If a third runway is built at Heathrow, what will be the impact on the wealth of the nation? It will cost us somewhere between £23.4bn and £62.5bn. These are not my figures; they weren’t calculated by environmental groups, but by the Department for Transport.
For decades, government ministers have told us that airport expansion is essential for “growth”. As chancellor, Rachel Reeves claimed that a third runway at Heathrow would add 0.43% to GDP, figures we later discovered came from a report commissioned by the airport. The transport department’s own analysis concluded that the real addition to GDP would be between 0.03% and 0.05%: eight to 14 times less.
Against this, it weighed the social and environmental costs of the project, to reveal a massive net loss. It found that a third runway would cause major harm to the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million local people. But even these figures don’t capture it.
The climate breakdown caused by the runway affects the entire planet, yet the costs to other countries aren’t counted. So again we must ask, why does the government support it? Though Heathrow expansion remains official policy, when asked at the weekend, Andy Burnham said the runway was “contested” and “principally it’s a matter for London and London MPs”.
We also learned that the project has been delayed yet again. Though Heathrow announced last year that its plans were “shovel-ready”, it now admits the runway would take four years longer to build than it claimed: the estimated completion date is now 2039. By then, or so we must hope, a government might have decided to take the climate impact seriously.
If so, the new runway would need to be shuttered the moment it opened. Otherwise, according to the government’s Climate Change Committee, “almost all CO2 emissions in 2050 will be from aviation”. Heathrow’s expansion alone, the committee says, would cause more carbon emissions by 2054 than “any other sector of the economy”.
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