Among the many people who think that building a new runway at Heathrow would be a bad idea we must now, apparently, add the current prime minister.
The FT (paywall) reports:
Andy Burnham has plunged the plan for a third runway at Heathrow into doubt by privately telling MPs he has always opposed the project, and the new prime minister is said to be “open minded” about whether it should go ahead.
One Labour MP is quoted (anonymously) as saying:
He’s indicated that in the past he has never supported Heathrow’s expansion . . . I get the impression that he’s now waiting for a report into the third runway by the transport committee before saying more on this.
This is a reference to the Transport Select Committee’s scrutiny of the draft Heathrow Expansion National Policy Statement, which the Department for Transport published for consultation in June.
My impression is that the committee, or at least its chair, Ruth Cadbury, is very sceptical and the evidence I have seen to the committee’s inquiry is unlikely to have persuaded anyone that the plan is a good one.
Speaking of which, Keith Buchan of the New Transport Taxation Group has published a piece on “The fantasy economics of a new Heathrow runway” on the group’s website and also on Local Transport Today/TransportXtra.
Buchan wrote on LinkedIn:
It is increasingly clear that this proposal has no credibility whatsoever – it’s not even clear who will pay (probably passengers) and who will benefit (probably not the UK). If fares go up to pay there will be less demand. You’d think someone would have thought of that….
This is very similar to a comment I made last week about passengers picking up the carbon cost of the expansion.
Adding to the enormous scepticism, Robin Hickman of UCL has published another paper on “Heathrow’s proposed third runway: rationality or rationalisation?” (Town & Country Planning, July/August) and free to access on UCL Discovery.
I haven’t read the whole piece yet, but the introduction notes that Labour’s support (at the time) for expansion of Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and many other regional airports represents “a huge bet on aviation as a catalyst for their central focus on economic growth” before adding:
Yet, there are at least three problems with this position: first, the links between aviation growth and national economic growth are not as clear as envisaged; second, even if economic growth does result, the distribution of beneficiaries is unclear; and, perhaps most importantly, third, there are significant adverse environmental and social impacts of aviation growth.
Hickman wrote a similar piece on the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), which I covered here.
I am conscious by the way that the last time I speculated that Burnham might be about to pull a U-turn on another piece of climate-wrecking and unconvincingly justified transport infrastructure (the LTC), it turned out that ministers are (for now) going full steam ahead.
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