Airports Commission: Final Report — House of Commons, 2015-11-26
Topic: Transportation
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): With respect to my hon. Friend, this is not about one company any more than it is about one individual constituency or one part of London The fundamental problem, as has been well demonstrated by other hon. Members in this debate, is that a third runway at Heathrow would be but a sticking plaster that, almost immediately, would be over capacity. There would then be a need for a fourth runway, which would not be achievable in legal or environmental terms because, whatever one thinks about the matter, the Supreme Court judgment has changed things. We cannot ignore that. The truth is that we would be sinking a huge amount of capital into something that would be a white elephant by the time it opened. That is not what I regard as getting on with things or with doing something that is deliverable. That is the key distinction We do need to move forward and there is an alternative. Heathrow may well have been the optimal place for an airport in 1948 or 1950. At that time, London was a shrinking city. Its population was reducing and nobody anticipated the massive population growth to come. Heathrow is no longer in an appropriate place. We therefore have to look at the alternatives. Nobody is saying, and I am certainly not saying, that we should close Heathrow down. It is an important part of the west London economy, but there are more readily deliverable options to increase capacity. I am in favour of increasing airport capacity in London and the south-east My constituents, like many of us who wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph today, are not from west London. My constituency is not directly affected by the flight paths, although we do suffer from stacking. The irony is that the stacking would be removed for only a very temporary period by a third runway, because the overcrowding would return, meaning that the stacking would be back until people tried to get a fourth runway, which would be impossible. It is a complete canard or red herring to suggest that it would solve things We need to get on with the option that can be most quickly delivered. No option is perfect and I might not have started from this point. I have sympathy with my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). If we had looked at the Foulness option many years ago, perhaps it would have been attractive, but we are not in that place now and revisiting the idea will not improve its deliverability I take the view that the Gatwick option is the right one because it is deliverable. No doubt there will be challenges, but the potential for legal challenge is significantly lower around Gatwick and the issues of dispute are significantly more discrete. It is therefore much more readily deliverable and we have a much better chance of delivering it on time. Having an additional runway at Gatwick would not exclude the possibility of more imaginative options being developed for the future or prejudge other ideas, but it would give us an immediate capacity increase. It would not involve anything like the amount of sunk cost that would be involved in the potentially unviable option of a third runway at Heathrow. Those are all good reasons for opposing Heathrow expansion Finally—this is the only thing that I say as a London politician, as I am sure the Minister will understand—I fought the 2010 election and two elections for the London Assembly by saying that I opposed Heathrow expansion. I campaigned twice for my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) to be elected Mayor, while saying that we opposed Heathrow expansion. Call me old-fashioned, but I rather like to keep my promises, and I hope that we can do that for this issue.