The Davies report has landed, but its recommendations may never take flight. Amid the hysterical antipathy from Sir Howard Davies’ bête noire, London mayor Boris Johnson, were pertinent questions: not least, would the conditions the Airports Commission placed upon building a third Heathrow runway be met?
Certainly, the measures would make a real difference. Davies said Heathrow needs to be a better neighbour; the airport accepts it. Some campaigners see an opportunity: a third runway could actually give more respite for those who now live under the approach to Britain’s busiest airport, especially if a ban on night flights is enforced. While new neighbourhoods would clearly suffer, it would share out the pain of aircraft over London more fairly, and enlarge the constituency of people set to erupt at any breach of Heathrow’s promises.
Although 250,000 more flights in and out of Heathrow every year can only increase the cumulative noise, the average individual aircraft will get quieter - and if they can be kept from disturbing the peace until a decent hour, that would represent progress. Promises of better noise insulation for homes and schools, cleaner air, and more say over what airports do will all appeal to Heathrow’s critics.
Noise tops the agenda for longstanding local opponents, whose life under the flight path continued when a third runway was canned by the coalition government in 2010; a more immediately perceptible pain than air quality or the climate concerns that dominated the last campaign. Environmental arguments have been more peripheral this time. Some green charities took their eye off the ball, but the question of climate change has dropped down the political agenda beyond Heathrow – Cameron’s husky-hugging days are a distant memory.
While green arguments could well return to the fore, the commission has worked carefully within the limited framework on which the UK and the world agrees, concluding that one new runway is compatible with Britain’s CO2 targets. And air travel keeps growing, whether via the national hub airport or not. Davies believes an efficient Heathrow is potentially less damaging than Britons flying via Europe to connect to long-haul flights.
After three years of deliberation, exhaustive consultations and reports, the commission has given a clear answer that most in aviation – bar Gatwick – and in business agree with, as well as Labour, unions and Conservative MPs without seats in west London. But their logical response may not prove to be the political outcome.
The suspicion that the caveats will slip away cannot be easily dismissed. Given, for example, the daily flouting of EU air quality limits in London (by no means just at Heathrow), or the exceptions that see flights arrive earlier than existing agreements officially permit, how much faith can anyone put in the Aviation Noise Authority or the Community Engagement Board that Davies imagines?
How firm could any parliamentary pledge to rule out a fourth runway be? Such decisions can, as Cameron showed in 2010, be swiftly overturned by a new government, which come around quicker than new runways. Locals well remember assurances once made by Heathrow that Terminal 5 would mean no third runway was needed.
Yet a definitive bar on no fourth runway could, perversely, count against Heathrow’s chances. Two years ago, the airport was keen to point out that it could grow much further, as Johnson argued for his wildly unlikely four-runway Thames Estuary hub as the minimum size for a future-proofed hub.
For a government keen to back infrastructure investment but one that has just admitted its grand rail plans won’t come to fruition, and that struggles to win over the country to its £50bn HS2 plan, expanding Heathrow should have real appeal. The only likely direct cost to the taxpayer is £5bn in road and rail upgrades, which Davies suggests the airport may itself end up paying for. Davies tried to touch a nerve in stressing that around the world, Britain’s inaction on Heathrow is seen as a sign that it can’t take the tough decisions it needs. While business leaders and Conservative backers are screaming for it.
Ultimately, Johnson may not so much outline the pertinent problems as embody them. Even if Cameron sucks up the embarrassment of a U-turn and backs a third runway, Heathrow will need some confidence to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in an 11-year planning and construction process, when their most prominent opponent could one day be in a position to ditch it once again.
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