Further, faster, higher - planes and politics

Sir Philip Rutnam was Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport and the Home Office.

Will this be the time it actually happens? After so many attempts to build another runway at Heathrow, Rachel Reeves definitely thinks so. She wants ‘spades in the ground’ during this Parliament. But is the fate of this attempt now tied to the fate of Rachel Reeves herself?

I spent five years helping the Cameron and May governments extract themselves from a crude commitment against expansion, and instead have a new policy that allowed growth subject to conditions. We made real progress – until Heathrow got struck by the double whammy of Boris Johnson’s government and the pandemic.

The thing that strikes me now is the mountain that Heathrow and the government have to climb to get this project to happen, and the scale of the political effort that will be needed to drive it through. Rachel Reeves is not realistically going to be able to lead that, certainly not month in month out – it’ll have to come from the Transport Secretary – but it’s Rachel’s reputation that is now linked to the project more than anyone’s.

Let’s look at three big things that have to happen before Heathrow expansion gets anywhere near final permission to take off.

First, Heathrow itself has to get to the starting gate and put in the application. Rachel Reeves has said she wants proposals from them by the summer. But Heathrow has run this race before. It knows how much it costs to get prepared, and how much leverage it has now before it has put in the application. Expect difficult negotiations between Government and Heathrow over things like surface access (costing billions), economic regulation (ie higher landing charges), and what happens if the Government later changes its mind (would you fancy writing off more abortive costs?). And expect all those negotiations to be overseen directly by Heathrow’s shareholders, and watched keenly by its airline customers and airport competitors. There are real risks of challenge to DfT if anyone is left unhappy.

Second, the case for expansion itself has to be updated and future-proofed. Aviation has changed a lot since the key decisions made in 2018 – think of the balance between business and leisure travel, what’s happening in aviation technology, but also the smart, lower cost schemes for expansion at Gatwick and Luton.  All this has got to be taken into account. So too has the latest evidence and policies on carbon and climate change, and other environmental impacts like noise. It’s a massive task to do this work right, and make the best possible case for expansion – and remember it’s Heathrow’s case that gets examined directly at a planning inquiry, not something general from the Government about what it wants to happen.

Finally, there’s the politics. There’s a long list of places, people and organisations that are dead against Heathrow expansion, and have a record of mobilising very effectively. Everyone from Sadiq Khan to lots of West London MPs and Councils to environmental organisations, cutting across party boundaries. Add in airspace modernisation (obscure but fundamental) and the list of places who will feel some effect gets much longer. The politics will only get more complex if the news on climate and carbon gets worse, or (paradoxically) if the news on growth gets a lot better.

None of this is to say that expansion can’t be made to happen: it absolutely can. Howard Davies showed ten years ago how strong the case is. But it will need really good political leadership to navigate through all this and come out the other side.

Over to you Heidi Alexander.