National Policy Statement: Airports

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Unlike the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), who kept us waiting for four minutes—until the last sentence of his speech—to know whether he was going to support this project, may I say at the very start that I and my colleagues will be supporting the Government on this tonight? This is a project of national interest. It is one on which our economy depends, and that will help us in our pursuit of increased productivity, in our pursuit of being a global trading nation and in regenerating the regions. As someone from Northern Ireland, that is an important aspect of this particular project, because we rely on connectivity.

We have had Members telling us today that we can have regional airports or hubs in different regions all across the country, but the truth of the matter is that most regional airports are not in the centre of populations that can support all the international connections that are needed, and we therefore need an international hub. If we are going to have an international hub, we need to have local connections. Given that places are currently at a premium at Heathrow, the only way to get those connections, despite what the Scottish nationalists have argued, is to expand Heathrow. They cannot wish for more flights into Heathrow and say that they are ambivalent about whether it should be expanded. This is important to us for that reason.

Northern Ireland is of course an exporting part of the United Kingdom. High-value engineering exports and high-value food exports depend on having a good cargo infrastructure to enable us to send our goods across the world.

[Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the biggest domestic cargo trade between Heathrow and any regional airport is that to Belfast City, which will double if Heathrow is expanded?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sammy Wilson]

That is what we are hoping for. In fact, one of our asks is for a guarantee from the Government that the 15% of additional places will be ring-fenced for regional airports so that there is such access. The other thing is that this is a national project, and different regions of the United Kingdom should therefore be able to have an input into the work generated from it. I am pleased by the discussions we have had between Mid and East Antrim Borough Council in my constituency and Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council in looking at the possibility of one of the hubs being located in Ballymena, which would of course provide jobs for Northern Ireland as a whole.

Many contradictory arguments have been made tonight. On the one hand, we have been told by the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) that these capitalists intend to squeeze every penny out of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) has told us that this project is so uneconomic that the Government are going to have to subsidise it. One of the two has to be wrong.

On the one hand, we have been told that this is going to wreck our climate change targets. For those who find that an important issue, the only answer is of course to reduce the number of passengers. However, nobody has suggested that; they have all suggested that we should have passengers flying from regional airports. Well, those passengers will still produce carbon dioxide, and they will still contribute overall. If they fly from Schiphol, they will still burn carbon to get to Schiphol and from there to wherever they are going. Either it affects climate change or it does not. In fact, the only honest person was the Member from the Green party, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who wants people to stop flying, but I do not believe that that is an alternative.

For these reasons, we will be supporting this motion and walking through the Lobby tonight.