There wasn’t much to like about the previous iteration of this Labour Government but airport expansion was one of them. Rachel Reeves committed early on to expanding City airport, opening the baffling spare runway at Gatwick, expanding Luton and Stansted and building a third runway at Heathrow. It was an aviation extravaganza for London aimed at proving the Labour’s commitment to growth.
But now all these plans appear to have been grounded, with Andy Burnham dodging questions about the future of Heathrow’s third runway and muttering about the consultation process. ‘There are different views and you have to take those views seriously in coming to a decision,’ he has said. But it was only in June that the government’s own view was that expanding Heathrow would support 60,000 jobs and bring £40 billion of benefits to the UK, 40% of which would be felt outside London and the South east.
No government can claim to be pro-growth and internationally oriented while deliberately constraining its most vital transport hub
Burnham has bizarrely said that this vital strategic infrastructure project is ‘a matter for London’. So what does the Labour Mayor of London think? Sadiq Khan says a third runway at Heathrow would ‘undermine our climate goals’. Instead he wants Eurostar trains to stop at Stratford. Great news for visitors to London who seek the convenience of flying to Paris, then simply hopping on a two-hour train instead of landing directly at their destination. Of course, Stratford International should live up to its name, but to suggest that’s a substitute for an adequate airport is laughable.
So it probably won’t happen now, and certainly not any time soon. Further delay will inevitably push building costs up further and allow other airports to steal a march. Istanbul has already overtaken Heathrow as Europe’s busiest airport. Meanwhile Heathrow is straining at the seams. It handles 84 million passengers a year and is already operating at 99% of its capacity. The world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International, has five runways for only 25% more flyers. I recently flew in and out of Schiphol, which also has five runways, and is a noticeably smoother passenger experience.
This isn’t just about passengers. Heathrow is also the UK’s most valuable port, through which a quarter of UK trade passed in 2025. Expanding Heathrow should be a no-brainer for a country that has barely grown since 2008, so why has it been debated for decades?
The disruption and complexity of the project should not be underestimated. It requires rerouting rivers and parts of the M25, with serious impacts on the people living nearby. If you wanted to build a hub airport for a major international city you probably wouldn’t start from here. But delaying what everyone knows is necessary will only make it worse. And the construction project itself would be the biggest privately-funded infrastructure scheme in Europe, creating thousands of jobs and apprenticeships.
Noise is a major cause of concern for West Londoners and can’t be dismissed. I grew up right under the flight path and am thus pretty inured to disturbance from aeroplane noise. I don’t say that to diminish the problem, merely to suggest that once things are built people tend to accommodate them, especially if they can feel the benefits. In any case, the objections of a vocal minority must not be allowed to stand in the way of a project that would bring such enormous benefits to the country as a whole. In fact polling for City AM indicates that 63% of Londoners actually support a third runway. And indeed the Civil Aviation Authority has modelled that, with a third runway, 15% fewer people could be affected by noise disturbances thanks to the flight path alterations a third runway affords.
No government can claim to be pro-growth and internationally oriented while deliberately constraining its most vital transport hub. But nobody should be surprised by Andy Burnham’s equivocation on the subject. He is an anti-London Prime Minister. One of his first acts was the establishment of the absurd ‘No 10 North’, a pointless political stunt but with the malign implication that he does not believe that the capital should be the centre of power. His central promise of ‘good growth in every postcode’ implies both that there is such a thing as bad growth and that there can be too much of it in one place. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what growth is and how it works. Burnham believes that it comes from governments and can therefore be picked up by central planners and moved away from where it already exists. CapX readers don’t need to be told how wrong that is.
Kemi Badenoch has urged the Government to ‘stop faffing about and get this runway built’. She should secure a similar commitment from her candidate for London Mayor.
And as for Labour, capriciously reversing Rachel Reeves’s commitment to Heathrow is enough to make her look stable and competent. That’s quite something.
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