Gatwick chairman: Heathrow is 'politically toxic'

The next generation of “hub-buster” aircraft – the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350 - is changing the face of long-haul travel, making it cheaper and easier to travel direct long-distance. And it is the airline market itself that is shaping this new future. There are five times more hub-busters on order than Airbus A380 Super Jumbos.

The low cost airlines rely on affordable airport charges and efficient airport infrastructure. Heathrow is currently the most expensive airport in the world and is not equipped to meet the fast aircraft turnaround times required for the low-cost business model.

In contrast Gatwick is the only airport that can cater for all airline business models, with affordable charges and facilities that enable fast and efficient aircraft turnaround times.

No-one can say with certainty exactly what the future looks like. This puts a premium on ensuring that London’s aviation capacity remains as flexible as possible to meet demand.

The advance of these long-haul, low-cost flights is challenging the premise that concentrating activity at one hub - where people transfer and then fly on to long-haul destinations – is the solution. The number of transfer passengers is, if anything, very likely to decline rather than increase.

Expansion at Gatwick can also optimise how London’s airport system works as a whole and allow Heathrow to play its role better, with connections to emerging markets. With low-cost airlines offering long-haul routes as well, traffic would inevitably move out of Heathrow to Gatwick.

There would no longer need to be 23 flights every day, for example, from Heathrow to New York as more flights would fly direct from Gatwick. That would then leave open some capacity at Heathrow to develop new routes in tandem with Gatwick.

As a result there would be all the benefits for passengers and growth for UK plc with little of the environmental damage and virtually none of the massive delivery risk that expansion at Heathrow would bring.

Competition between airports from the breakup of the old BAA monopoly has been one of the great successes of recent industrial policy.

It has driven up standards and driven down prices. Allied to ever increasing airline choice, passengers are reaping the benefits of lower fares. We could choose to turn the clock back on all this and create a restrictive monopoly or alternatively build on what has been achieved and have even more competition.

There are significant benefits to the UK economy which will result from the more vigorous competition between airports and airlines, if there is a new runway at Gatwick which competes with Heathrow.

The economic potential at Gatwick is larger and there are further benefits arising from Gatwick’s case including lower air fares, lower airport charges, and because a new runway will be operational sooner. Independent consultants have quantified the benefits from choosing Gatwick over Heathrow at around £40 billion over the next 60 years.

In contrast to the Heathrow case, this can be delivered at no cost or risk to the taxpayer.

There is business support for Heathrow and for Gatwick. What unites all business is the need for certainty. This is an issue that has been considered many times in the past. Each time Heathrow has been chosen it has faced a political roadblock.

The reasons for that are very simple but worth restating. Heathrow is in the wrong place for expansion which makes it politically toxic. In the modern age it has not been considered acceptable to have another 270,000 flights a year over a central London flight path - with all the resulting noise and environmental impact - at a time when, today, noise at Heathrow is greater than all European airports combined. It would also mean building across the M25, with all the disruption and delivery risk that would inevitably entail.

Gatwick however can deliver the economic benefits the country needs at an environmental cost it can afford. Perhaps most importantly of all given the history of the past, the prospects for delivering a new runway at Gatwick are much stronger. Before this process expansion at Gatwick was ruled out under pre-existing agreements.

It is now being considered properly for the first time. If chosen, work could start on its safe guarded site in the next Parliament and the runway could be operational by 2025. It can be built at less than half the price of a third runway at Heathrow at no cost to the taxpayer and with minimal disruption.

We can debate the future, but the challenges of today in the end demand that the UK just gets on with it.

Gatwick is already the largest single-runway airport in the world, enabling passengers to fly to over 200 domestic & worldwide destinations – more than any other UK airport - cheaply and efficiently.

Heathrow's chief executive recently described Gatwick vs Heathrow as a 'false choice'. He is wrong.

There is a very real choice between two visions - competition vs monopoly, future-proofing London airport system vs building a model based on the past, developing a safeguarded site vs building a runway across the M25 in the busiest section of Europe's busiest motorway. Gatwick is the progressive solution and the obvious choice for the future.

Sir Roy McNulty is chairman of Gatwick Airport

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