Despite wobbles in the global economy the year has kicked-off confirming that Britain’s aviation industry is one sector that continues to flourish – delivering growth and with it an abundance of new jobs for people.
British Airways confirmed in recent weeks that it will create two thousand new jobs at Heathrow and Gatwick – bringing its total number of employees to over 20,000 for the first time in the company’s history. Meanwhile Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Edinburgh airports have all reported record passenger traffic numbers, as more of us flock to the skies on leisure and business trips.
Indeed if this rate of growth continues, all of the capital’s airports collectively could well reach their capacity limits by the middle of the next decade, far sooner than the Airports Commission predicted. This means that the Commission’s recommendation to build a new third runway at Heathrow needs to be implemented as quickly as possible.
As an island nation, a successful and flourishing aviation and aerospace sector is fundamental to the health of the wider economy. Maintaining and enhancing our international connectivity and our status as a global aviation hub is critical for the UK’s long-term economic growth and our global reputation.
The government-established Airports Commission found the aviation sector contributes £12bn a year to the UK economy and employs 116,000 workers across the country. Whether you’re a pilot, engineer or air traffic controller much of this work is high-skilled quality employment. Furthermore, by value 40 per cent of all UK exports leave the country via Britain’s airports, and over a quarter of exports go via our only international hub airport Heathrow.
So far so good. However, before Christmas the government announced it would delay a final decision on airport expansion for another six months, citing that it needed to carry out further environmental analysis. This is despite the fact that the Airports Commission had already spent three years examining the evidence, including extensive environmental analysis, at a cost of £20m of taxpayer money.
After all this time and money spent looking at the issue, the Airports Commission had already confirmed back in July that airport expansion, specifically a new third runway at Heathrow, would be compatible with our legal obligations to the environment.
Furthermore, the Commission proposed a strong package of mitigation measures to deal with the environmental impacts. Ministers had already had the Commission’s analysis and recommendations for six months before the latest announcement confirming a delay, so what on earth have they been doing for all this time? For the government to cite environmental concerns as the principle reason for a delay is therefore rightly being questioned.
The fact is most in Westminster believe that short-term political considerations surrounding the forthcoming London Mayoral elections have got in the way of making a decision in the national interest. This is a government whose Ministers constantly tell us they have a ‘long-term economic plan’. Yet when it comes to making big strategic decisions to secure future prosperity, such as the decision to build a new runway in the South East, they seem incapable of doing the right thing.
Even more unbelievable therefore that there have now been media reports that a final decision could be delayed further still, until after the EU referendum – bringing into question whether the government will ever find the political will to do anything, or whether they will always find some other excuse to yet again kick the can down the road.
Last month marked the anniversary that Concorde, the world’s only supersonic passenger airline, first came into commercial service forty years ago. This was a truly ambitious and visionary project pioneered by the British government that broke the mould at the time. It therefore seems all the more astonishing that in all the decades that have passed since Concorde’s origins in the 1950s consecutive governments have not had the foresight to give the green light to a new runway in London and the South East.
The government must now understand that every further delay on a decision to build a new runway is not only clipping the wings of our thriving and world-leading aviation and aerospace sector, but it is clipping the wings of the British economy and squandering a golden opportunity to secure tens of thousands of new jobs across the country.