Heathrow: National Airports Review

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. I look forward to the work she does on this ANPS coming to our Committee in due course. A third runway at Heathrow, combined with all the other agreed—or likely to be agreed—expansions of capacity in London and south-east airports would involve an increase of 177 million passengers, which would be 70% more than the number of passengers in London and the south-east from 2024. I look forward to the Climate Change Committee’s response to the proposal, because it has said that a 35% increase in capacity would be the maximum that would keep the UK compliant with our international legal commitments.

To return to the specifics of the statement, the Secretary of State said that she seeks to minimise costs for passengers and customers, but given that the cost of a third runway will be between £25 billion and £49 billion, how exactly will that cost not be passed on to the airlines and therefore the passengers if the Treasury is not going to fund those costs, which we know it is not? On surface access, ever since the building of the fifth terminal, the local authorities all around Heathrow have been pushing for southern rail access to Heathrow. Heathrow Airport has long said—and has clarified recently—that it will not pay the cost of southern rail access, so how does she expect that to be funded? If the M25 and M4 are not to grind to a halt, and if passengers and workers from the west and south of the airport are to be able to get in and out of the airport, how is that to be achieved?

[Heidi Alexander]

My hon. Friend is entirely right to raise these issues. We will give very careful and thorough consideration to them in the airports national policy statement review, which will take place in the coming months. She referred to the Climate Change Committee’s opinion on capacity expansion. We are making rapid progress in cleaning up the fuel that is used in planes, and we are making huge efforts to reform our airspace, so that we can have cleaner and more direct flights. The carbon intensity of flying has to come down if we are to have more planes in the air. She was also right to highlight the importance of the regulatory model. That is why we have asked the Civil Aviation Authority to do this piece of work over the coming months; it is aligned with the review in the airports national policy statement. We will say more on that in due course.