So Heathrow’s good for business (Report, 26 October)? Heathrow Airport Holdings is owned by FGP TopCo, an international consortium led by Ferrovial, a Spanish Company based in Madrid, in partnership with Qatar Holdings, Caisse de Depot du Quebec, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, and the China Investment Corporation, among others. Heathrow Holdings has previously admitted it makes more from being a shopping mall than from the flying business and now the taxpayer is likely to be told to stump up £5bn-£10bn for added road and rail infrastructure, according to former transport minister Stephen Hammond.
And that’s before the crucial debate on pollution and health. Heathrow has never taken responsibility for the dangerous pollution caused by the stacking of aircraft waiting to land and anxious to shed surplus fuel over hapless residents below. Heathrow must come clean; this whole affair is a dirty business.
Anna Ford
London
• Your editorial (26 October) has it right: so long as the mania for economic growth possesses us, terrible decisions – such as that to expand Heathrow – will go on being made. Is it not, therefore, time to draw the logical conclusion: that our society needs finally to put into question the logic of such growth? Let’s give it up – and substitute the goal of actually making our lives better instead.
Dr Rupert Read
Chair of Green House and co-author, The Post-growth Project
• Unless fail criteria are published in advance of the public consultation on the third runway at Heathrow, it can only be a waste of time and money. Just what would those being consulted be required to demonstrate to halt this development? Is there any independent authority whose opinion could conceivably change their minds? If the government has already made up its mind then why not go ahead and build it right now?
Dr Richard Turner
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
• So the transport secretary suggests the runway could be put on a ramp over the M25, which would be cheaper and quicker than a tunnel. But aren’t there even cheaper options? How about traffic lights or a roundabout? Or, cheapest of all, perhaps, a zebra crossing, so that road vehicles pull up when they see a plane waiting to cross.
Richard Norman
Canterbury, Kent
• Far from demolishing hundreds of homes to build a new runway, we could be demolishing redundant airports to build new homes. Northolt is a complete, but scandalously underused airport just five miles from Heathrow; it could easily become a Terminal 6 for non-hub and domestic traffic. Only just outside the M25 lies Farnborough, another fully operational airport working at a fraction of its capacity. And just a little further out, Greenham Common has a runway big enough to be an emergency landing site for the space shuttle, and it is now completely unused.
Martin Lyster
Oxford
• Tony Hodbod (Letters, 26 October), in proposing Thorne Waste for an English national airport, must be unaware that it is a nationally important nature reserve. But of course, it is far more important that we increase our greenhouse gas emissions rather than protect the environment.
Catherine Goundry
Retford, Nottinghamshire
• Manchester Airport with two runways and excess capacity is the third largest airport in Britain and is far more central to Britain. Living only 10 minutes from this international airport, I resent having to go to Heathrow to access direct flights to some parts of the world. Perhaps the investment in Heathrow could be redirected to encouraging British Airways to use Manchester as a hub, as it once didhelping to rebalance the economy.
Moira Sykes
Manchester
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
