and by a majority recommended Cublington in Buckinghamshire. There was a dissenting view by Colin Buchanan that there should be an airport in the Thames estuary. That was adopted by the incoming Government of 1970, who proceeded to construct the airport, which was termed “Maplin”.

I had time in those days to fully read the Roskill report, and I also became familiar with all the inland sites being considered. I came to the view that a third inland airport would be a mistake, so I heartily supported the proposition that there should be a new airport altogether in the Thames estuary. Why, I asked myself, should there be a third airport when there were already two?

What was, to my mind, unfortunate was the legal agreement arrived at between West Sussex County Council and the British Airports Authority, when it was still a statutory authority, that there should be no second runway at Gatwick for 40 years, expiring in 2019. In a sense, it had cut off a limb for expansion and was seeking a third site. I did not think that that made any sense in 1979, and I do not think it makes any sense now.

After the airports inquiry of 1981 to 1983, which considered further expansion at Stansted or Heathrow, the recommendation was to allow a terminal at Stansted, limited to 15 million passengers per annum. It took about two years for the Government to reach that decision after the inquiry reported—Howard Davies, please note. The inspector also stated firmly that he would only recommend such a degree of expansion at Stansted provided it was made clear that there should never be a second runway—Howard Davies, again, please note the worth of that type of promise.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I do not know whether my right hon. Friend remembers this, but it is my understanding that Stansted airport was then marketed to the local community as its own airport in the countryside, not at all with the sort of pretensions necessary for a major airport such as Heathrow.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

My hon. and learned Friend is quite right. There was an attempt to damp down the feelings locally about Stansted by not referring to it as London’s third airport, but the assumption in its design and construction was that it would, indeed, share an even amount of the traffic coming into London.

What followed? Well, traffic distribution rules were abolished. The effect was that 19 airlines promptly moved from Gatwick to Heathrow, leaving rather a large hole at Gatwick, which made that airport much more attractive at the time than Stansted. The next decision was to give BAA, when privatising it, a monopoly of the three London airports, which of course meant in the circumstances that it had no particular priority for Stansted. It was probably making more money at the other two airports, so there was no pressure from that direction to improve access to Stansted.