Heathrow’s third runway has slipped again, and this time the prime minister would not catch it. Asked at the Labour conference in Liverpool on Sunday whether he backs the £33bn scheme, Andy Burnham called the issue “contested”, said it was “principally a matter for London and London MPs”, and wants the consultation results first. Consultation, mind you, that has been running since June.
The airport brought the sharper news over the weekend. Open by 2035, as the government hoped? Unlikely, says Heathrow. The actual plan, as the Guardian reports, is permission by 2029 and opening within a decade after that. Do the arithmetic. 2039. Four years behind the promise that helped sell the whole idea.
Four years. A child starting primary school and finishing it. Two parliaments, possibly three.
The rest is well-worn. Two runways full for over twenty years, 480,000 flights a year capped, some 40 airlines locked out. Heathrow says a third runway means roughly 100,000 jobs and costs the taxpayer nothing, privately financed to the last pound. Unite and the GMB both spoke for it this weekend. Sharon Graham on unionised jobs and a market for UK steel; the GMB’s Warren Kenny with the line of the week, that every year of dithering is a year of apprenticeships not started, contracts not signed, wages not paid.
What you would build has not got any nicer in the telling. Hundreds of homes demolished. Rivers diverted. The M25 tunnelled under the runway between junctions 14 and 15. Khan has opposed it from the start, noise, air, climate, all of it. The government’s own climate advisers said last week the runway should only go ahead if airlines pay for cleaner flying, which will show up in your fare. Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth points out that a four-year slip makes an already dubious economic case more dubious, before you even count the carbon.
Here is the awkward part nobody says out loud. There is no planning application yet. The DfT says the timeline was “always ambitious” and the framework vote itself may slip into 2027. So the real argument is not 2035 versus 2039 at all. It is whether any government for the next twenty years will spend the capital this needs while its advisers attach conditions that make the airlines and the neighbours both angrier.
Heathrow keeps saying the sooner it starts, the sooner the UK benefits. Most people on both sides probably agree with that too. They just do not agree on whether starting means this decade or the next one.