Heathrow delay could cost €43bn, says business group

Police have moved in to remove climate change demonstrators who got onto the north runway at Heathrow and locked themselves together in protest at airport expansion.

Heathrow Airport are arguing that the decision to place the 3rd runway further to the west will mitigate the noise for residents on he flight path as planes will have descended less when they reach Chiswick.

“The benefits are significantly greater, for business passengers, freight operators and the broader economy”, commission head Howard Davies said.

The FTA says its own “Sky High Value” report on airport capacity in the south east, plus a report commissioned by the FTA and undertaken by York Aviation, both confirmed Heathrow as a vital hub for air cargo and underlined that a failure to invest in new runway capacity would result in United Kingdom exporters and importers losing competitive edge to continental competitors, with the real possibility of services transferring to airports on the continent.

Earlier this month a long-awaited report recommended that a new runway should be built at Heathrow rather than Gatwick.

2002 The government proposes a four-runway airport at Cliffe on the Kent coast before ruling it out a year later.

Prime minister David Cameron, however, has said the government will delay a decision on a potential new runway until the end of the year.

“Heathrow will face the mother of all challenges to meet the conditions for a third runway set down by Davies”, he said.

According to Holland-Kaye, expanding Heathrow will create up to £211 billion of economic growth and 190,000 new British jobs across the country – the first wave of which will come from the planning and development of an additional runway and new terminals.

In his first speech since the Airports Commission’s clear recommendation for Heathrow expansion, Heathrow Airport chief executive John Holland-Kaye has he views the debate on where a new runway should be built to be “firmly closed”.

“Davies spent a lot of time and so much money and then comes back actually with the worst option of all three”. In assessing the case for expansion in particular locations the Commission has examined its implications across a wide range of factors including noise, surface transport, employment, air quality, housing and local communities.

“It’s something we did say we may need to use in extreme circumstances, we don’t think that we’re going to need it because we are going to have enough other mitigating factors”, the airport boss said. What this means is that we’re losing out in the global connectivity race: Paris already offers 50% more flights to China than London, for example.

Spelthorne Borough Council has been a supporter of Heathrow expansion and welcomed the “series of strong measures to address environmental and transport concerns”.

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