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Will the Heathrow expansion ever get off the ground?

Rachel Reeves needs to start putting growth ahead of greenism.

Fraser Myers

Fraser Myers
Deputy editor

Topics Politics UK

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Rachel Reeves, the UK’s embattled chancellor, has hinted that Heathrow’s long-delayed third runway could be finally about to get off the ground as part of her plans to kickstart economic growth.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, she blasted the previous Tory government’s dithering on infrastructure projects, from airports to windfarms to housing. ‘When there was a choice between something that would grow the economy and anything else, anything else always won’, she said. Although she would not be drawn on the specifics at Davos, Bloomberg reports that she is set to announce plans to expand Heathrow, Luton and Gatwick airports in a speech on growth next week. This is certainly welcome news, but we have been here before.

There is no doubt that a third runway is sorely needed at Heathrow. The airport is bursting at the seams. Since 2000, annual passenger numbers have risen by 10million, but the number of flights landing and taking off has remained the same. Despite being Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow has to manage with two runways compared with Paris Charles de Gaulle’s four, and Amsterdam Schiphol’s six. According to a 2016 estimate, expanding Heathrow could add £64 billion to the UK economy and create 77,000 jobs.

So why hasn’t it been built yet? A third runway at Heathrow was actually first proposed in 1946, almost 80 years ago. The current proposal that Reeves is likely to back first emerged under Tony Blair’s Labour government. In 1998, a study was commissioned to explore expanding airport capacity in south-east England. By 2003, a white paper on the future of aviation made it clear that Heathrow was the best choice. Since then, it has been backed by successive governments (apart from the Tory-Lib Dem coalition) and even approved twice by the House of Commons, but it was delayed by the High Court in 2010 and blocked by the Court of Appeal in 2020.

The chief cause of these delays is the undue weight Britain gives to environmental and climate concerns. The 2010 High Court decision accused the government of failing to consider the impact on global warming. The 2020 Court of Appeal decision said the expansion would be incompatible with the emissions-reduction commitments the UK made in the Paris Agreement. In other words, if the Labour government is serious about getting the third runway built, it will have to start relaxing Britain’s stringent climate laws.

The signs here are not encouraging. Elsewhere, the Labour government is currently giving free rein to its eco-zealot energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who one suspects would happily turn Britain into a Net Zero no-fly zone. Since entering office Miliband has accelerated the pace of Net Zero, bringing forward targets to eradicate CO2 emissions in everything from electricity to transport, at a staggering economic cost. Should the government continue to put these climate targets ahead of growth, then it won’t be long before the latest Heathrow expansion plans run aground again.

Besides, it is not just airports we need to expand to get the economy growing. It is all well and good for the chancellor to put her weight behind a few specific infrastructure projects, but this won’t be enough to counter the toll Net Zero is taking on the broader economy. The steel industry, the car industry and the chemicals industry are all groaning under the weight of the government’s eco-extremism. The green-energy transition has made industrial electricity unaffordable for manufacturers, while the Climate Change Act blocks new projects, from mines to oil fields, that might fall foul of future targets. Yet we have not heard a single word on this from our supposedly ‘pro-growth’ chancellor.

If Rachel Reeves is serious about growth, then she must tear up the green diktats that are standing in its path.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

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