Heathrow unveils £49b expansion plan including third runway, M25 reroute

LONDON: Heathrow airport has unveiled plans for a £49 billion expansion that includes building a third runway and rerouting Britain’s busiest motorway, telling ministers they needed to ‘clear the way for take-off’.

Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s chief executive, has warned that the facility was currently operating ‘at capacity’ and said it had never been ‘more important or urgent’ to expand Europe’s most-used airport.

The 10-year plan involve spending £21 billion to build a new north-west runway, crossing London’s M25 motorway, and billions of pounds more to expand and modernise Heathrow’s existing terminals.

Heathrow, which is owned by a consortium of investors led by France’s Adrian, proposed diverting the M25 into a new tunnel running underneath the planned third runway and slightly west of the road’s current route.

The airport said the government would have to change the planning, regulatory and other policies that have blocked previous efforts to add an extra runway over the past two decades.

“Our shareholders will need sufficient comfort that necessary policy changes … will be implemented before they are able to greenlight us taking this proposal to a full planning application,” Heathrow said. “The ball is in the government’s court.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who spurred the latest push to expand Heathrow in January, welcomed the proposals saying they would help ‘kick-start economic growth’, according to Financial Times.

“We are one step closer to expanding our biggest airport – boosting investment in Britain increasing trade for businesses, and creating up to 100,000 jobs,” said Reeves.

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Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander also indicated she would make changes to a key planning document that governs airport expansion.

“We’ll consider the proposal carefully over the summer so that we can begin a review of the Airport National Policy Statement later this year,” Alexander said.

Heathrow’s plans, submitted to the government on Thursday, would increase annual passenger capacity by 78 percent to 150 million, from the present 84 million.

The project joins planned expansions of capacity at Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City airports, all of which are likely to make airspace over London busier and increase emissions.

Heathrow wants assurances that air traffic control capacity will be enhanced before it presses ahead. The current system would be unable to handle the volume of traffic an expanded airport would generate.

The airport also wants to ensure that its regulator the Civil Aviation Authority will have no power to cut the fees it charges to airlines partway through construction and harm its ability to fund the work.

Woldbye said that, with the ‘correct policy support”, Heathrow was “ready to mobilise and start investing”. “We are uniquely placed to do this for the country,” he said. “It is time to clear the way for take-off.”

The regulatory demands will infuriate some of the airport’s existing airline customers, who are demanding changes to reduce the charges they pay.

One of the loundest critics – IAG, parent of the airport’s biggest user, British Airways – said it supported expansion of the airport but that it needed to be “affordable for passengers.”

IAG has backed alternative expansion proposals involving a shorter new runway that would not cross the M25.

“Avoiding the need to cross the M25 would remove complexity, reduce costs and help deliver better value for passengers,” IAG said.

A third runway remains politically contentious. Sir Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour mayor, opposes the project on environmental grounds, while the Green Party said the airport’s expansion was “a flightmare on Downing Street for people and the planet.”

The parliament had previously voted overwhelmingly in favour of expansion in 2018. But the project had been delayed by a judicial review battle that Heathrow ultimately won at the Supreme Court in December 2020, by which time Covid-19 had put the project’s viability in question.

Heathrow said its plans were deliverable within 10 years with the right political support.

Government officials said the proposed Heathrow third runway would be a private sector project and would not require public subsidies.