Airports Commission: Final Report

Debate between Boris Johnson and Callum McCaig

Thursday 26th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As he will have heard from the Chancellor’s long-term economic plan for London, the Tramlink extension to Sutton is absolutely part of our programme. My hon. Friend is right. Nobody has factored in the extra costs of the transport. The Government say that they will not pay. The airlines say that they will not pay. I am afraid that the programme is undeliverable.

The final point—this is the answer to the points made by my right hon. Friends the Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns) and for Arundel and South Downs and others—is that even if a third runway were to be completed, and it could not be done until 2030 by the Airports Commission’s own admission, it would be full at the point of completion. It does not answer the exam question in the sense that it does not deliver the extra connectivity that we all want. It does not hook up British business with those extra destinations in China, let alone with Latin America or Africa—those destinations where we are currently losing out. In fact, according to the commission’s own figures, the number of long-haul destinations would increase by only seven by 2030, and the number of domestic routes, to answer the points made by some of our Scottish friends, would go down from seven to four.

[Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions connectivity to Scotland, for which I thank him. Does he believe that this should be an English-only matter, or does he share our view that it should be for the United Kingdom Parliament as a whole to decide?

[Boris Johnson]

That is a fair question. The answer is that this is plainly a national issue. Nobody in Scotland would wish to be disadvantaged, and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow being the only option would disadvantage communities not just in Scotland but in other regional cities in the United Kingdom, which would lose connectivity as a result of our taking the wrong route.

As I say, by 2030, Heathrow runway 3 would be full and the pressure would be on. As my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) rightly said in his excellent speech, the pressure would be overwhelming, come 2030, for us to build a fourth runway at Heathrow, which would be a total environmental catastrophe. Where would we be then? What would we have done? We would have blighted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners—not just those who are under the existing flightpath but people in Pimlico, people in New Cross, people in south London, people in Chelsea, people in Shepherd’s Bush and people in Hammersmith, who have no idea of the scourge that will be visited upon them by this appalling decision. We would have greatly worsened air quality in the greatest city on earth, in breach of our international obligations. We would have spent colossal sums of taxpayers’ money to create a short-term solution that did not address the problem of Britain’s lack of connectivity. Were we to make that mistake, we would find ourselves having to address the same long-term questions that we seem determined to shirk now.

That is why I think it is time to pause, to avoid making a disastrous mistake. There are other, better, more practical solutions on the table. The House knows what they are. I do not have time to rehearse them now, but they are infinitely preferable. They do deliver the long-term solutions, they are environmentally sensitive, they do enhance the competitiveness and the connectivity of this country, and, by the way, they could be achieved at a roughly comparable cost.

The Prime Minister was absolutely right when he said, in 2009, that he wanted to oppose a third runway at Heathrow. He was right to commit us. I voted for that and many people here were elected on that manifesto. It was right—