Aviation

Robert Syms Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

The UK aviation industry has been a remarkable success story, post war. It is the second largest in the world. It has been so successful that most of us take it for granted and assume it will always be there. Sometimes we are a little disparaging of British Airways as a national carrier, but it is a competitive world out there, and in Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt there are people who want to compete with us and take jobs away. The aviation industry creates lots of well-paid jobs for lots of people, so we must think clearly about where we are going with it.

It is perfectly sensible to say “We will not expand Heathrow” or “We will not expand Gatwick” or “We will not expand Stansted”, but it is not sensible to say that we will not expand any of them. At some point, we have to increase airway capacity in the south-east of England. Some of the BALPA pilots who came to lobby us last week pointed out that one of the most environmentally dangerous things is to have 15 aircraft sitting on a runway running their engines while waiting for a take-off slot. Sometimes, an additional runway might not necessarily be a bad thing environmentally. We can do a lot to have smart working at Heathrow, and I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) that considering slot allocation would be a sensible way to begin.

It would be sensible to have a link between Heathrow and Gatwick. Given their proximity, a fast rail route would provide consumers with more diversity and variety of choice. However, the principal area that ought to be expanded is Stansted. I use the airport myself, and sometimes it looks as though it is half-shut. It has a lot of capacity but its biggest weakness is the rail link with central London. Passengers amble through the Essex countryside wondering whether they will ever get to the airport. On one occasion I was late for a flight, and I burnt up a lot of nervous energy on the way. If we could get a fast rail connection from Stansted to the rest of the rail network and the tube system and halve the journey time from 60 minutes to 30 or 35, many more people would use the airport. Stansted is as far from London as de Gaulle is from Paris and Schiphol is from Amsterdam, and potentially there is capacity for more people to start using it.

The other advantage of Stansted is that significant numbers of people do not live around it. One only has to stand in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park and watch the number of aircraft coming in to realise that putting a lot of money into expanding Heathrow is not the environmentally sensible thing to do. One has to pay regard to the many millions of people who live below the flight path.

We can be smarter. We can invest in rail links and, at some point, we will have to increase capacity by putting in more runways, with the logical place being the underutilised Stansted. Although Heathrow will always remain the hub, we can be a bit smarter with the airports around London and make them a bit more efficient, thereby promoting our national interest.