Andrew Adonis once told me that the third runway at Heathrow would never be built because the airport is surrounded by housing: 30 per cent of homes in the whole of Europe affected by aircraft noise louder than 55 decibels are around Heathrow.
This was after he had been transport secretary in the last Labour government, when he was trying to get it built, so he knew what he was talking about. He thought there were just too many votes too close to the airport to make it a viable option.
But the jumbo project does seem to be, finally, lumbering towards take-off. The Conservatives were against it, when David Cameron was in his green chameleon phase, but then they were in favour. Boris Johnson, the green convert and former mayor of London who had promised to lie in front of the bulldozers, had to be sent on a trip to Afghanistan while parliament voted for it to go ahead.
Then came the coronavirus lockdowns; the skies over London were silent and people could hear birdsong again. The project was put back in the hangar. Now it is taxiing again, as the Labour government has confirmed that it supports a third runway plan. Ed Miliband, the keeper of the party’s green conscience, opposed it while Labour was in opposition, but is now in favour of it.
Heidi Alexander, the current occupant of Adonis’s musical chair, will decide later this year between rival bids: a full-length third runway going over the M25, or two cheaper plans for a short runway that won’t involve rerouting a motorway.
Whatever she decides won’t be built until at least 2035, which seems an absurdly early estimate. As my colleague Simon Calder explains, there will be a public consultation and legal challenges, including from Sadiq Khan, Johnson’s successor as mayor of London.
I agree with Sadiq. The really courageous decision by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves would be to cancel the plan now. Save us the delays and legal fees and paperwork and vast quantities of clever people’s time. It would be right because the case for Heathrow expansion is weak, and it would be brave because the unthinking consensus is that Britain should build more infrastructure to stimulate economic growth. This is infrastructure, therefore we should build it.
No, we shouldn’t. To build one bit of infrastructure is to choose not to build another. I think there is better infrastructure to build. People only want to build this one because the existing airport is “full”. But that is the classic “predict and provide” fallacy. We have learnt that it doesn’t work for roads. If a road is congested and another road is built, it creates more traffic until that road is congested, too. When Heathrow’s third runway is “full”, there isn’t anywhere to put a fourth, so that game would have to come to an end. Why not bring an end to it now?
Any model of growth that depends on ever-increasing air travel is one that is not worth having, in any case. I am not a fan of the net zero carbon target, but I am in favour of reducing greenhouse gas emissions if there are low-cost ways of doing so. One low-cost way would be to avoid increasing air travel. That might have some effect on GDP in the 2040s, but is a trade-off worth making compared with some of the costs being loaded on energy bills now.
We should make that trade-off as economically productive as possible by embracing the free market: as runways around London are a scarce resource, we should charge more for them so as to ensure that the resource is allocated most efficiently.
Miliband’s argument that the environmental rules will ensure that airport expansion is compatible with his climate-change policies is unconvincing, and may well be the basis of a successful legal challenge to Heathrow expansion – because those climate-change targets have been written into law. There is no low-carbon alternative to flying apart from doing less of it. Everyone knows that sustainable aviation fuel is magical thinking: flying planes on vegetable oil is never going to be economic.
But it is not just the green case against air travel that makes Heathrow expansion such a bad idea: it is that it is another example of the HS2 fallacy – “the railways to and from London are full; we must build some more; London must be made even more privileged in the UK economy”. If air travel is good for growth, let us have more of it in other parts of the country.
London is a successful city, the best city in the world, partly because of the constraints of the green belt and runway and road space. It does not need any more runways in its backyard.
