Baroness Randerson is
right to highlight the importance of the Northern Powerhouse projectto the current debate on aviation capacity in the South-East. The Prime Minister showed strong leadership when with cross party support he took the decision in 2012 to set up the Airports Commission to keep Britain as an aviation hub. It showed a government serious about increasing airport capacity to help secure the economic future of not just London, but also the Northern Powerhouse, the South West, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
At a cost of £20million and with a panel of leading environmental, engineering and transport experts, the Commission has completed the most detailed analysis into aviation capacity in the UK for a generation. After nearly three years it made a unanimous and unambiguous recommendation for expansion at Heathrow. Critically it found around 60% of the up to £211 billion boost to GDP from expanding Heathrow would be focused on areas of the UK outside the South East of England.
The reason for this is simple: air routes are this country’s vital trading routes and Heathrow is Britain’s biggest port – handling over a quarter of all British exports with £101bn worth of goods passing through the airport in 2014. If Britain wants to remain a leading trading nation, it needs more trade routes to more of the growing cities of the world.
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Heathrow and the Northern Powerhouse
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This is why just last month the Regional and Business Airport Group representing 32 airports including Blackpool, Humberside and Doncaster Sheffield wrote to the Transport Secretary to express their support for expansion at Heathrow. “Some opponents of expansion at Heathrow have chosen to misrepresent the findings of the Airports Commission and suggest expansion will lead to further degradation of domestic connectivity to the UK’s hub airport,” the group wrote. “The opposite is true: expansion at Heathrow can reverse the decline in domestic connectivity.”
The Group of 32 join Leeds Bradford, Liverpool John Lennon, Newcastle International, Glasgow and Aberdeen and more than 30 Chambers of Commerce from Inverness to Newquay to support Heathrow expansion.
Heathrow complements all other UK airports because it is a hub. It brings together passengers from all across Europe who want to go to long haul destinations. It is the best located hub in the world, with 95% of the global economy within range of a direct flight. That allows Heathrow to support direct flights to 81 long haul destinations – more than almost any other airport in the world. Indeed, only 5 other airports in the world have regular flights to more than 50 long haul destinations – that is how rare and valuable Heathrow is.
Most of the growth in the world is in Asia, Africa, North and South America – markets you can only get to by air. And businesses across the UK need flights to growth markets with as high a frequency as possible. This means the vitality of airports such as Leeds Bradford, Newcastle and Liverpool are critical to the success of the Northern Powerhouse project.
In most cases, direct flights to emerging markets can only be sustained from a hub airport where passengers and freight are aggregated to fly to markets across the globe multiple times a day in every week of every season. Heathrow makes it easier for Northern businesses to get to world markets and for inward investors, tourists and students to have direct access to the North.
But Heathrow has been full for 10 years. Because it has not been allowed to build a new runway, it has had to turn away airlines who want to come to Heathrow. The French and the Germans have expanded their hubs and are only too happy to welcome them. In fact, Paris has just overtaken Heathrow as the best connected airport in the world. There are now more flights to mainland China from Paris than there are from Heathrow.
Which country gets more tourists from mainland China? Which country exports more by air to mainland China? In the bicentenary of Waterloo, we are letting the French run rings around us. If Britain doesn’t move quickly, exports, trade and investment will all be going through Paris or Amsterdam to get to global markets – that puts the Northern Powerhouse at a disadvantage to European competitors and makes the North a less attractive base for global business, tourists and students.
And with Heathrow full, airlines like British Airways have to choose between maintaining domestic routes and developing new long haul routes. It is a false choice – the UK needs both. Only by expanding Heathrow can Britain secure the connections that the whole country needs.
Heathrow does not stand in the way of UK airports securing their own direct connections where demand exists to ‘thick routes’ like New York or Beijing, but the North shouldn’t rely on infrequent and low quality connections to hub airports in Europe let alone be reliant on the commercial decisions of foreign airlines and airports for their global connectivity. It is in the long term interests of the North if it is able to determine the future of its own trading routes, but it can only do so if Heathrow expands.
The Heathrow debate isn’t about a new runway. This debate is about how the UK - and the Northern Powerhouse - remains right at the heart of the global economy.