The Metropolis

Does London need another airport?

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 3 November, 2011 12:34

Does London need a new airport? Plenty of people think so. Here is Lord Foster outlining his much-ridiculed plan for a new hub in the Thames estuary at the Isle of Grain.

If you address the national interest of future generations still to come you have to have the courage and you have to face up to the realities in terms of trade, in terms of competitiveness and in terms of quality of life.

And trade is what this is all about. It’s important to realise that absolutely nobody on the side of increased airport capacity is worried about giving you more flights to the Costa Brava.

It’s about business passengers, and more specifically, transfer passengers.

The report which goes with those horrid Heathrow growth adverts makes this explicit.

…Airlines serving Heathrow facilitate the majority of face-to-face business meetings between UK and overseas business people, who do £590 billion a year of business deals adding more than £150 billion a year to UK GDP. This economic contribution depends on transfer passengers.

So any new airport will not be built to take Brits on holiday to the Mediterranean, but to act as a stop over for Wall St businessmen en route to Shanghai, Delhi or Hanoi.

But will we need this extra capacity? I would hope that better technology (do the deal on Skype!) and increased environmental awareness, together with rising fuel costs, will mean a levelling off of air travel. If that happens, a brand new multi-billion airport would start to look like an expensive, environment trampling white elephant.

But the lobbyists behind the Heathrow report would argue that once citizens and businessmen in emerging markets get the chance to fly, they’re going to take it. And we’re going to want their money pretty bad.

I can only hope my rune-reading is more prescient.

The Politics Show has more on the race for transfer passengers, and where it might take us.

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