No, Heathrow’s third runway fail won’t make your holiday cost more

4th March 2020 by CMIA

Heathrow’s third runway is no more. It’s a victory for environmental campaigners, but the decision raises some important questions.

On Thursday, the UK’s Court of Appeals ruled that the government’s decision to allow construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport was unlawful, because it conflicted with the government’s own climate change policies. Environmental campaigners welcomed the news as a victory for both the communities affected by the plan and, well, the planet.

Business groups, meanwhile, described themselves as “bitterly disappointed” and called on the government to unequivocally back the third runway to show that, post-Brexit, Britain was still open to the world. But what does the decision actually mean? And what implications will it have? Allow us to explain…

Why did the government lose the case?

A number of organisations opposed to Heathrow expansion – councils and residents’ groups, the mayor of London, and environmental charities including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Plan B – challenged the policy in the High Court last spring. That case was dismissed, but went to appeal. It’s that ruling that has just emerged.

The nub of the issue is that ministers supporting the plan in 2018 failed to take into account the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, aimed at keeping the global temperature’s rise below 2C. Chris Grayling, the erstwhile transport secretary who approved the plan, said in a witness statement that the government had met its environmental commitments by assessing the plan against the Climate Change Act of 2008, and that the Paris agreement was “not relevant”. The court disagreed.

What would the environmental impact of a third runway have been?

Earlier this month, Heathrow Airport proudly announced that it was now carbon neutral. But that’s only true if you only count the emissions generated by the airport itself, and not the planes that use it – which is quite the caveat.

As things stand, around 1,300 planes fly through Heathrow every day. A third runway would raise that to 2,000 – an increase of over 50 per cent – adding significantly to emissions, as well as to the noise and air pollution faced by locals.

According to environmental campaigning group Friends of the Earth, a three-runway Heathrow would generate all the emissions UK aviation should be allowed to produce, leaving none for other airports. Right now, the sector is only responsible for 6 per cent of UK emissions – but the larger that number gets, the faster other sectors of the economy will need to decarbonise if the UK is to meet its climate change targets.

Will this decision harm the UK’s economy?

Business groups think so. The main argument for expansion has always been economic. Heathrow is already one of the busiest international airports in the world, as well as the UK’s biggest port, handling exports worth nearly £200m every day. Expanding it, so the theory runs, would maintain that advantage, attracting visitors and investment to the UK, and providing new links to the developing world. The business lobby group London First argues that, “Expanding Heathrow will be worth tens of billions in GDP and create tens of thousands of jobs across the UK.”

Is there any way the third runway can still happen?

The scheme seems to lack powerful political supporters. London mayor Sadiq Khan opposes it, while Boris Johnson once said he would lie down in front of bulldozers rather than allow it to go ahead. By what was surely just an unfortunate coincidence, he was flying back from Afghanistan at the time of the Commons vote on Heathrow expansion in June 2018, which prevented him from voting against it.

But while the government is not appealing the ruling, Heathrow itself is, so it may yet be overturned. The airport is also working with the government to demonstrate that the expansion is compatible with the Paris Agreement: although it’s staying cagey about the nature of its argument, it’s assured its supporters in the world of business that it has a “very strong legal case”. Where the Prime Minister will place himself in respect to the bulldozers if Heathrow’s appeal is successful remains to be seen.

What are the alternatives to a third runway?

In the 11 years since the then Labour transport secretary Geoff Hoon first announced the UK government’s support for a bigger Heathrow, a number of alternative proposals have been discussed. There was the “Boris Island” proposal for an entirely new airport in the Thames Estuary. There have also been calls for expansion at Gatwick or Stansted, or for more international flights to use regional airports such as Manchester. But while plans like this may face less opposition from locals, they’ve not found favour with the air industry, which favours large, hub airports that can attract a broader range of passengers.

They also wouldn’t do much to help meet the UK’s carbon targets. To do that, we probably need to get more people off planes altogether, which points to the sort of increase in rail capacity represented by projects like High Speed 2. Or, we could all just travel less.

Won’t people just have to take more connecting flights, which will emit more carbon?

Probably the opposite. One of the arguments for Heathrow’s expansion is that there’ll be more space for both local flights and long-haul ones: at present, the lack of space means cheaper local flights are being squeezed out. So if you want to fly from Newcastle to Shanghai, it’ll be easier to do it via London.

If we don’t expand Heathrow, there will be other ways of doing that, via other hub airports such as Amsterdam Schiphol. Or perhaps those journeys simply won’t happen.

Will this make my holiday more expensive?

In the immediate future, no. For one thing, the third runway wouldn’t have opened before 2026 at the earliest. For another, last year Heathrow unveiled plans to find room for another 25,000 flights a year by allowing planes to touch down at both existing runways at the same time. And while we’re at it, government stats show that just 10 per cent of flyers are responsible for nearly half of all flights: perhaps you usually holiday in Bognor.

That said, the laws of supply and demand being what they are, a failure to expand London’s aviation capacity will make flights more expensive in the long term. Again, in order to bring aviation emissions down we may all have to fly less – and one day that will likely mean paying more.

Source: http://bit.ly/No3Run