OPINION - The Standard View: Why saying yes to a third runway at Heathrow is the right call
OPINION - The Standard View: Why saying yes to a third runway at Heathrow is the right call
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London is the world’s greatest city — it deserves an airport to match that status. Although the capital’s premier hub has come a long way since the days of “Heathrow Hell” a decade or so ago it still falls short of passengers’ and business expectation too often.
Much of that is down to capacity constraints as Heathrow Airport is bursting at the seams; the 474,965 plane departures and arrivals it handled last year represented 98.7% of its legal allowable maximum. No wonder so many flights back to London end with a frustrating half an hour circling over the home counties countryside waiting for a landing slot.
Building a third runway will relieve that pressure and provide headroom for passenger growth for the foreseeable future, making Heathrow capable of handling 140 million passengers a year. It would also create tens of thousands of jobs and provide the best and most visible rejoinder to doom-mongers who say the UK no longer cares about growth and is now in managed decline mode. After the debacle of HS2, Britain is perilously close to deserving its reputation as a country where “nothing gets built anymore”.
Unlike the botched high speed railway line, but in common with the superb engineering achievement of the Channel Tunnel, the third runway — and the other expansion work that goes with it — will be entirely privately financed. Not only that but the vast majority of the estimated £20 billion plus cost will be funded by foreign investors. Heathrow, is after all, now only 2% UK owned. Getting Heathrow done, to paraphrase the architects of Brexit, would be a huge vote of confidence in UK plc at a time when it is desperately needed.
