Airports National Policy Statement

Richard Burden Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Manchester will be in an interesting position, because it will be connected with Heathrow by air and by high-speed rail. The linkage between the two airports will become a strong strategic benefit for the UK. I expect Manchester to have more flights to Heathrow, but I also expect more trains linking the two to provide a real interchange between Britain’s two most substantial airports.

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

Connecting the regions and nations of the UK to opportunities and markets abroad has to be about more than how much they can have routes through a national hub in the south-east—however important that national hub is. Does the Secretary of State agree that airports such as Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and East Midlands for freight are international gateways in their own right, not simply regional airports as he described them? While every Minister to whom I have spoken about this has said that they want to support all the UK’s international gateways, few of them have said what they will actually do to make that a reality, to utilise existing capacity and to ensure that the potential of those airports grows in the time it will take, which could be a decade or more, to build the new runway—if indeed that goes ahead. What will the Secretary of State do about that?

[Chris Grayling]

We have a thriving aviation sector, and I am unsure whether regional airports need ministerial help to grow because they are doing a pretty good job already. Every time I visit a regional airport, I am surprised by the range of international destinations. Cardiff airport has recently launched a route to Qatar, and a whole variety of different European, transatlantic and other international routes have been developed at our regional airports. I expect that to continue, but the reality is that, apart from some of the most strategically important routes, there is often not enough of a market in a regional area to justify the launch of a route. The purpose of a hub airport is effectively to assemble a market to justify such routes and strengthen the whole UK.