I will lie down in front of those bulldozers and stop the construction of that third runway … Heathrow is just undeliverable, and the sooner we face that the sooner our salvation.”
This was then London mayor Boris Johnson’s most famous pledge, made in 2015. Expanding an airport on the outskirts of a major city, he told delighted listeners, was “the kind of thing that could have happened in China in the 1950s”. It would be impossible in London, he said, because of the legal challenges, environmental costs and the offence to human rights. “It is just not going to happen.” As recently as last June, Johnson went awol as foreign secretary to avoid voting for Heathrow.
To rule is to choose. Before even reaching Downing Street, Johnson’s shoulders are starting to buckle at the prospect of tough decisions. He has told Tory MPs that, since parliament has approved the Heathrow project, he declines to repeat his opposition. In other words, facing a determined business lobby, he had dropped his assertion of “fuck business” for “fuck west London”. Like his broken promise to halt “Dubai-on-Thames” and now to halt HS2, he offers the “Don Giovanni’s defence”, that whatever he said before he meant at the time.
This week Heathrow came up with its latest plan for a third runway. It is a plan so monstrous, so expensive, so disruptive and so archaic as to beggar belief. No city in the developed world would think of increasing flights over its built-up area by 700 planes a day. None would think of jamming its busiest stretch of urban motorway for a decade, consuming 1,000 acres of greenbelt land and building the world’s largest car park (for 50,000 vehicles), all in an area already intolerable with congestion, aircraft noise levels and illegal air pollution – and all at a time of mounting concern over climate change.
Heathrow’s managers rival Johnson for pledge-busting. They once promised west London residents they would “never” build a second runway, then never a fourth terminal, then never a fifth. They promised quieter planes and no early morning flights. Now there is even talk of a fourth runway. Not surprisingly, Heathrow refers those it is driving mad not to its promises but to the Samaritans, according to one report.
The latest promise is that the runway will cost £14bn, an amount that will fall not on the taxpayer but on the airlines. They have refused point blank to finance it, such that even BA has deserted the bigger Heathrow cause. The new figure is mendacious anyway, as it is for the runway alone. Two years ago a former transport minister, Stephen Hammond, said the infrastructure cost to the Treasury, such as for tunnelling the M25, might be as high as £10bn. Last week reports put the total cost in the region of £30bn. This stretch of runway will cost more than half as much as the entire HS2. It is barking mad. Yet Johnson has reportedly switched to favouring it.
Heathrow has persuaded the City, the Confederation of British Industry, civil servants and a salivating construction industry that its expansion is vital for British business. It is not. Around 80% of Britain’s air travel is for leisure and tourism. Though figures are hard to come by, I understand that just 33% of Heathrow passengers are classed as “business”. Business use of Stansted is 20% and Gatwick 17%. Airline travel is overwhelmingly to go on holiday and visit friends and relatives. Stay-at-home tourism could as well argue that a bigger Heathrow is dreadful for business.
Every time I hear Heathrow pleading that an extra runway would “generate up to £147bn” or is “vital as a business hub”, I weep for respectable economics. It would probably be cheaper to give every genuine businessman a private jet flight from City airport or Northolt airports. As for tourism, for all its virtues, it hardly justifies making a misery of the lives of 950,000 Londoners when four other airports are available: Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Southend.
But this debate is about indulging the leisure preferences of the relatively rich. We no longer predict and provide road space, we ration it by congestion. A bigger Heathrow would not only deliver a great dollop of filthy air on west London. It would make a mockery of policy on climate change and regional planning. This should be discouraging, not encouraging, the current craze for hyper-mobility.
Heathrow has come to embody the hopelessness of British infrastructure planning. Both of Johnson’s (putative) predecessors, David Cameron and Theresa May, were strong opponents of the third runway. In 2009 Cameron pledged to oppose it, “no ifs, no buts”. He even dreamed up HS2 as an alternative, to appease northern business people who prefer taking planes rather than trains to London. Cameron then did a U-turn under pressure from Heathrow’s lobbyists, and so did May. Johnson seems on the brink of delivering the airport a stunning hat-trick of victories over the public interest.
Every aspect of public policy should now be aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Expanding capacity at Heathrow is like switching Drax power station back to coal. If London really needs more airport space, common sense argues for Gatwick and a fast rail link to under-used Stansted. Both venues have lower-cost plans for growth. Common sense cries out for a progressive downgrading of London’s premier airport, but common sense is a rare commodity among Britain’s infrastructure planners, seemingly as rare as prime ministers keeping their word. Cynics can take one comfort from the prospect of a Johnson broken promise. Not even a broken one can be trusted.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
