It was my second week at Construction News when I sat in a Whitehall office and watched Sir Howard Davies put forward Heathrow as the preferred option for airport expansion.

“That’s it – Heathrow’s going ahead”, my inexperienced brain thought back in June 2015.

More than two years later, I am writing as Heathrow continues to stutter towards a start date, older and definitely wiser about how long it takes to get an infrastructure project from concept to construction.

Today’s news that the government is launching a second consultation on Heathrow expansion hasn’t done much to instil confidence that the project is, as the government puts it, “on track”.

But speaking to planners this morning, it was pretty clear that they did not believe the consultation would have too much of an impact on the project’s timescale.

“The additional consultation would help get the Heathrow plan right, which is essential for a project like this,” said Capita GL Hearn national planning advisor Gideon Amos.

Pinsent Masons head of infrastructure planning Robbie Owens dismissed claims that this was a “relaunch” of the consultation, saying the extra round of scrutiny would actually strengthen the government’s Airports National Policy Statement against potential judicial reviews in the future.

The consultation is being launched following fresh analysis carried out by the Department for Transport on the relative merits of expansion at both Heathrow and Gatwick, which has reignited the debate over where a new runway should be built.

One particularly interesting finding was that Gatwick is forecast to be more economically beneficial than Heathrow, albeit over a 60-year period.

But there was another stat in there, which was arguably the most important when considering the UK’s future airports capacity. The DfT warned that aviation demand forecasts showed that London’s airports “will be completely full” by the mid-2030s.

London is currently the world’s busiest city for air passenger numbers, with 110m passengers passing through both Gatwick and Heathrow last year.

This demand shows no signs of abating. Heathrow is already running at full capacity, with Gatwick hitting its limit during peak times.

It seems to me there is only one solution: build new runways at both Heathrow and Gatwick, and be done with it.

Getting Heathrow over the line is clearly the priority, but there does need to be some focus on the long term, looking at where and how future capacity can be created.

With that mind, Gatwick should be built as well.

As Sir Howard Davies told us two years ago, and the latest data today has shown us, it has a compelling case. And the airport is ready to go, too.

“We don’t want to get to a situation where we build another runway and it is job done for another 15 years,” says London First transport lead Richard Dilks. “We need to tackle the pace in which these things progress.”

As we have seen, getting a runway project from concept to construction isn’t simple and certainly isn’t swift.

If another runway is to be built after Heathrow, which is clearly needed, work to develop it will need to start sooner rather than later.