The proposed third runway at Heathrow carries an official price tag of £49bn, but the overall budget for the airport’s expansion and operating expenditure could climb past £100bn, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins writes, calling the project a “bottomless money pit” whose only winners would be the airport’s owners.
Jenkins argues the scheme will not promote growth, will take decades to complete and will absorb billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, with an unknown proportion of the cost falling on the public purse.
According to the columnist, the proposal has been debated for 20 years and its opening repeatedly postponed, with a date of 2035 now pushed to 2039 — a target he says he would not bet against slipping to 2045.
Heathrow is a foreign-owned private company seeking to make more money from its cramped west London investment, Jenkins writes. Airlines are sceptical of the plan, he notes, and passengers would face surcharges higher than any in Europe.
Meanwhile, he points out, fields around the rival Gatwick airport lie empty and capacity at Stansted, London’s third airport, is underused.
Jenkins recalls that 60 years ago the British government concluded it was totally inappropriate for crowded and polluted Heathrow to expand in densely populated west London, and that an enlarged Gatwick could not meet demand. The debate then turned on where to place a new third airport, with sites in the Thames estuary and at Cublington and Stansted researched. Stansted won, Jenkins writes, because it already had an RAF base and would serve expected growth from London’s growing eastern reaches; it opened in 1991.
The Conservatives’ privatisation of London’s airports turned what should have been a planned expansion into a battleground of feuding rivals, according to Jenkins. Each airport became a matter of quick profits, self-serving airline slots and a shifting army of amateur officials, with commissions coming and going under the grip of overpaid lobbyists, he writes.
He notes that a Heathrow runway proposed by businessman Surinder Arora within the existing airport curtilage was brushed aside as insufficiently bold, while Stansted — taken over by Manchester airport — is now hardly mentioned as an alternative.
Jenkins challenges the airport’s public relations framing that the project is about “business” and therefore “growth”, likening it to Andy Burnham’s re-industrialisation of Britain. Heathrow claims its new runway will create 100,000 jobs, but fewer than 15% of air travellers claim to be “on business”, and video conferencing has reduced the need for intensive business air travel, he argues.
The columnist also questions Heathrow’s claim to be Britain’s leading cargo airport, based on “a quarter of all UK trade by value”. That figure rests, ludicrously, on the value of the gold ingots that form roughly 60% of the goods it transports, he says, adding it is unclear what banks shifting bullion has to do with growth.
Jenkins compares Heathrow with HS2, noting their upper cost limits of £100bn are much the same. Both, he writes, are plagued by extravagant planning horizons and consultancy-driven budgets in which each contractor has a vested interest in cost inflation. A third similar project is the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, whose cost is currently rising through £50bn, he adds. Both the railway and the power station have been savaged by the National Audit Office, Jenkins writes, and both are widely considered political white elephants still years from completion.
Against such sums, he notes, a new general hospital costs £1bn — as would rebuilding 50 secondary schools.
Jenkins describes the channeling of stupefying sums into London and the south of England as bizarre, emerging from the era of Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” and Burnham’s tilt to the north. He points out that this week conference politicians cited budgets with endless savings — half a million off student exchanges, a billion off quangos — yet no one mentioned that every year for the next decade John Healey’s Treasury will spend about £7bn just to relieve overcrowding on trains from London to Birmingham, almost 70% of his total rail investment.
Big infrastructure is monumental and sexy, Jenkins writes, and no one boasts about building a care home rather than a fancy train or a nuclear power plant. He cites one of Parkinson’s laws, that while tiny items of corporate spending are debated for hours, big ones go through on the nod because they are too big to check and easy to promote.
He argues it is absurd for the government to spend the next two decades upheaving Heathrow and tearing apart the M4 corridor for the profit of a band of foreign investors when a simple alternative lies in growing Gatwick and Stansted. This whole debate, he concludes, is about tourism, and tourists can surely suffer the mild inconvenience of using the other two venues, as was intended half a century ago.
Jenkins adds that this is serious money, with serious uses to which it should be put.
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