Danny Beales

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) for securing this timely and important debate. She set out very well the issues that we are concerned about and grappling with. Heathrow expansion raises significant concerns among my constituents, given that my constituency neighbours the airport. As has been said, this is not a new issue. I was going to say that it has been going on since the ’90s, but apparently it was in 1983—before I was born at Hillingdon hospital—that the people took up the mantle and battled expansion. That explains why people are incredibly frustrated and jaded: the same questions are being asked yet again, but we are getting no answers to these decades-long problems. The Government have been explicit time and again about their commitment to the four tests, which I share. Does Heathrow expansion deliver economic growth in every region? Is it consistent with our climate change commitments? Will it undermine air quality progress? Will the plans properly manage, limit and mitigate the noise impact? If the expansion fails to meet those tests, it should not be allowed to go ahead. That was always my starting point, and to this day I have been consistent about that when looking at the proposals. To be frank, the numbers that we have seen are not reassuring. According to the Government’s own modelling, the impact on GDP is predicted to be just 0.03% to 0.05% by 2056—a reduction in the economic benefit set out in earlier estimates by a factor of 10. In addition, the Department’s modelling suggests that, once monetised costs and benefits are considered, expansion could impose greater costs than benefits over 60 years, with a negative net present value of between £20 billion and £60 billion to the economy. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said that there would potentially be benefits to consumers, but projections suggest that ticket prices could rise by £60 to £65, or £250 for a family of four, as the higher airline charges to fund the development will be passed on to passengers. Rather than extend air travel to more, it could price out ordinary families from travelling from Heathrow. That is why major airlines themselves are concerned about the proposals. Many Members have heard from them. I share the new Government’s ethos of delivering growth in every postcode, but the analysis shows that Heathrow would not be a silver bullet. Modelling suggests that between 72% and 92% of the benefits of the expansion would be concentrated in London and the south-east, and research by the New Economics Foundation suggests that up to 15,000 jobs could be displaced from regions outside London and the south-east, harming regional airport capacity. Many Members are rightly fighting for such growth in their regions. It was previously claimed that expansion could be funded entirely from private investment, but that is simply not the case. There are real concerns about burdens on taxpayers. Just last week, Heathrow told the Transport Committee that it does not intend to cover the full cost of rail infrastructure. Time and again, we see taxpayers in London and elsewhere in the UK pick up the price for Heathrow-related travel. The new Elizabeth line trains, which are being built and will be rolled out soon, will not serve West Drayton, my constituents or constituents between Reading and Maidenhead, because the capacity is going to serve Heathrow, but the airport is providing no money. The headlines about expansion tell us one thing, but Heathrow bosses admit to another. We risk pressing ahead with an incredibly expensive and financially dubious infrastructure project not because it offers a credible path to growth but because it has become a symbol of whether we are committed to growth in an abstract form. We saw that with HS2. Although rail expansion and capacity are undoubtedly needed in the country, we pushed ahead with a project that was poorly scoped, poorly costed and poorly specced, and it led to decades of underperformance and cost inflation. As Members have said, the evidence falls flat on the other tests too. On the noise impact, a huge number of people will be pulled into increased noise and disruption across London, although the flight paths are still uncertain, so we cannot be sure about the exact scope and extent. The costs of mitigating noise impacts, with secondary glazing or replacement housing, are potentially exponential, and we still do not know how they will be paid or who will pay for them. The Climate Change Committee’s work, published last month, found that aviation emissions had more than doubled since 1990, and that Heathrow currently accounted for half of all UK aviation emissions. It concluded there is no credible pathway for Heathrow expansion to be compatible with the UK’s vital climate commitments under current policies. Meanwhile, on air pollution, serious concerns remain over the reliability of modelling and whether the impact of the latest expansion proposals has been sufficiently assessed. Frankly, there is no point standing on a commitment to these four tests as criteria for shaping the future of Heathrow, if the moment they are not met, we abandon them. It is not something I can do while looking my constituents squarely in the face. For many of us, Heathrow expansion is a perennial issue that should be dealt with, so we do not have to keep on talking about it. For residents in Hillingdon and London, the impacts will be profound, with the case as shaky now as it has ever been. That has been compounded by what can only be described as an incredibly poor consultation process, which failed to engage properly with the strength of feeling on the issue, with consultations taking place in August, despite many stakeholders, including me, outlining the difficulty of securing proper engagement over the summer. Heathrow’s own consultation that is taking place as we speak, with have no events in my constituency, despite its neighbouring the airport. Perhaps Heathrow does not want to hear questions because, as we have seen time and again, it does not have the answer to meeting the four tests. We must take our time and think fully about the implications of expansion. We must have access to proper data that is thought through. I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Putney in calling for a proper national strategy about our aviation needs, which thinks holistically about every region and every aspect of our nation’s aviation needs. We must think again on Heathrow expansion.