Why Heathrow’s third runway won’t happen

We’ve also added new Heathrow special markets to trade on

Too expensive, too noisy, too harmful

London Heathrow Airport is back in the news, as the Cabinet has backed approval of the building of a third runway. The Coalition of DUP and the Conservative Party will not be enough to win the vote in Parliament, so it will have to turn to the SNP and Labour MPs to get it through.

The Tory’s ‘no ifs, no buts’ pledge against expansion has changed into support for the airport, but delivered at a time with the smallest level of support it can muster in the House of Commons.

Labour policy has been a qualified approval based on meeting the party’s four tests on capacity, noise and air quality, climate change and economic growth. A whipped Labour vote against the plan would mean the end of the proposal.

Is Heathrow turning into the little airport that couldn’t?

Who will vote for it?

On one side, the proposal is unequivocally backed by Unite and the GMB unions and also officially by the Labour Party — on the proviso that the four criteria are met. Conversely, the plans are opposed by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonald, and nearly every MP from a constituency that will be affected by low-flying planes.

A plethora of well-known MPs oppose expansion including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (who will be given a special ‘Licence to Rebel’), Justine Greening, Zac Goldsmith, Vince Cable, along with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and most overflown local residents.

The Government may scratch together support across the benches, from Labour MPs in the North and the DUP (they can’t hear the planes), and Scottish MPs (ambivalent at best about London).

Heathrow’s arguments centre around the nonsensical. They will have more and bigger planes, but they will be quieter. They will have more planes but when you divide them by the number of people in the planes they will be quieter. They can reduce their carbon emissions by buying carbon credits from other areas.

We have markets on whether the vote will pass (latest prices imply it’s 70–30 in yes’s favour), while you can also trade whether Labour will be whipped to vote with the government (83–17).

Who will pay for it?

Despite being vaunted as a privately-funded project, there are many reports that the general public will have to pay serious amounts of cash to make the scheme viable. Ex Transport Minister Stephen Hammond said it would cost £10bn to the taxpayer. TFL put the figure for extra links at £15bn. This is because outside of a new runway, a few villages will need to be demolished, the M25 will need to be moved/buried and new transport links created.

The cost of the new runway alone will be around £17.6bn. Heathrow said it would pay for that (through increased passenger charges levied on the airlines that use it). However, Heathrow doesn’t have a great reputation for keeping its promises.

Heathrow promised £230m for Crossrail. According to Crossrail, this eventually became just £70m.

Is life all bad under the flightpath?

Another runway means more planes, and to minimise the effects of this Heathrow is considering increasing amounts of ‘flight concentration’.

‘Flight concentration’ means motorways in the sky, where hundreds of planes overfly certain properties every single day (depending on wind direction).

This will cause much grief for residents, especially when new concentration paths were tried out with lower flying airplanes. This is akin to waking up one day and finding that the quiet residential street in front of your house was a motorway and that every car that passed was now a juggernaut.

In return, Heathrow is promising six-and-a-half hours of no planes overflying per night.

Maybe planes will get quieter?

This might happen, but there will be more of them (the whole point of adding a runway). Overflown citizens are disturbed by the frequency of the planes rather than level of sound each plane makes (beyond certain limits).

Analysis has shown that over 2.2 million people will be newly affected by significant noise annoyance from an expanded Heathrow.

People live and work under Heathrow’s skies and the airport has built some dystopian windowless concrete bunkers for affected schools that will cope with the extra noise. Heathrow hopes that these teaching bunkers will:

Who will it harm?

Beyond the hundreds of thousands of people that are currently overflown, campaigners argue that a new runway will breach the UK’s legal limits on air pollution and increase noise pollution with an extra 700 planes a day.

Poor air quality around the airport is linked to dirty ground transport, and the plans Heathrow have put forward to mitigate this are not accepted as credible.

General commitments to reduce the carbon footprint seem to be based on buying carbon credits from elsewhere in the EU, but Greenpeace said a new runway was not compatible with building a low-carbon economy.

Previous assurances

In the run up to the construction of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, in a letter to residents in April 1999 BAA Chairman Sir John Egan wrote:

“We have since repeated often that we do not want, nor shall we seek, an additional runway. I can now report that we went even further at the Inquiry and called on the Inspector to recommend that, subject to permission being given for T5, an additional Heathrow runway should be ruled out forever.”

This is not the only promise that the airport has broken about what it will do and what impact it will have on residents.

Who wants it?

Strangely, not the airlines, Willie Walsh has called expansion a ‘ridiculous glory project’, and there doesn’t seem to be any support from other airlines who will have to pay increased landing fees.

The owners of Heathrow obviously benefit from increased passenger numbers as the Terminals are huge shopping centres where people have to stay for hours before for flights. The Unite unions have suggested 70,000 new jobs will be created by 2050 as a result of expansion.

Brexit and the Boeing 787

All economic forecasts for Brexit, including the most optimistic, show a shrinking economy and the end of the current open skies agreement will have multiple impacts on UK based airlines to operate from the UK anyway.

The Boeing 787 is also worthy of note as it means that long distance point to point air travel (as opposed to hub and spoke travel) is a possiblity. This means more travel to and from regional airports, reducing the needs for massive hub airports like Heathrow in the long term.

The Smarkets view

In order for Heathrow to expand, the airport will need to provide solutions for:

Air quality, surface access, regional connectivity, scheme costs and airport charges, make quieter airplanes, provide effective community impacts and compensation, increased resource and waste management and have a successful policy on airspace change.

It will never get built.