Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Scrutiny of the draft Heathrow Expansion National Policy Statement, HC 482
Wednesday 9 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 9 September 2026.
Members present: Ruth Cadbury (Chair); Dr Scott Arthur; Jacob Collier; Daniel Francis; Olly Glover.
Questions 244-279
Witnesses
II: Gordon Dewar, Chief Executive, Edinburgh Airport; Christopher Snelling, Policy Director, Airports UK.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Gordon Dewar and Christopher Snelling.
Chair: Welcome to our second panel and particular thanks for coming, given that the past 24 hours have been particularly stressful for your staff and, I guess, for your members as well. Please will you introduce yourselves, starting with Christopher?
Christopher Snelling: Hello. I am Christopher Snelling. I am director of policy at AirportsUK, the trade body representing the UK airports. We represent over 50 airports across the whole UK, from Heathrow down to some very small aerodromes, including Edinburgh and all the other airports you would expect.
Gordon Dewar: I am Gordon Dewar, chief executive of Edinburgh airport.
Q244 Chair: Welcome. In written evidence, we have seen an argument that the Government are lacking a strategic policy that covers all UK airports. Do you agree? If so, what are the consequences?
Gordon Dewar: Yes, we do agree. There is not really a coherent message about how we want to get the best benefits from aviation—and that covers all aspects of aviation. Obviously, I will focus on some specifics around the Edinburgh model. The way the Heathrow expansion is being approached not only does not have any answers for other airports, but threatens to consume all the resource, energy and money available, to the detriment of opportunities elsewhere.
Christopher Snelling: There is planning policy in place for the expansion of other airports. We have had expansions at other airports go through recently, and we have the “making best use” policy in place. That is due for a review, and we want that process to go ahead. Gordon makes a valid point that we should not allow any one policy project to swallow up the resource. The Department needs to continue to resource the planning and development policy for other airports around the UK as well, but that should be perfectly doable. It is just a question of internal resource prioritisation and not making a mistake about this.
Q245 Olly Glover: In the context of your remarks, do you feel that the draft Heathrow expansion national policy statement takes enough account of the wider question of UK airport capacity as a whole system?
Christopher Snelling: For me, I would say it is a Heathrow expansion statement. It does what it is supposed to do, which is to look at the question of Heathrow expansion. There are separate questions for us outside of the HENPS about ensuring that we have the system in place to deliver airport expansion across the UK properly. It is still too expensive, costly and uncertain a process everywhere. We need to work to improve that. We continue to be in dialogue with the Department about how to do that.
Our members in general would say that it is not something that should be addressed through the HENPS, because that is supposed to be about Heathrow, and it should be. A lot of that work will carry on outside of that. However, to go back to the previous point, it is important that work continues and is not blocked by the focus on Heathrow as well.
Gordon Dewar: Very similarly, we are very supportive of the hub operation at Heathrow, and we have heard from the previous witnesses about what British Airways, IAG and others do through the hub. That is important. Edinburgh to Heathrow is the largest single route we have and obviously that gives connectivity opportunities to a very broad network beyond that.
For us, it is more about the diversion of effort and energy. We have already been extremely successful over recent years in developing our network, both short haul and long haul. We think that is evidence that many other airports around the UK could deliver improved connectivity. Of course, we include other London airports in that, where capacity exists and additional capacity could be delivered more cheaply and reliably.
The real issue is that we do not believe the Heathrow proposals are affordable or deliverable. As you have heard from other witnesses, passengers will ultimately pick up the price. There is also Heathrow’s track record on delivery, and its reliance on so many other agencies to deliver surface access—supposedly at the cost of the airport, but it is unclear how that would be harnessed.
The other aspect is that it just distracts from everything else. We have heard some very good questioning around the importance of airspace change from the Committee and some good responses from previous witnesses. We are already picking up delays on a well-established and well-progressed airspace change programme in Scotland. That affects Glasgow as well, simply because NATS, the agency responsible for designing high-level airspace change, has been asked to look at Heathrow and it decided to prioritise that. That is just one small example of the implications of when everything gets distracted by what we think is an undeliverable project that has been rumbling on in one shape or form now for about 25 years.
Q246 Daniel Francis: I will start with Christopher. Has the scope of the NPS limited the options considered for achieving the Government’s objectives—for example, the creation of a second hub in the north of England?
Christopher Snelling: Obviously, as the airports trade body for all UK airports, we look at the commonality of interest across them. It is not necessarily for us to pronounce on the correct commercial model for airports. However, with the knowledge we have of how it works, there is no prospect of building a hub airport in the north of Britain. There is no prospect of having two hubs in Britain, because that is not how the economics of hubs work. As a hub, Heathrow is in competition with Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and now Istanbul and the middle east.
On that hub model, as we heard from the previous panel, for that aspect of their business, the competition is with airports in other countries, not with airports in this country. That is not to say that in the Venn diagram of these things there are not some overlaps. There are some services where Heathrow is in competition with Edinburgh or Gatwick, and sometimes for short haul with other airports as well, but for the specific hub airport model, Heathrow will be the hub that we have, and it will be a question of how good that hub is.
Gordon Dewar: For me, being successful is about listening to your customer base, and our customer base is, first and foremost, the airlines as well as the passengers. I do not see any appetite for an airline to be created or an existing airline to create a new hub. If somebody wants to do it, that would be fantastic—I do not see any problem with it. We are hub-agnostic. First, we want to deliver direct connectivity wherever we can, and secondly, we want to give the maximum opportunity to connect to every other hub—or every hub that we can connect to—as much as possible. That gives the widest possible opportunity to our passenger base and gives the widest exposure from us to other airlines that offer something different to the consumer and better connectivity for Edinburgh and Scotland.
Q247 Jacob Collier: We had a discussion during the last panel about hub airports, and some stakeholders have said that the aviation industry is moving away from that hub model. Are hubs still the best way to maintain passenger and freight connectivity?
Christopher Snelling: I think it is important in that debate, when you are thinking about changing the industry, not to make the mistake of thinking it is a black and white thing. The proportion of direct traffic versus hub traffic may change; the proportion of business travel versus leisure may change—but it will change within a range. The reality will still exist: we will still have hubs, they will serve a particular kind of market, that will still be very important and Britain will still be in the position of having a hub in London that will be the quality that it is, and to a certain extent, is in competition with foreign countries. That is the situation we have to deal with.
Q248 Jacob Collier: How do you think that might change over the next 30 years, or is it difficult to say at the moment?
Christopher Snelling: We are not experts in the commercial projection for airports, because we are a voice connecting airports with public policy and Government. We have all heard the debate saying, “It will change,” but my point is that it will change in a proportion. None of that changes the underlying picture that hubs will remain a feature of the aviation system, and they will remain a very important feature. They are a feature where, if Britain did not have a hub any more, we would significantly suffer.
Q249 Jacob Collier: Gordon, do you want to add anything on that?
Gordon Dewar: To take the example of Edinburgh, from 2012 to today, we have gone from one long-haul direct connection, which was New York back then, to 18 today. That makes a massive difference to the convenience for passengers, and it lowers the carbon and cost for them to get to their destinations. But even that huge expansion is clearly only to a very small proportion of major cities around the world where we know there is demand to get to and from—in fact, it is “from”, because over 50% of our long-haul traffic is inbound, which is really important for the economy of Scotland and the UK.
That is just a reflection that you can never be connected to everything. I think it is about maximising connection, and hub operations are always going to be a key part of that where they bring together lots of thinner routes and create a critical mass that allows them to serve that. Inevitably, particularly on long haul, you will be flying into two of the major cities in a country like China, for example, if you are a regional airport like Edinburgh—we do not like being called “regional” as the capital city, but I will take that label for the moment. We accept that, if you are going to some of the other smaller cities in China, that is going to be via somebody’s hub, whether it is a Chinese, London or European hub.
Q250 Dr Arthur: Christopher, I think you are right in that hubs will exist and we are going to have to continue to have airports like Edinburgh that have point-to-point connections, which people want. But they do not exist independently: they can even help each other, to a certain extent, but there is a real risk. I do not know how many of Gordon’s 18 flights he has simply because those flights could not run from London, so they have come to Edinburgh instead. Is there something that the Government can do to ensure that, while Heathrow thrives as a hub, our regional airports can still have point-to-point connections? I do not want them to fiddle the market too much, but do we need to protect our regional airports so that they can thrive as well?
Christopher Snelling: It is worth saying that it is a competitive market in the UK; there is a good, thriving airport market. If you did not have the flights we would gain through the Heathrow expansion in this country, a portion of those flights might go to another London airport, such as Gatwick, or to Edinburgh, but it would be a proportion of those flights. A much larger proportion would be lost to the UK and would go to the foreign hubs. Overall, the UK would lose out.
In terms of what we should do for regional airports, we should always look at how you maximise a proposition. Not maximising one proposition because you want to help something else is always a fairly inefficient way of going about making something work. The best way to make regional airports work is to make regional airports work. They need a planning system that provides certainty and fast responses and is relatively low cost, so that they can plan expansions and gain the confidence of the UK tax system to leverage investment, expand their airports, improve services and lower costs.
Particularly in regional airports, that cost is absolutely vital. Whereas at Heathrow you will have a queue of airlines waiting to get in because they can make a lot of money there and it is quite straightforward if you have a slot, a lot of regional airports will spend an awful lot of their time and money going to airlines trying to encourage them to fly out of their airport. They need a very commercially competitive environment. That is where you get into issues about business rates, aviation taxation, the support for decarbonisation and particularly about certainty for the future and whether we have a good environment for that. There is a raft of things you can do to improve regional connectivity and regional airport growth.
We have to remember that the Heathrow expansion has, in some elements, competition with other airports on the long-haul routes, but in other elements, it is a complementary service to regional airports because it is the connectivity into both the hub and London that a lot of those regional airports want. That is why quite a few of the airports are very supportive of the Heathrow expansion. That supports a lot of the regional model as well.
Q251 Chair: Christopher, I did ask the witnesses about this in the last session, and we got an answer around freight, but have you or anyone you are aware of done analysis of the cost to the UK plc of runway 3 not going ahead, particularly in terms of the hub element? Everybody talks about the hub being important, and there is no doubt that that that is true at the moment, but is it the end of the world for connectivity if runway 3 does not go ahead? Have you done that analysis in numerical terms?
Christopher Snelling: We have not done that analysis because we are a national trade body for all airports, so we do not take an interest in the commercial side of any one proposition. That would be something for Heathrow to take a view on, or potentially other business groups that are more focused on that.
We would say that one of the weaknesses of the NPS is how it does not take account of the full range of the economic benefits that would come from this example of airport growth. We have to remember that, even compared with what we were talking about in the first session, a wider set of issues is also being missed. In the long run, for Britain to be connected in the global economy and seen as a leading place to do business, it needs very high-quality connectivity, both for freight and business travel.
Chair: We get that. I was just asking if you have a numerical figure for that, but don’t worry.
Gordon Dewar: The big concern is that nobody is against the principle of the hub operation, but a £65 charge per passenger is not delivering anything that we want because it will be unviable for airlines. The biggest threat to our connectivity to Heathrow would be an expansion of Heathrow that results in a £65 charge per passenger, because we would not manage to sustain the connection that we have, and British Airways would not be able to make a success of that. I find it quite astounding that you have just about the entire customer base of Heathrow saying that they do not want its proposition. I cannot remember ever hearing a proposition by a company that is ignoring and going against the wishes of its customers and expecting to have a good outcome.
Chair: Okay.
Q252 Jacob Collier: Christopher, you said that there is no prospect of any other airport becoming a hub airport. In effect, it is Heathrow that will remain the UK’s hub airport. What do you think will be the impact of that on resilience across the UK, with Heathrow being our only hub airport?
Christopher Snelling: I do not think it is a question of the hub model having that kind of overlap with resilience. The hub model is used across the world. That is the way aviation works and the way that the economics of the industry work to maximise service. Without the hub model, you would simply have quite a lot less aviation. What you need is a resilient network. We have to remember that aviation is never just a domestic activity; it is part of a global network. You need the resilience in terms of good-quality airport infrastructure around the country to help with problems.
Again, if you look at Heathrow specifically, it has runways that have massively high utilisation, and that intrinsically comes with difficulties for resilience, which Heathrow has to manage. That is partly why there is the cost base involved in running Heathrow: because it runs to an incredibly high utilisation of its runways. Other airports are constrained by their terminal or surface access capabilities, whatever it might be. There are a variety of different things. But in terms of runways, it is Heathrow that is the most constrained, somewhat followed by Gatwick, but at a lesser level.
Jacob Collier: Gordon is shaking his head. I will let him respond in a second.
Christopher Snelling: Resilience is very important, but resilience is about the total capacity of the system. That does not necessarily mean the same thing as the commercial model. The hub is a commercial model to optimise the use of flights; it is not necessarily an either/or about resilience.
Gordon Dewar: The focus on resilience, affordability and delivery is the right answer. If you look at Heathrow’s track record, it does not perform very well in any of them. Effectively, they are not the highest utilised runways—Gatwick has by far and away the highest utilised runway on the planet and is doing it at significantly lower cost overall than Heathrow manages. As an example, comparing what we do and what Heathrow does, we are doing 650 passengers per hour, per lane in security, and Heathrow is doing less than a third of that with identical equipment. I would suggest there is lots more that we could do on ensuring that Heathrow tries to live up to some semblance of affordability, resilience and efficiency before we start allowing it to print blank cheques and expecting its customer base to pay the bills that it does not want to.
Q253 Jacob Collier: If the third runway does go ahead, there will be a huge amount of disruption in the aviation sector. Has that been adequately taken into account in this national policy statement?
Gordon Dewar: I am not sure it would necessarily reflect disruption. If the two existing runways keep operating smoothly while the construction goes on, I do not think that we would see that as particularly disruptive. However, I do think there are better options, whether it is Luton, Stansted, Gatwick or Manchester airports declaring an interest. We can keep connectivity through Heathrow and as a point-to-point market to London as we go through this. It is more about the end state and whether it is worth doing if it is unaffordable at the end.
Christopher Snelling: Your point about disruption goes back to some of the points that Gordon was making earlier about the total focus on the sector of the Department and the CAA and NATS. It needs to ensure that it resources the support and the question for Heathrow expansion appropriately, but that must not come at the expense of supporting the service to all the other airports in the UK as well.
That goes back to an issue, possibly the most important one—as Gordon mentioned—about the delivery of airspace modernisation. There needs to be a massive, continued focus on that across Government to deliver across the UK. We have important areas in Scotland and the north of England, as well as London and the west of England, that all need to be deployed and we need to ensure that resourcing continues to go into all those areas to make sure that we deliver across the country. That should be perfectly doable; it is just a question of departmental will.
Chair: Scott, do you have any questions on the impact on other UK airports? Some of the questions have probably been addressed, but is there anything else you want to pick up on?
Q254 Dr Arthur: Do you think the Government, in their approach, are thinking enough about the impact on other airports? I raised the point earlier about perhaps losing flights or changing the flight profile to and from those airports—are the Government considering that enough as part of the HENPS process?
Gordon Dewar: As Chris said at the start, this is a Bill for Heathrow, and it should address what Heathrow needs and what the benefits are. The only significant concern I have around Heathrow, other than if the price becomes prohibitive and we lose that connection to the hub or the hub starts to deteriorate—that is bad for everyone, including us and Scotland—is around the distraction: if this becomes all-consuming as the only game in town for aviation development, we are leaving so many other opportunities on the table.
We believe we have lots more room to expand direct connectivity in long haul and short haul. We believe that there is so much more that we can do in the policy environment around things like APD, around training and skills to ensure that people are employable, and around creating the conditions for this enormous engine—Edinburgh airport alone contributes £2.7 billion of GVA and tens of thousands of jobs across Scotland, all driven by the growth that we have managed to sustain over the last 15 years. That has been done almost without any direct intervention or support from either the Scottish or UK Government, I would argue. In fact, most things have been negative in terms of cost increases, whether it is business rates or APD and so on.
I would encourage people to think about where Heathrows sits in the context of the wider aviation market. If it becomes too all-consuming or undeliverable, as we worry about, or unaffordable, as the airlines are clearly worried about, then let us make sure we are not missing the other opportunities.
Q255 Dr Arthur: In terms of growth in regional airports, you mentioned growth in Edinburgh specifically. The witness in our previous panel from easyJet said there were concerns there as well; you might have heard her saying that she thought Edinburgh was full and could not expand.
Gordon Dewar: We have never turned an airline away yet, and it is certainly not my intention. We are growing. We have been very tight in places, but we are just embarking on one of the largest ever investment strategies in the history of the airport. I am very confident that while it is tight, we will get ahead of that and continue to offer fantastic opportunities for airlines to serve Edinburgh and Scotland and be very successful.
Q256 Dr Arthur: Christopher, have you looked at what the impact would be on regional airports in terms of their viability, ultimately, but also the service they are providing to their current customers? They must have their own growth plans that were quite happily being delivered until the Chancellor made her announcement.
Christopher Snelling: The airports do have growth plans. We see growth in the sector. All the forecasts are for continued growth. In these very difficult economic times, aviation is a potential massive success story for the UK. It is a potential massive growth area. If Government allow us to expand and improve our service, and if Government do not get in the way, aviation can be a massive success for the UK. Heathrow is one example of that. Gatwick also recently got permission to bring a second runway into use. Luton has an expansion. It works in other areas. It can work.
This is not an either/or between, should we be allowing Heathrow or should we be developing elsewhere? As I have said, from my understanding, the majority of the benefit through the traffic we could gain at the hub airport at Heathrow, we would lose to foreign airports if we do not go ahead with that expansion, so it is about a total loss.
I think it is worth remembering that we are talking here about giving permission for a private developer to develop this very significant piece of infrastructure. This is not a question of where taxpayer money should go. This is about allowing a private company to invest in our transport infrastructure. That is something that is always in the UK interest holistically, and it is something we should always support.
The best approach to this is to support the Heathrow expansion, as the Gatwick expansion was supported and as Luton was supported, and to support the regional airports with what they need as well. The forecast for growth in this country that the DFT works to includes Heathrow expansion, but the Heathrow expansion does not take it all up; there is expansion left for all the other airports as well. As I say, although there are some cases where it is competitive with other airports on long haul, it is complementary for many other airports, because it enables their growth by allowing them to have flights to Heathrow in the future.
Q257 Dr Arthur: When regional airports look at what is proposed, if nothing changes—you were talking about business rates and air duty earlier—is it an opportunity or does it concern them? I am guessing that they had growth plans previously, so this is a big disruptor for them.
Christopher Snelling: Airports operate in a commercial environment where they work with and compete with each other, so you will hear a variety of different opinions. Gordon is here to express Edinburgh’s point of view. Other airports, whether it is Leeds or Newcastle, or very small airports such as Newquay, are on record saying that Heathrow expansion would bring very significant positives to their airports—
Q258 Dr Arthur: So there will not be growing calls to reduce business rates, cut APD and so on. That will not be necessary for these airports to benefit from what is happening.
Christopher Snelling: There is generally a very significant problem for airports in England, and now some in Scotland, with business rates, which effects all kinds of questions about the viability of future investments. I do not think it is necessarily relevant to something of the scale of the third runway question—
Dr Arthur: So it is not going to increase those calls.
Q259 Chair: Although Heathrow also has the challenge of an unexplained massive increase in business rates.
Christopher Snelling: Heathrow faces that challenge, just as others do, but I would have to leave Heathrow to comment on whether it affects their plans in this instance specifically. The business rates problem that we still face, with airport bills proposed to multiply by more than four times over the next few years unless we get Treasury support, will have a massive effect on the ability of airports to leverage capital investment to invest in growing. That is certainly a problem across England, and we are now seeing it in Scotland as well.
Q260 Chair: In a nutshell, what has changed? Ten or 12 years ago, the regional airports were four-square behind Heathrow’s expansion proposals. This time, they are not. Why?
Gordon Dewar: I am not sure that we were all behind Heathrow. I do not remember ever being supportive of Heathrow, personally—
Q261 Chair: That was the impression we got as MPs. We were lobbied heavily by Christopher’s members—maybe not all of them.
Gordon Dewar: Some of them—absolutely. I agree that most were in favour. What is different here is the understanding about affordability and deliverability. I think that most regional airports, if they thought that they could keep the existing pricing at Heathrow and there would be additional capacity that offered an opportunity for improved connectivity, would still be in favour. But if they sit back and say, “Would that come at a £65 charge per passenger?”, and, “It might take 10 or 15 years to deliver,” I think their enthusiasm would significantly wane.
We need to listen to the very airlines that would have to be responsible for delivering it. Building a runway does not create a connection; it is the airline that does it. So when the airlines are saying that it is unviable, I think that we should listen to them.
Christopher Snelling: It is worth repeating that there is still considerable support from some airports around the country for the Heathrow proposal. But airports are in a competitive commercial mix, so they will have opinions about each other and their development plans that they would quite rightly express directly to you, so it is not so much an issue for me to get into.
Chair: Is there anything still to ask on domestic connectivity, Scott?
Q262 Dr Arthur: We have covered this to a certain extent, but can we be confident that an expanded Heathrow will provide additional connectivity to regional airports? We talked earlier about whether the Government should ringfence slots at Heathrow to make sure that we get the connecting flights. We acknowledge that although it needs those connecting flights, it might not be the most lucrative for the airport, so should there be some kind of ringfencing? Should the Government be a bit more interventionist in how they protect the key benefit of expanding Heathrow?
Christopher Snelling: On the question of whether that system would work, you would have to refer to Heathrow for some of the specifics. The general point I want to make is that we are talking a lot about the affordability of the development, but you have to remember that, whichever way the money is recouped, there is an enormous raising of capital to fund this project. Anything that puts more restrictions and inflexibility on how that is deployed in future prevents the commercial return on it and adds inherently to risk. Again, you have to remember that, generally speaking, the investors in our airports are raising money on global markets, where they have a choice about where to invest. In some ways, the UK is seen as quite a risky place to invest because of the very high levels of business taxation and a very uncertain planning system. Anything that suggests the Government are going to make the decisions for you or to take control, or that the Secretary of State for Transport gets to decide where the flights go, will make international investors incredibly nervous.
Q263 Dr Arthur: But the Government’s objective here is to grow the economy; it is not to increase the number of people who are travelling through Heathrow and only buying a cup of coffee at best. Their objective is to grow the economy, not to maximise return for shareholders, whoever or wherever they are. The Government really have to deliver on their objective, which might mean being a bit more interventionist in terms of making sure regional airports are protected.
Christopher Snelling: I reiterate that this is a private development funded by investors, not by the taxpayer. The default position should be that if a private developer wants to develop, we should support them, and then it is a question of whether there is a reason not to.
Q264 Dr Arthur: We were out at the airport just last week and we went around the perimeter. You can see that the current airport has a big impact, as any airport does, on the surrounding areas—on everything from a community farm through to people living in nearby housing estates and so on. The Government cannot let the operators and the airport just let rip and make as much money as possible. There has to be some regulation.
Christopher Snelling: Those are the questions that then have to be asked. Of course we have to go through how appropriate the development is and all the conditions for carbon, noise and local environmental impacts, but if you start from the position that private investment in developing our infrastructure is a good thing and we should enable it if possible, you are looking at it the right way. Then it becomes a series of checks, to say, “And is this the right way?” I repeat my point that if you get into a position where the Secretary of State for Transport gets to decide where flights go from an airport, international investors are not going to look on this country as a very good place to invest their money.
Q265 Dr Arthur: How about you, Gordon? Is there a balance to be sought here?
Gordon Dewar: I have a lot of sympathy for the objective of your question—about how we make sure we can spread the benefits of this huge expansion and this singular hub around the country—but I also share Chris’s concerns about the unintended consequences of regulation. Theoretically, you could argue that that would be an issue only when the third runway capacity is getting consumed and it is beyond capacity again—when it might start squeezing out domestic, that hopefully would be viable, at the expense of higher yielding long haul. That would be the risk at the end state of the third runway.
But I would come back to first principles: these things have to be viable in themselves. We should be focused on making sure that whatever project gets delivered offers a viable investment both for the capital side and, equally and probably more importantly, for the airlines that actually operate in and out of Heathrow and offer the genuine economic benefits that we are looking for. Again, I come back to the £65. It does not matter if you are reserving space for an Inverness to Heathrow flight. At 65 quid, nobody’s flying it.
Q266 Dr Arthur: You are right: you can offer a fantastic slot, but if that is the cost, maybe people do not want it. You mentioned Heathrow filling up after the third runway. We hear a lot about resilience, and one of the issues is that Heathrow is not currently resilient because it chooses to use up all its capacity. With a third runway, do you think capacity should be reserved just for resilience, so we would never get to the crazy state where we are basically running things at well over 95% capacity? Because it is a piece of national infrastructure, do you think some capacity should be reserved for resilience?
Gordon Dewar: I would start by saying let’s not run at capacity in the first place, and let’s have a strategy that keeps ahead of the demand curve. I think we all agree on the economic benefits of growing aviation. If we are dealing with the environmental stuff—sustainability, noise and all the things that we are acutely aware are the downsides of aviation if we are not clever—why would we want to constrain ourselves in capacity? Letting every airport deliver what it can for the benefit of its local communities and the economy is the right answer.
I do not think you should let it get to that stage, but it is not necessarily about more capacity at Heathrow. London is a complex network of multiple airports, all of which can play a role in making sure that we get the best out of the overall system. Letting each of them do what they are good at is probably a big part of the answer.
Christopher Snelling: I can totally see where you are coming from, in terms of the theoretical point of view about resilience, but it is worth saying that Heathrow’s runways are completely full today.
Dr Arthur: By choice?
Christopher Snelling: Yes, because it is a commercial business that seeks to make money and to benefit the UK as much as possible by using its asset. It manages that on a resilience basis that is comparable to the other airports. That takes a huge amount of effort from Heathrow, and it is part of the cost base of the airport.
Dr Arthur: I think the electrical episode showed that maybe we should question its approach to resilience.
Q267 Chair: This really comes in more frequently when there are weather incidents. An airline ops manager at Heathrow said, “I wouldn’t mind a third runway, but more to give me that resilience when we have problems, rather than to be able to run a load more flights through it.”
Christopher Snelling: There is always a balance to be struck between resilience and the commercial operation of the airport, both for the airport’s sake and for the benefit that it delivers to the locality, the region and the country. You have to maximise the use of your asset.
But Heathrow is achieving resilience levels; the electrical issue was a particular thing that was not a Heathrow piece of equipment, and was not related to runway capacity, obviously. You can run a resilient airport with a high utilisation of runway. That comes with increased cost, which is part of the reason why Heathrow has the charges that it does. But, in principle, expanding the infrastructure in this way, for that kind of thing, is always a good approach, as you are either improving the commercial service that it offers or improving resilience, or doing both.
Q268 Chair: Going back to domestic connectivity, the draft policy statement has some words about retaining domestic connectivity. Obviously a very small number of routes, such as Belfast, are public service routes and are funded by the taxpayer, but I do not see the Government expanding those. Do you think that the policy statement says enough about how to protect domestic connectivity against the demand at Heathrow for more flights to and from long-haul destinations?
Christopher Snelling: We are certainly not looking for that to change. We have quite a few airport members around the country that are supportive of the expansion proposals and the HENPS as it stands, as they believe that the consequence will be that they benefit through increased access to Heathrow.
Q269 Chair: Do they believe that they can afford to get access, given that it is £65—
Christopher Snelling: The question of the charges is not really an issue that we engage in, because it becomes a more commercial matter.
Q270 Chair: And it is not affecting your members directly; it is their customers—the airlines—so that is not filtering through to you.
Christopher Snelling: It would be the airlines, obviously, that are negotiating on paying that charge, but we certainly do not have a universal position from the other airports that that simply does not work; it is a much more nuanced position, depending on the views of the individual airports. There are airports with views on both sides.
Q271 Chair: Gordon, from your perspective, do you think the draft policy statement is strong enough on protecting domestic connectivity?
Gordon Dewar: I do not have a view on the statement, but I come back to viability: if the airlines are saying that they will not fly at £65, I think you should pay attention to that. It is about creating capacity for viable services. If the statement was more focused on making it viable for airlines to be successful, that should do. Of course, there is nothing to stop the Government stepping in and doing public service subsidies for specific outlying routes—there is lots of that going on in the Scottish islands, for example, and we are supportive of that. That is probably a more efficient and targeted way of using resources where something is not viable.
However, if we are actually designing a system to destroy viability by allowing £65 from the start, I think we are going to have a bigger problem. Chris is quite right in saying that there is not a shared voice among all airports, but from the session earlier today I think there is pretty much a shared voice from all the airlines.
Q272 Jacob Collier: Do you have a view on the runway length, Chris? Airports UK has some freight members or associates, such as FedEx, DHL and UPS, and we have heard that the Heathrow West proposal would not allow wide-body freight aircraft. Do you as an organisation have a view on which proposal you support?
Christopher Snelling: We speak for airports and airports only.
Q273 Chair: But presumably some of your airport members are predominantly or significantly freight airports?
Christopher Snelling: Heathrow does the majority of the air freight in the country, as we have heard, so you have substantial operations. East Midlands is probably the only airport that would describe itself as predominantly, or a specialist in, freight, but other airports do quite a bit with the dedicated freighters.
Because runway length is a project-specific issue, we would not make a specific pronouncement on exactly what length it should be. However, we take the general position that our history in this country is one of not developing transport infrastructure very well and not building enough or soon enough. In general, we are better off building the biggest, best piece of infrastructure we can get and then utilising it, if that is in our long-term interest. The specifics on exactly what should be done and what the costs are in this project are more a matter for Heathrow specifically, so we would not pronounce on those.
Chair: But did you not say earlier in this session that you think runway 3 is undeliverable?
Christopher Snelling: No.
Jacob Collier: I think that was Gordon.
Q274 Chair: It was Gordon? I do apologise, Christopher. Gordon, you said that it was undeliverable. Why did you say that?
Gordon Dewar: As it stands, the proposal involves huge diversions to the M25, knocking down villages and filling in ponds. It is more based on the recent history—I say recent; it is probably the last 40 years—of Heathrow not delivering on its many attempts to do a third runway in one shape or form, and our pretty woeful record in the UK more generally on doing major infrastructure projects on programme cost or at all.
The profound thing is the affordability of it, and who, in the end, will pick up the tab. That is before you get into the risks, which are still not bottomed out, that previous witnesses talked about, around what happens if there are cost overruns, and shifting the M25 and so on. Track record says that this is an improbable project to deliver, because we have tried multiple times before and have failed every time.
Q275 Chair: Thank you, and again, apologies to Christopher. If none of my colleagues have any other questions, I will close. Would either of you like to comment on anything else in the draft Heathrow expansion national policy statement, or on anything raised by the previous panel?
Christopher Snelling: For us, the main frustration and failure in the HENPS is about how it assesses the economic benefits of the proposal. If you assessed any airport development in this way, it would significantly underestimate the benefits involved. It does not incorporate freight or properly understand the benefits for trade. It is a massive failure within the Department to not have been able to quantify and include those, and it leads to some misleadingly low figures around the economic benefits of the expansion. Airport development is vital across the country, and it can be delivered only if we fully understand the range of benefits involved. The Government really need to do more work to fully articulate and understand the range of benefits that any of these projects would bring.
Q276 Dr Arthur: The flip side is that that is also the case for some of the impacts. I do not know whether you watched our meeting yesterday, but we heard real concerns about how the noise impact and the air quality impact were being considered. I am not trying to put words in your mouth, but surely if we are going for the gold standard in measuring the benefits, we have to do the same for the consequences.
Christopher Snelling: Absolutely. In some ways, those are two separate things, and you have to get them both right. At the moment, we do not have a sufficiently good understanding of the benefits in metrics—it is an inaccurate one.
Dr Arthur: Or the disbenefits.
Chair: Yes, and for other things.
Christopher Snelling: It is the social costs as well—they all need measuring. I would make the additional point, however, that with a lot of the social costs, limiting the size of the infrastructure is usually a pretty bad way to manage the impacts. A lot of the work that can be done, especially around decarbonisation, needs to be done whether you expand Heathrow or not. If we do not transition aviation to net zero, we fail; if we do, we succeed. Restricting the size of airport infrastructure is a very inefficient way to try to achieve those objectives.
Q277 Chair: We picked up on the risks at the end of the previous session. Heathrow has a completely different funding model—and, therefore, risk-based model—to all your other members, which decide whether and how to grow, what their customer base will be, the price points and costs, and all that. Is there a risk with Heathrow that the building goes ahead, and then the airlines say, “We can’t afford it”? How would that impact the benefits of expansion that you are alluding to?
Christopher Snelling: Again, I cannot get into the commercials of the specific Heathrow project, because I speak for all airports.
Chair: The question is more about the model.
Christopher Snelling: Looking at it as a matter of principle, Heathrow will obviously be looking at that as part of ensuring the commercial viability of the project. You have to remember the price-setting regulation for Heathrow, which we have talked about today, is there to protect the airlines. Heathrow is not allowed to charge commercially what it could for its space. Those charges would be much higher in the private market, but to protect the airlines, the consumer and the British national interest, there is a regulation to prevent it from doing that.
Q278 Chair: So it is not a risk to other airports; it is just a different way of looking at it.
Christopher Snelling: Yes, and Heathrow carries that risk. If in some doomsday scenario it expanded at a cost that meant its charges were at such a level that all the airlines left, Heathrow would be the one that had spent all the money and not got a commercial return.
Q279 Chair: Okay; thank you. What is your last word, Gordon?
Gordon Dewar: I come at that from a slightly different point of view. An interesting outcome of the regulation is that we have ended up with the most expensive airport in the world; that does not sound like the best protection for their airlines. The only reason they might be able to charge more is that we have created scarcity value. Where airports, like other major hubs around the world, have capacity, they do not and could not charge that. We are basically getting the worst of both worlds: a very expensive airport that costs our consumers, our freight carriers and our airlines; and less economic value because the capacity constrains it, so we cannot get the maximum out of it.
It comes back to the first principle that all the economic value could be much greater, but that will not come unless the airlines deliver against the capacity benefit. I keep repeating myself, but the airlines are telling us that they will not or cannot pay what they are being expected to. Therefore, if they are right, that economic benefit will not materialise.
Chair: Thank you both very much for the time you spent preparing your evidence. As always, if there is anything that you did not get the chance to say or expand on, please write to us. That concludes today’s meeting.