What Heathrow needs is not a third runway but a complete rethink of its central hellhole

Justine Greening is unlucky to have been passed the transport chalice so early in her cabinet career, and her tenure will surely be even shorter than the already short average for the post. On the issue of a third Heathrow runway, opposition to which was a theme of her campaign for her Putney seat in 2010, she seems at a loss to respond to a surge of Tory opinion led by former minister Tim Yeo in favour of the runway project as a symbol of newly assertive, globally connected, growth-seeking post-Olympic -Britain. I feel obliged, in a chivalrous way, to help her marshal her arguments before she’s forced to depart. Here goes.

What Heathrow needs is not the bulldozing of the last semi-rural communities between the Bath Road and the M4 to make way for what could only be a short-haul landing strip, but a complete redesign of the nightmarish central complex that encompasses Terminals One, Two and Three. In modern air travel, size matters less than the sophistication of the offering and the speed of connection to the city centre: the quality of the Wi-Fi, the air conditioning, the seafood counter and the Crossrail link are at least as important as the availability of direct flights to Chinese industrial cities.

Contrary to the pro-runway rhetoric, history does not tell us that foreign investors base their choice of location on proximity to giant hub airports. It was Thatcherism and tax breaks that brought Asian factories to the north-east in the 1980s, not the limited amenities of the former RAF base that was Teesside Airport. The denizens of Canary Wharf would rather slip through City Airport to Geneva and beyond than trek westwards to Heathrow; London’s tribe of foreign bankers stays here because of the quality of housing and office space, not the transport.