The Department for Transport announced yesterday that the final verdict on airport expansion will be put off until summer 2016. Back in October, The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer predicted in his ‘Any Other Business‘ column that the decision would be delayed until after the mayoral election in May:
The Great British Runway final between Heathrow and Gatwick is beginning to look like a game of two halves. The visit of China’s President Xi Jinping is a bonus for the West London team, who can claim that Chinese investors with bulging wallets are more likely to be impressed by landing at an urban mega-airport than an expanded flying club in Sussex. But the Volkswagen emissions scandal has been a gift for Gatwick, because as chief executive Stewart Wingate said: ‘Heathrow’s poor air quality already breaches legal limits and it’s difficult to see how expansion could legally go ahead with the millions of extra car journeys an expanded Heathrow would generate.’
Airports Commission chairman Sir Howard Davis, busy in his new job as chairman of RBS having concluded in favour of Heathrow, retorted that ‘limited weight should be placed on the suggestion that air quality represents a significant obstacle to [Heathrow’s] expansion’. But the fact he had to do so in a lengthy personal letter to transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin rebutting Gatwick’s forensic criticisms of the Commission’s methodology is an indication that he has unexpectedly found himself on the back foot.
Besides fumes, there’s a real issue about financing £5.7 billion of infrastructure work (including an M25 tunnel) around Heathrow: junior transport minister Robert Goodwill says ‘the scheme promoter’ must pay for ‘surface access’ in either case. At Gatwick, the comparable figure is £1 billion, included in the deal proposed by the airport’s owners. At Heathrow, the extra cost would have to be passed to airlines, of whom by far the biggest in terms of landing slots is IAG, the British Airways-Iberia combo — whose boss Willie Walsh says helpfully, ‘We didn’t ask for it and we’re not paying for it.’
Then there’s the politics. George Osborne and Sajid Javid, I gather, want to press on with Heathrow to prove the UK is capable of making big projects happen — and what George wants counts for plenty these days. Back in 2009, David Cameron aligned himself with Heathrow-haters by sponsoring a tree in Greenpeace’s ‘orchard of resistance’ on the runway site, but his sapling is reported to have died and he’s braced for a U-turn by the end of the year — except that he doesn’t want to perform that pirouette only to find Heathrow’s plan is undeliverable. Nor does he want to torpedo the Tories’ anti-Heathrow candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith, currently polling neck and neck with Labour’s Sadiq Khan.
‘We need a futile gesture at this stage,’ Peter Cook said in a ‘Beyond the Fringe’ sketch, ‘It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ Lord Adonis’s new National Infrastructure Commission is itself a tone-raiser, and I wonder if its first gesture might be to take a fresh look at the Heathrow-Gatwick spat, at Downing Street’s request, with a view to reporting back after the mayoral election in May. I still think Gatwick’s in with a shout.
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