Airports Commission: Final Report

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) that I, too, believe in getting on with things and in clarity. They are good, but getting it right is better. The problem with the Davies report is that it gets it fundamentally wrong. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), in a powerful intervention, made the point that although the report puts options on the table, they are not deliverable, because it is so chock-full of internal contractions. The contradictions have been well highlighted by my hon. Friends the Members for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), for Twickenham (Dr Mathias) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) and others.

The Heathrow option is so shot through with contradictions that it will be delayed time and again. It is a recipe for judicial review. Attempting to expand Heathrow will be a field day for well-heeled west London lawyers, but it will not deliver the connectivity that is required for the rest of the country. It is a blind alley to go down the Heathrow option. The process is flawed, the consultation is fundamentally flawed and it is not, in my judgment, legally sound.

My second point is that the Heathrow option is economically flawed. It is clear that the case does not stack up. Willie Walsh does not make the comments he is making for the sake of his health, but because the case is economically illiterate.

[Mark Menzies]

The reason Willie Walsh has taken this position is that BA acquired BMI to get its hands on more Heathrow slots. Having spent a vast sum of money acquiring BMI and the Heathrow slots, he does not want lots more Heathrow slots to come along and weaken his economic case.

[Robert Neill]

With respect to my hon. Friend, this is not about one company any more than it is about one individual constituency or one part of London.

The fundamental problem, as has been well demonstrated by other hon. Members in this debate, is that a third runway at Heathrow would be but a sticking plaster that, almost immediately, would be over capacity. There would then be a need for a fourth runway, which would not be achievable in legal or environmental terms because, whatever one thinks about the matter, the Supreme Court judgment has changed things. We cannot ignore that. The truth is that we would be sinking a huge amount of capital into something that would be a white elephant by the time it opened. That is not what I regard as getting on with things or with doing something that is deliverable. That is the key distinction.

We do need to move forward and there is an alternative. Heathrow may well have been the optimal place for an airport in 1948 or 1950. At that time, London was a shrinking city. Its population was reducing and nobody anticipated the massive population growth to come. Heathrow is no longer in an appropriate place. We therefore have to look at the alternatives. Nobody is saying, and I am certainly not saying, that we should close Heathrow down. It is an important part of the west London economy, but there are more readily deliverable options to increase capacity. I am in favour of increasing airport capacity in London and the south-east.

My constituents, like many of us who wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph today, are not from west London. My constituency is not directly affected by the flight paths, although we do suffer from stacking. The irony is that the stacking would be removed for only a very temporary period by a third runway, because the overcrowding would return, meaning that the stacking would be back until people tried to get a fourth runway, which would be impossible. It is a complete canard or red herring to suggest that it would solve things.

We need to get on with the option that can be most quickly delivered. No option is perfect and I might not have started from this point. I have sympathy with my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). If we had looked at the Foulness option many years ago, perhaps it would have been attractive, but we are not in that place now and revisiting the idea will not improve its deliverability.

I take the view that the Gatwick option is the right one because it is deliverable. No doubt there will be challenges, but the potential for legal challenge is significantly lower around Gatwick and the issues of dispute are significantly more discrete. It is therefore much more readily deliverable and we have a much better chance of delivering it on time. Having an additional runway at Gatwick would not exclude the possibility of more imaginative options being developed for the future or prejudge other ideas, but it would give us an immediate capacity increase. It would not involve anything like the amount of sunk cost that would be involved in the potentially unviable option of a third runway at Heathrow. Those are all good reasons for opposing Heathrow expansion.

Finally—this is the only thing that I say as a London politician, as I am sure the Minister will understand—I fought the 2010 election and two elections for the London Assembly by saying that I opposed Heathrow expansion. I campaigned twice for my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) to be elected Mayor, while saying that we opposed Heathrow expansion. Call me old-fashioned, but I rather like to keep my promises, and I hope that we can do that for this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

We have a duty to deliver a modern competitive economy for ourselves and for future generations. National decisions will always be tough, but they need to be taken in the interests of the country.

It is very clear that the south-east needs additional runway capacity. Sir Howard’s foreword to the Airports Commission report notes that there have been no new full-length runways built in the south-east since the 1940s. Air travel growth is forecast to slow to a median estimate of 2% a year until 2050, compared with old growth rates of 5% since the 1970s. However, UK passenger numbers are still forecast to increase from 225 million today to 315 million in 2030 and to 445 million by 2050. If we overlay that date with current capacity, it shows Heathrow and Gatwick at 100% capacity by 2020, and all other London airports—Stansted, London City, Luton and Southend—at 100% by 2030. Half the UK population uses air travel each year. It will only grow. As we have a growing international middle class, I certainly want Britain to be a destination of choice. If we want to continue as the global economy we are, these will be constraints to growth.

There was much good news about growth in yesterday’s spending review, but it is predicated on our global economy. We face losing out as a global centre allowing point-to-point travel, particularly in relation to connecting the UK with the new dynamic economies of the world, if we do not get going. We are already lagging behind Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris. We need only look at Dubai. In 2001, it ranked as the 99th in the world in terms of international passengers. By 2011, it was fourth in the world and it will overtake Heathrow as the No. 1 international airport within a year. We are seeing similar meteoric growth at Istanbul, which is rapidly becoming an international hub.

I am not speaking today to suggest Heathrow is the only answer, or to discount Gatwick. The operators of each airport have made their own persuasive arguments and the economics of expansion for the country are obvious. What I would like to emphasise is the benefit of regional airports, particularly in the shorter and intermediate sector. I note, to the great benefit no doubt of Southampton, the support in the spending review yesterday for new air routes to Munich and Lyon.

Returning to the Heathrow versus Gatwick argument, this is a matter for right hon. and hon. Members in those areas to overcome. There are obvious connectivity, air quality and noise issues to consider. I am here to put on the table a relief valve for current pressures. Whatever is decided, the lead time before expansion will be a decade, a decade in which we will fall further behind in the international aviation league. Too often, the UK is behind the curve, whether on energy generation, railways, roads, Thames crossings and airport provision. That is a criticism of all Governments in the past 30 years.

To increase capacity in the south-east, and free up valuable slots and develop and accommodate growth, we have Manston airport, which is just 80 miles away. It is ready to go within months to take freight-only aircraft from both Heathrow and Gatwick, to offer new routes in the low-cost market, and as an immediate solution to opening up additional intercontinental routes, particularly to growing markets. It will never be, it could not be and I would not want it to be a major hub airport.

As Members may know, Manston airport was closed a year ago and sits unused. It has an uncertain future. In both parts of Thanet, north and south, there is a desire for aviation activity to recommence and with it the opportunities, for instance, for emergency provision—the Virgin incident last year blocked Gatwick for eight hours. We also have the opportunity for new industries in the UK, including big jet dismantling and recycling.

I bet Members must wonder why all this has not already happened. Very simply, the UK Independence party-run local authority was elected on a single strong policy of promising back-to-back compulsory purchase orders, but it has given up and backed out of the deal. There we are: a huge runway sitting idle. It is well connected and can take any size of aircraft, but it is doing nothing.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. From my experience as a Communities and Local Government Minister, I am aware of the benefits that Manston would bring. Does he not also agree that, fortunately, Conservative-controlled Kent County Council takes a much more progressive and sensible view of the value of economic growth in this area? In fact, the development of Manston would be entirely consistent with our devolution of economic powers to our regions and shire counties.

[Craig Mackinlay]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I tend to agree that Kent County Council is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to supporting Manston, but it could be a key driver for economic development.