Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Scrutiny of the draft Heathrow Expansion National Policy Statement, HC 482
Tuesday 15 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 September 2026.
Transport Committee members present: Ruth Cadbury (Chair); Steff Aquarone; Dr Scott Arthur; Jacob Collier; Daniel Francis; Alex Mayer.
Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee member present: Ashley Dalton.
Questions 338–389
Witnesses
II: Michael Coughlin, Strategic Adviser, Heathrow Strategic Planning Group; Mark Frost, Associate Director, Heathrow Strategic Planning Group; Ian Thynne, Head of Environmental Planning Specialists, London Borough of Hillingdon; Anna Sutherland Bamber, Council Member, National Infrastructure Planning Association.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Heathrow Strategic Planning Group
– London Borough of Hillingdon
Witnesses: Michael Coughlin, Mark Frost, Ian Thynne and Anna Sutherland Bamber.
Q338 Chair: Welcome to our second panel this afternoon. First of all, could I ask you each to introduce yourselves, starting with Michael?
Michael Coughlin: Good afternoon. I am Michael Coughlin, and I am a strategic adviser to the Heathrow Strategic Planning Group.
Mark Frost: I am Mark Frost, and I am a consultant, working as associate director for the Heathrow Strategic Planning Group.
Q339 Chair: And the strategic planning group is?
Mark Frost: The strategic planning group is a network of nine local authorities. We were set up in 2010 to ensure that there was a strong local authority voice into the Airports Commission’s work at the time, and then we formed a key conduit for the local authorities that were not the host planning authority into the previous development consent order round. We bring together west London and west of London authorities, including Surrey, Berkshire, Ealing and Hounslow. The London borough of Hounslow is our accountable body.
Ian Thynne: I am Ian Thynne, and I am head of environmental planning specialists at the London borough of Hillingdon, the host authority.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: Hello. I am Anna Sutherland Bamber, and I am here representing the National Infrastructure Planning Association.
Q340 Chair: We will have some questions that are specific to you, Anna, and some that will probably be more for the local authority representatives.
I will start with a process question on public consultation. The 10-week public consultation on the draft Heathrow expansion NPS has concluded. How accessible and effective has the consultation been, compared with previous national infrastructure or planning consultations?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I would say that it has been effective. It is in line with the consultation guidelines set by the south, and it follows a very similar format to those that other national policy statements have been through.
Ian Thynne: I am going to disagree with that. Sorry, Anna. It’s not a good start, is it? [Laughter.] The consultation was not up to scratch, as far as we were concerned at Hillingdon. The complexity this time is that so much has changed since the last round of consultation, which was overseen by an independent observer, Sir Jeremy Sullivan. There were independent sessions, 20 DFT-led sessions at a local level and 1 million leaflet drops—various things like that. There was an active interest in getting people involved.
This time round, it was a 10-week consultation, and we did not really know what the DFT did to engage with the communities. They wrote to us in early June to ask us for our views about what they were going to do. We wrote back a week later, and then the consultation kicked off eight days after that, so we do not believe that they took our views on board. As I say, the consultation was not effective enough, and the local authority ended up having to pick up some of the pieces to get people engaged.
Just to complete the picture, the really interesting point this time round is the two development consent order promoters. There really was an opportunity and a need for the DFT to explain how that would work to reduce the confusion among our community, and that was lost.
Q341 Chair: Michael and Mark, you are both from the same organisation, so I will assume that, unless you indicate otherwise, one of you will want to answer.
Michael Coughlin: We are probably somewhere in the middle of the two previous answers. I agree that the public consultation was less extensive and less comprehensive, and therefore less effective. The stakeholder engagement, which we saw through HSPG, with representatives of DFT and through sitting on the CISHA board, looked as if it was stronger than the wider public engagement. Indeed, the timing of the 10 weeks over the summer period contributes to where we tip towards Ian’s comments.
Chair: Okay, thank you. Because he has to get a train up to Edinburgh, I am going to let Scott come in now on biodiversity.
Q342 Dr Arthur: Thank you. The Committee so far has talked about the environment largely through the lens of carbon emissions and other emissions, but do you think the HENPS is enough to think about the wider environmental considerations associated with expansion?
Chair: We are thinking locally, ecologically—water and those sorts of things.
Ian Thynne: Again, no. I think there is an obsession with the four tests, which lose sight of the wider environmental impacts and some of the social impacts as well. It is sort of fair game for the environment around Heathrow, particularly the Colne valley, to be ruined by the expansion. Not only is it going over the top of the M25 with all the problems that brings, but it is putting loads of rivers underneath a concrete corridor, which has never been done before, and the HENPS is fairly silent on that.
As I am sure we will come to, I think this is all predicated on the economic gains, but so much weight is being given to the economic gains that almost anything else is sort of allowable. The residual impacts and the collateral damage are left. I do not think there is sufficient protection in the HENPS for the environment or a lot of the other social aspects.
Mark Frost: Biodiversity is a very important consideration for our members. We are particularly concerned about the impact of culverting on the river ecosystems and what that will mean for the wildlife that uses those river systems. There is obviously a nascent but developing system around biodiversity and net gain, and netting off the impact of these schemes. The primary concern from our members is that where there are impacts on green and blue infrastructure in the area resulting from a scheme, the mitigations should come back to the local area, and at the moment, we do not see any assurances in the HENPS that that is the case. You cannot take significant green space from people who are already largely underserved by access to green space, but say you are mitigating it because you are investing in peat bogs in Cumbria or whatever. We are keen to see significant investment coming back into the area, and that investment should be evidence led. There is quite a lot of work going on in local nature recovery plans, and they form a great basis that the applicants and promoters could use to mitigate any impacts.
Q343 Dr Arthur: That cannot happen like for like though, can it? If you lose a river into some concrete pipe, or there are lakes as well, you are not going to volunteer part of your council area, Ian, to be flooded out to recreate it.
Ian Thynne: In terms of the local impacts, the original plan from 2019—the DCO proposals from Heathrow—placed a lot of the biodiversity net gain on land in and around some of our communities. The local planning authority might have been otherwise looking to do something positive with that land, so it is more of a contrived result of how you ruin biodiversity in one place and then put it back in somewhere else. That needs to be done in a more holistic, place-shaping way with the local authorities, and again, the HENPS does not really put in place the guardrails for that to happen. There are plenty of opportunities throughout the Colne valley, which should be a focus area, but they are being lost among this sudden need to deliver the 10% net gain, for example.
Q344 Dr Arthur: It does talk about replacement habitats, but not about what should happen if those fail to deliver.
Mark Frost: We will keep coming back to the implications of not performing in terms of mitigation or not achieving the targets that have been set—you touched on it in the last panel. At best they are opaque, and in many cases they are simply missing. That is why we expect and are looking for an overarching governance of environmentally controlled growth, which ensures that the applicant is held to account for what they have targeted, with real consequences.
I think Alex Williams made the comment about Gatwick airport providing a model here. Luton, in many ways, goes much beyond what happened at Gatwick. It seems strange, given that that was signed off by the Secretary of State, that we do not have learnings from that in this document. It does not talk about biodiversity net gain in that respect, but it could easily form the basis for adding biodiversity in with carbon, air quality, noise and surface access.
Michael Coughlin: There is an issue in here about quantity as well as quality. Replacing areas of land, as we have talked about, at a quantum level is one thing; the quality of the biodiversity and the habitats would be captured in something like an environmental controlled growth plan agreement, where we could capture that and hold the promoter to account for the quality as well as the quantity.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: There are two different issues here that we are trying to determine. It is whether there should be another test within the four tests. Obviously, the NPS goes through biodiversity net gain, it goes through a process, it puts in more detail than there have been in other NPSs, if you were to confirm, and it updates the existing legislation. Several DCO projects, going back to the early 2020s, have had to put in assurances around biodiversity net gain, despite its not being a legislative requirement and target at that stage.
It is not an easy test to meet, and a lot of DCO promoters, the local authorities and Natural England are still struggling on how to develop it. It is an evolving field, but it is being worked through, including the question about, “If this fails, what happens next?”. Obviously, we need to see the proposals from the applicant, but we cannot take away that it is actually quite a strict test that promoters are being put through. I am not sure that we should necessarily put greater tests on this one promoter or these two promoters, depending on how the one-to-two promoter element works out. We need to try to make sure that we have a clear and consistent policy framework for all national infrastructure going forward.
Q345 Dr Arthur: Something is interesting—perhaps it is interesting; you never know. I remember being a councillor, and we had a biodiversity action plan, which did some incredible work to improve and sustain biodiversity in our council area. This development will make it much harder, I am guessing, for those surrounding local authorities to deliver their existing plans. Is that connection accounted for, Ian? You must have a biodiversity plan.
Ian Thynne: There are statutory requirements to have biodiversity improvement plans.
Q346 Dr Arthur: Have you looked at how this will complement or threaten your—
Ian Thynne: This fundamentally changes everything. The loss of the Colne valley, effectively, as an ecosystem as it goes underneath the corridor is something that we have to grapple with and challenge the promoters to come up with a credible plan to offset. It comes back to what we were talking about in the previous session: the challenge might well be there, but the “what if?” question is not set out in the NPS. This is a game changer for the Colne valley in particular. I know that the Colne valley regional park put a lot of representations in, because it is not just here: further up to the north is HS2 crossing the UK’s longest viaduct. You can start to see this disconnect throughout an entire ecosystem.
It is not just 10% net gain, which I appreciate has been a good thing in terms of development; it needs a bit more credible thought. It comes back to the impacts of this. It is a massive UK scheme. We should be looking to achieve something commensurate with the scale of the development, and that needs to be thought through a lot more carefully.
Q347 Alex Mayer: As has been said, the Government have set out four tests: growth, carbon, air quality and noise. We have just heard that maybe we should have some different ones—maybe a biodiversity one or a surface transport one. To start us off, do you think those are the right four tests?
Michael Coughlin: Broadly, yes, but that is not to say that they are complete in the way that we have just discussed and the way that we heard from the previous panel: an argument could be made that surface access could be a further test, with the appropriate accountability framework attached to it to ensure delivery going forwards. Subject to Anna’s views and taking a view from the experts here today, I am not sure whether biodiversity is adequately covered already, whether it needs to be a further test or whether, in the HENPS, it is already adequately addressed in the way that we have heard.
Ian Thynne: Again, no, they are not adequate. There is going to be a lot of that from us, I am afraid. We have asked for a fifth test around the community. One of the things that we have reflected on through this process goes all the way back to the T5 decision and what happened there. It effectively gave us one of the world’s largest airports in the borough. You look at what the communities have had to put up with in the interim and whether local growth has actually occurred in the way that was envisaged through that process, and we would say no.
That is only raising a fifth test to community level. It is about all the stuff that happens around the airport. It is not just the host authority; it is all the local authorities in the area. I think the impacts on communities have been lost in this when we start talking about national growth, and the residents have had to put up with a lot over the years. Elevating a community impact test would not just get a proper assessment of the current implications of Heathrow for the local community, but set stronger targets to ensure that we have proper controls so that the community is put front and centre of growth going forward.
Q348 Alex Mayer: What will that bring that is additional to what we have from the air quality and noise tests?
Ian Thynne: It is about making sure that the local areas are better off with expansion. We had terminal 5, and I do not think the local areas were better off with terminal 5. That has to change, because all the impacts are felt at the local level. It is all well and good for growth to go up for various other parts of the country, but the impacts are felt very much at the local level. If the benefits are not going there, it is just communities being left alone, really, and that is what we have seen with terminal 5.
I think a community test would really elevate that and make sure that Heathrow Airport Ltd—sorry, whichever promoter is successful; I forget that there are two—puts the communities front and centre and puts in place credible, deliverable and enforceable plans to make sure that the communities will not be left behind.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: Yes, there are four tests, but there are more than 15 other material assessments that need to be undertaken as part of the Heathrow expansion national policy statement. Those will go through due process and assessment, through both the applicants’ proposals and the regulatory stakeholders that are involved—including the gentlemen on this side—as well as the Environment Agency and so on. They will go through a lot of scrutiny during the examinations once the examination panels have been appointed to take this through.
The four tests put forward are the four that have obviously faced a lot of scrutiny. I think, if you start putting in a fifth one, the question would be, “Well, should we have a sixth one? Should we have a seventh one? Should we have an eighth one?” At what point do you draw the line?
Q349 Alex Mayer: Is it possible to fail the tests, in the way that they are currently drafted?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I don’t think I can respond to that one, I’m afraid.
Ian Thynne: I can—as I am sure you would expect. I do not think there are any failure points. Just before we get on to the four tests, I think the real issue is the critical national growth infrastructure designation. I think that is the thing that really hurts the way that the draft NPS will deliver the scheme.
In a normal planning balance, you have lots of things on the negative and positive sides. Often, at this stage, optimism bias generally means that the benefits are heavily emphasised. Then, as you go through the detail of the scheme, a lot gets added to the negative side. For a local planning authority, that is relatively straightforward, and ultimately you end up with an approval or refusal.
What happens here is, because of this fairly contrived designation of critical national growth infrastructure, that basically puts all the small amounts of positivity into a massive great big box that can never be outweighed. It does not matter what is in that box or how weak the economic argument is; that outweighs everything else that we are going to find out. In terms of the air quality test, you can pollute and that is allowed. In terms of noise, you can pollute—again—and that is allowed. In terms of climate change, you might not meet your targets, but that is allowed. That is all because of this contrived policy terminology that sits on one side and cannot be outweighed.
That comes back to the biodiversity stuff, and that really is the fundamental element for us. That is why this is so galling for our residents to look at, because it does not look like there is any point of failure. Looking at the draft NPS, we do not see how a planning inspector can look at that and go, “It is refused; it is not good enough.”
Mark Frost: Certainly, our thoughts on the tests are that they are worded in such a way that you might not know that you have failed until it is too late, because it is all in the future and the accountability is not there to really hold people to account. And exactly as Ian just said, the CNGI really tilts the balance against them. So I do think there are some real challenges there. I hear what Anna says about all the other assessments that are in the NPS, but again, the balance is very much tilted against.
Then you have the issue of affordability. Affordability runs through the NPS. It obviously was raised very much by the airlines in their session last week. The Secretary of State is effectively free, to some extent, almost to say, “You know what? This is all great mitigation. Planning Inspectorate, thank you for considering it. But unfortunately, because of affordability, we are not going to take this, this and this forward.” That is one reading of the NPS, as we see it, and it is a significant risk, I think, for communities.
Chair: Anna, we have jumped ahead, but that is fine, because there is a natural sequence. What is your sense of the implications of this designation?
Q350 Steff Aquarone: May I ask a slightly sharper question? It is competing for tautology of the year, is it not, saying, “This is considered to be critical to national growth, and therefore we are going to call it critical national growth infrastructure”? That is making up a term that has never been referenced, let alone legislated for, in the past and creating its existence while at the same time trying to justify it without any other information. Is this normal behaviour in planning policy design, Anna?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: If you look at the energy NPS, that does have a designation called critical national priority. We would have to go away and do a comparison, but if you look at the two designations, they are fairly similar. It does identify that there is an infrastructure need within the UK for certain sectors. Water also has a similar designation.
Q351 Steff Aquarone: But were those designations and the needs for them justified in advance of that, or were they made up on the spot like this was?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I don’t know the exact process of how they have got through. That might be more one for DESNZ—as I think we call it these days—to go through. But there is a lot of legislation, and the energy NPS has been updated very recently and has gone through a similar consultation to this.
Q352 Steff Aquarone: Okay. So in this case, unusually, it has appeared out of nowhere. You are saying that there is policy context and lots of other history to these terms being used in other industries, but critical national growth infrastructure—as opposed to critical national infrastructure, which has a long history of definition and application—was made up. There is no history of this that you are aware of prior to its name checking in this document?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I am not aware of it with this title, no.
Q353 Steff Aquarone: Does it have any meaning to anybody else? Did I miss something? Or has it cropped up out of nowhere?
Mark Frost: We were interested to read about it in the NPS and what it means. Clearly, the biggest issue is residual impacts. What is an acceptable residual impact? It could be anything.
Steff Aquarone: For me, this is really where the entire argument hinges. Ian, you have already referred to this. These tests literally mean nothing, because we have a new term, “critical national growth infrastructure”, which we are told means that they mean nothing unless something really superlative is discovered. Is that too cynical an interpretation?
Q354 Chair: Can I ask it in a different way? I do so as a planner and remembering my diploma course. Material considerations were defined and understood. Ian talked about the big box against which all others have to compete, at a lower level, as a material consideration. Is it okay for Government to suddenly create in the planning process a new high-level, dominant material consideration that has never been tested before? Is that normal?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I don’t know how to respond to that one, I’m afraid.
Ian Thynne: As a planner, I would say that that is unusual. The Planning Act requires us to deliver sustainable development, which means, as you said, material planning considerations that balance economic, environmental and social impacts—all equally. That is normal and it is what is not happening here, because we are, as I said, putting everything into this box. It does not matter whether you open that up at some point in the future and say, “Well, there’s not much in it.” It is too late. The principle of development is established by the time you get to the development consent order process and the Planning Inspectorate are looking at it. That is the fundamental issue for me. I don’t think it becomes a fair assessment of harm versus positive, which is a bedrock of the planning system.
Mark Frost: To react to Anna’s point about the precedents that have been set in other industries, it is clearly the case that those industries could well have residual impacts and harm for people, but this is a piece of infrastructure that is going to affect very significantly millions of people, particularly the communities that are represented by our partnership and by Ian, so there is a big question about the suitability of the use of this, I think. There is a lot of scepticism in our partnership about how it is being employed through the NPS.
Q355 Chair: Yesterday, I was guesting on the Public Accounts Committee, which was looking at HS2. I asked what the difference is between a mega-project, as that is apparently designated, and critical national growth infrastructure. The reaction of the people at the desk and in the chairs behind will not be captured on the transcript, but nobody was able to answer the question, least of all the permanent secretary.
Ian Thynne: When you referred to it as a mega-project, you will not have captured what went on inside me. It is in the north of the borough and I have been dealing with it for the last 16 years, so I have a close relationship with it.
Chair: Sorry to cut across you, Steff.
Q356 Steff Aquarone: Not at all; you have clearly excited some very important genetic-level interest in the planning process. Are there any other consequences or effects of the designation that you can think of? Other than what you have already said about the implications that it might have for the determination, are there consequences of introducing the phrase into a document like this?
Ian Thynne: It could set a dangerous precedent. Going back all the way to HS2 again, you could use the terminology to promote a similar scheme; you could just refer to it as critical national growth infrastructure without any guidelines as to what that actually means—what is critical growth for the UK? We all saw the Airports Commission and what came out of that, but that was a long time ago and none of it has been refreshed. Simply saying that that is still the output that delivers this new designation is not adequate, and I think it sets a dangerous precedent. As a planner, it is all about balancing the harm against the benefits. If local authorities started just doing that, most of our schemes would be judicially reviewed in a heartbeat.
Q357 Chair: The evidence that we have received, including the advice from the DFT’s advisers, is that the economic case is an awful lot weaker than it was in the NPS.
Ian Thynne: Indeed. The cynic in me would suggest that it is a weak economic case that does not support expansion, so you create a designation, put it in this box that is immovable—
Steff Aquarone: It does not support expansion—I accept that—but there is still an argument to say, “The Government wants to do it, so we think it should happen.” I think we would all accept that there are situations where goods and benefits cannot be captured or measured, so political leaders take decisions, but is this not a bit more than that, in terms of the precedent it sets? This is a bit like saying “The eastern ballroom is bigly good; therefore it is going to be designated a bigly good infrastructure project, and no one can challenge why and on what basis that has been decided.”
Chair: These may be questions that you want to pose to the Minister.
Q358 Steff Aquarone: I am interested from a planning perspective in whether this could have consequences for other types of developments, if it can be written into the NPS.
Mark Frost: Exactly as Ian says, you could have that precedent. It is this tilted balance and the way that it is going to play out through the examination that will have a real impact on millions of people. That is a genuine concern, and it is not something that you would necessarily want to see become commonplace.
Q359 Steff Aquarone: Why does it have such an impact on the examination? The planning inspectors will still have a view, so what does its existence stop them from doing or allow them to do?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I don’t think it stops them from examining any other issue. During the course of the examination, the economic evidence will get challenged. All the environmental matters that are identified within the NPS will get challenged by the examining authority. Where you will see it is through the recommendation report, which is not a public document until the decision is made, where they are pulling together their view: “We have taken all the evidence in front of us from the promoters and the other interested parties”—which is the term used in DCOs for stakeholders—to go into their recommendation report, which I assume will be lengthy in this case. That is where they will be putting their arguments about whether the designation is overriding some of the residual impacts that have been talked about by my peers here. I do not think it will result in less examination during the examination period.
Ian Thynne: Just to come back on that, everything will get examined in accordance with the NPS, but there is policy protection within the NPS that basically says, because it is critical national growth infrastructure, that then elevates it. That is the point, because when you are giving that weight to the planning inspector, he or she is already putting extra weight on the designation before they have even gone in. There is policy protection in there that basically says, “Because it’s this, some of those residual concerns can’t result in refusal.”
Michael Coughlin: It is not only the surprise appearance of it in this document, but the absence of a rationale for it and the criteria. It seems incredibly subjective—
Steff Aquarone: Or even a definition; it is a tautology!
Michael Coughlin: The planning inspector comes to look at this, and the incredibly subjective nature of that designation blows a hole in a lot of the rest of the considerations that he or she will need to be giving to the application in the DCO process.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: In the work that follows up, the energy NPS and the water NPS should be looked at, even though they have not used the same terms. I hate to say it, but our NPSs are not consistent, even though we would like them to be. That is where the Planning and Infrastructure Act has come in to try to get more consistent terms with our five-year updates. It is not so novel that it has suddenly occurred; similar terms give similar protections—in the words of the gentleman to my right. The same premise is there. It is worth looking at those NPSs to see how those patterns and commonalities are coming across.
Q360 Steff Aquarone: Do they include the word “growth”, though? We also have that in planning; we have critical national infrastructure.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: The phraseology in the energy NPS is “critical national priority”. It does not have the word “growth” in.
Ian Thynne: Just to come back on that, in terms of energy, water, and our infrastructure provisions, I do not think that anyone would be challenging whether that is the right thing to be doing to improve our energy infrastructure. The thing about Heathrow is, certainly after Gatwick expansion, Luton expansion and all the rest of it, we are still talking about this. It feels like there has to be more evidence to justify it in this case; I do not think you need the evidence to justify—
Chair: The criticality of the infrastructure element.
Ian Thynne: Yes, exactly.
Q361 Chair: Backing down from the CNGI definition and going back to the tests and conditions. Witnesses in this and the previous session, and many others, have spoken about different levels of mitigation on different issues, particularly the four tests. There is an expectation that some of these will be sorted in out in the DCO and then tested in a public examination, but should more of them be specified in more detail in the draft NPS?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: Until the assessments have been undertaken to understand what the impact and the harm is, it will be quite hard to specify a mitigation measure. It is quite uncommon to do that within the other NPSs, because you want to make sure that you are putting forward the right and relevant mitigation measure in response to the impact that is being assessed. I do not think it should. The NPS goes quite far in some of the documents that it requests the applicants to promote and where it will outline some of this information. It is affording some flexibility for the promoter, with engagement with the relevant stakeholders on how best this could be mitigated. If we came up with a solution today for some of these harms, it may not be what is best in response to what the actual impact is.
Chair: I am conscious of the time, and we are only just over a quarter of the way through our questions. We will not be finished by 6 pm.
Mark Frost: Anna has touched on the issue of basic uncertainty. There is so much uncertainty in this project. All these requirements are based on modelling and assumptions. The only thing that we know for certain is that they will be wrong; the question is, how wrong? We need to be safeguarded. Our communities should not have to bear the consequences of that uncertainty disproportionately, which is why we say that there should be an overarching environmentally controlled growth framework that reaches throughout the duration of this project—through consent into construction and operation—that allows us to properly control for the issues that are disproportionately impacting communities. Luton provides a really good option for that, and one that involves local communities and local councils and gives that sense of accountability moving forward.
Chair: Thank you. Brief answers now, and you can follow up in writing.
Q362 Jacob Collier: In the previous panel, we spoke about the impact on the SRN, but the estimated additional 60,000 vehicle journeys a day will have some impact on local roads. Do you think that the draft NPS pays sufficient attention to those local roads?
Ian Thynne: Again, I don’t think so. It is all being looked at at too high a level at this moment in time. The theme that runs throughout the NPS is that more work should go into trying to justify what is actually required. We talked about the rail schemes before, but all the problems result on the local roads if you get the more strategic issues wrong. The rail is not secured. We talked about the public modal targets in the previous session. If you miss them, they hit the local roads and then it is too late. The roads around our local communities—around the airport—are some of the worst in London. There were problems on the M25 today. That causes carnage and block-ups all around Sipson and the little villages that we drove around.
Again, that comes back to what we were saying about T5. That is where the impacts fall on our communities. I do not think there are controls in the NPS to make sure that they will be avoided. To be clear, Chair, I think there should be some sort of managed growth. You should be unlocking growth when you have reached targets. You should not be missing targets and still being allowed to grow.
Q363 Jacob Collier: Is there anything in the NPS on monitoring and mitigating the impact on local roads, or anything that you specifically would like to see included?
Ian Thynne: This all comes back to Mark’s point about environment and managed growth. That has to go into the framework. The impacts on the local surface access network need to be monitored better. In particular, where charges are received from the airport, whether it is drop-off charges or some other form of car charging, they need to start being directed towards local solutions as opposed to just being put in someone’s back pocket.
Mark Frost: Absolutely. Exactly as Ian says, you spend a lot of time thinking about the M25 and the M4 being a car park, but the reality of that is that people cannot pick their kids up from school in residential roads in Cranford, Bedfont or Poyle.
There is also the point about resilience. It will get more congested, with 60,000 additional vehicles—TfL calculated 55,000, but give or take 5,000 a day—being very significant. Assuming half of those are on the M25, that is a very significant increase in traffic on the M25, for example—13%, 14%, or 15%. Understanding what that means as BAU, but also when there are issues on the network, which there are almost daily, as Ian says, is really important. There is no obligation on either promoter to do that in the NPS, so the issue of resilience is really important.
There is also the issue of maintenance, which does not come up very often. We talked a lot about freight. Lorries have a hugely disproportionate impact on the asset integrity of roads. While many of those trips will be on SRN, many of them end or start on bits of Hillingdon’s, Hounslow’s or Surrey’s network. How we take the local authority burden of additional maintenance requirements from that is quite important.
The reason we would say that there is a case for surface access being a fifth test is that, yes, it has implications for air quality, carbon, economic prosperity, congestion and the rest of it, but it is also just about wellbeing. Being able to go about your business on a general day without being stuck in endless traffic is a significant part of enjoying life, right? That is the threat here if we do not get this right.
Ian Thynne: If I may add one final point, we are not just talking about the growth of Heathrow here. The mayor has a massive housing target and quite a lot of that has been put down on to Hillingdon. It is not just accommodating Heathrow expansion on our road network, but accommodating tens of thousands of extra houses over the next 10 years—25,000 came out of the London plan for the London borough of Hillingdon to deliver. That is an incredible number of houses that we have to deliver on the same networks where Heathrow expansion is going to take place. It cannot all fit.
Q364 Jacob Collier: Are the public transport mode share targets in the draft NPS achievable and are they are ambitious enough?
Mark Frost: As Anthony Smith of the Heathrow Area Transport Forum, of which HSPG is a member, said, anything is achievable if you put enough money at it. Is it ambitious enough? Well, 60,000 extra vehicles on the road a day does not feel like success to me.
Ian Thynne: Again, no. The thing that really irks is where those figures came from. It should be an evidence-based target because it might be that you can achieve that, but there is still massive carnage on the road. It should be an evidence-based target that informs whether we should have rail links as part of this scheme. At this moment in time, again, it seems a little bit of a contrived target, and again, what if they do not hit it? It might well be a challenging target for them to achieve, but what if they do not hit it?
Mark Frost: The timings are so key, as Anthony was saying. The idea that you could get to 129,999,999 before you have to deliver a rail scheme, which is the suggestion within the surface access vision, is a difficult message to take for local authorities who are going to deal with that congestion.
Q365 Jacob Collier: There are road surface access improvements, but there are not rail surface access improvements. From the plans that you have seen, do you think there will be any improvements to the local infrastructure from the upgrades that are within the promoter’s plans?
Ian Thynne: The intention at the moment is for no net loss in capacity. We have not yet seen anything that requires additional capacity to future-proof growth in the area. That is not a requirement of the draft NPS either, so that is not great.
There will be new roads, which is great, but it comes back to, what are the maintenance arrangements for them? Construction is the biggest issue for us in the interim. How are you going to get everything on the network before you have even built some of that infrastructure?
Mark Frost: The clear message that we have heard from our discussions with one of the applicants is that they are planning for interventions such as cycle lanes and potentially bus lanes. They have got a southern road tunnel which giveth and taketh in the sense that it might generate more traffic in some areas like Surrey and Hounslow, but it might also provide much better bus access into the central terminal area, which would have improvements.
How you bring all of that together and deliver it effectively is still unknown. They are also saying that they are probably not looking to fund those interventions that are off the network. How can you have a credible bus service to the airport if the bus lanes only start at Southern Perimeter Road? How can you get people there on bikes if there are no cycle lanes in Hounslow or Poyle or whatever?
Q366 Chair: We are now going to move on to noise pollution. Heathrow’s noise mitigation schemes have been the bane of my life as a councillor and as a MP.
Jacob Collier: And as a local resident.
Chair: Yes—I am not benefiting from any of the existing schemes. The draft HENPS points to the existing noise mitigation measures, including the residential insulation scheme and the one for schools and community buildings. It assumes that it will continue following the expansion. As the host authority, Ian, how effective have those measures been in practice?
Ian Thynne: Perversely, we are not actually impacted by noise that much at this moment in time because the airport sits neatly in the southern part of the borough and the take offs are to the east and the west of the borough.
However, we have been looking at a planning application for ending the Cranford agreement—the easterly alternations. We have been getting into the weeds of those current proposals. Although the quieter neighbourhood scheme has been an improvement, there is still concern that its roll-out is not properly regulated. It is delivered by Heathrow Airport Ltd pretty much on its own terms, and it is not getting to the properties that should be prioritised.
It has been an improvement, but there is still a lot of work to do. The numbers that we are talking about if we go forward with the expansion exponentially increase.
Q367 Chair: Mark, maybe you are in the best position to answer both from Hounslow and the west side.
Mark Frost: One of the primary reasons our councils came together was because they were end-of-runway authorities and would potentially be disproportionately impacted by noise. There is a lot of support for the mitigation schemes among the councils—there has been for many years—but there is also a recognition that they do not go nearly far or fast enough.
Under the existing proposal—the quieter neighbourhood scheme—Heathrow have looked to put a lot more money into that, only to see the regulator effectively say, “No, it’s not necessary. The amount of money that you are spending at the moment is fine.”
You went from a situation where Heathrow was looking to try and accelerate the provision of that mitigation so that all properties were insulated within about 20 years to a situation where, under the current spending that has been approved in the next regulatory period—if we assumed that carried on—it would take more than 100 years.
The current scheme is welcome. They have moved it from a situation where there was part funding to one where they are 100% funding and that has really helped with take-up. That is very much welcome, but it is nowhere near far enough.
Looking at what the requirement is—
Q368 Chair: Just on the current one, I am seeing very slow progress. It looks good on paper, but we are not getting a sense of who is going to get insulated and when? Is that just my experience?
Mark Frost: No, I think that is a fair comment. Basically, they started up this scheme with 100% funding. It has taken quite some time because, as Ian says, they are trying to do this to be a good neighbour; they are not obligated, in many cases, to do this. There needs to be some accountability, and there needs to be a pipeline of delivery. You need to get muscle memory about how you deliver this more quickly and more efficiently. They built all this up only to get knocked back, to the tune of a couple of hundred million pounds, from the CAA over that period. It is very significant. Now they are having to almost pick themselves back up again.
We cannot be in that situation during an expansion programme, when so many hundreds of thousands of households, possibly more, are going to be impacted. Much like surface access, this mitigation should be put in up front; it should be following new flights and new impacts. It is quite significant. We may get on to the discrepancy with what has been approved at Gatwick.
Q369 Chair: Do you want to focus on that? There is a discrepancy.
Mark Frost: There is a discrepancy. In 2018, it was £3,000. We are six years on, and it is £3,000—I think there has been some inflation in between those two. It is unusual that we have not seen any indexation for it. Then you compare it with Gatwick, which is up at £6,500 for the same insulated property. There is a big gap there. Gatwick and Heathrow are in different circumstances, so there is a conversation about whether it should be exactly equivalent, but there should be some level of comparability between those two.
Some of our members would be concerned about the tension with affordability. We are very keen on pace and on coverage. Sometimes it might be better to have a little less money going into each property but getting more properties insulated. There is a discussion there, but the gap between Gatwick and Heathrow, and the fact that the money has not been indexed linked, is pretty concerning.
Q370 Chair: Have you had any feedback about the noise insulation schemes for schools and other community buildings?
Mark Frost: We have not had as much feedback from members on that; I think there has been a feeling that Heathrow has tried to put quite a lot of effort into that over the years. Some of the concerns have been more about the maintenance of what has gone in, but the actual schemes are important.
It is also important to note that the whole issue of increasing the noise footprint will mean more cost for local authorities more generally when building any community facilities, because you will need more noise insulation. If you are trying to build council housing and respond to the housing crisis, all those units will cost more per unit because of the insulation. There are not just direct impacts on existing properties; unbuilt properties are going to be impacted.
Ian Thynne: In terms of the Gatwick-Heathrow comparison, the numbers are fairly contrived. Where does the £3,000 come from? That has not been assessed in the appraisal of sustainability that sits behind the draft NPS. There is no justification for that number; £3,000 does not really buy you too much, and it does not matter whether you are in a five-bedroom property or a one-bedroom flat—you still get £3,000.
There is also a real concern about the levels at which those kick in. Just as the consultation came out, there was the release of a new updated noise survey, which said that people are getting more annoyed at noise at a much lower level than they were previously, but the mitigation does not go down to anywhere near those levels. You can understand why: if you started to go down, the cost would go up exponentially, and then you are into the world of affordability again. It is not an evidence-based offer or an evidence-based test. Again, this leaves people exposed to noise harm.
Q371 Chair: Very briefly, Ian, the draft HENPS talks about a noise envelope, but no extra noise. What is the implication for residents of yours who will be significantly impacted by being underneath an approach path, when they are not at the moment?
Ian Thynne: It says no extra noise from the 2024 baseline, but there will be new exposures. Within that noise contour, you could still get a lot of communities exposed to new levels of noise. In particular, flights going east on the new northern runway will take off to the north, over our areas of regeneration around Hayes, which have never experienced noise before. They will be exposed, and they will not be getting the noise mitigation that is required to protect their health.
Q372 Alex Mayer: This is probably not a very evidence-led question. Many of your residents presumably moved there knowing that there was a very large airport. Does it genuinely come as a surprise to them that it might be expanding? This has been talked about for a long, long time. Surely most people knew that this was a possibility when they got there, and put that into their thinking.
Ian Thynne: Some people lived there long before this came around. If we go back to the “no ifs, no buts, no third runway” from the former Prime Minister, it has not been delivered and people still live there, but some of those homes will be lost. Some people have hung around waiting to get compensation payments. Some people love the area, and why wouldn’t you? There is a tension within the communities as a consequence. When the people I was referring to in Hayes moved in, they had no intention that they would have flights taking off over them, because there were no expansion plans. Nothing has been approved; it has been talked about, but it has never been approved—there are no decisions. If that were the case, we would have no regeneration in Hayes until this is all sorted, and it has been going on for 20-odd years now.
Q373 Alex Mayer: I suppose the question I am asking is, is there surprise about this or is there just fear and anger?
Ian Thynne: Fear, anger—I do not think they are surprised it is coming around again.
Q374 Chair: Many people further east, underneath the approach path from central London, say, from 10 miles out to the areas in Hillingdon most affected, do not even know that they are under it, because no pathways have been published. Several hundred thousand people have no idea that they will have a significant—
Alex Mayer: Perhaps that goes back to your point about the lack of leaflet drops and the like.
Mark Frost: Even if you were to go to the indicative flight paths, they are only indicative. At the point where this will get consented, there are all manner of changes to UK airspace and all the rest of it, and we will not really know who is impacted. They probably will not really know until the planes start flying over their heads. That is simply because these are two separate processes. The other thing, I think, other than fear and anger, is just fatigue. There is such a huge amount of fatigue, and it is sad when you see that in action.
Michael Coughlin: The other more general point that this discussion raises is the differential impacts on subsets of the wider community of those affected by Heathrow. That comes through very strongly from the discussions we have with our member councils, that some suffer some of the impacts really acutely, as Ian has just set out, others experience them marginally and others do not have them at all. That will apply to a number of the issues we have discussed today. Coming back to the environmentally managed growth programme would allow you to pick up those differences in those different community experiences more acutely than you can in a generalised, high-level HENPS.
Q375 Ashley Dalton: To clarify, I am guesting here from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. It is my absolute pleasure to join you. We have talked about the impact on various communities. I want to home in on the impacts on local authorities specifically, given my role. How do the mechanisms that are set out in the draft NPS for addressing the impacts on local authorities compare, crucially, with those that have been used for other nationally significant infrastructure projects?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: There has been quite a lot of planning reform and planning change over the past couple of years. The Planning and Infrastructure Act really compounded that, with the new guidance that has come through. Because the other NPSs are sector-specific and not project-specific, they are probably more general on local authority involvement and impact. I think it is fair to say that, because of the project-specific nature of this NPS, we do see more given on the type and requirements of information that should come out. Forgive me, I will not have the title right, but there is a new cost recovery system that is now in place for statutory stakeholders involved in the DCO process. It has been recognised over a large number of years that stakeholders such as local authorities and others, like the Environmental Agency, come under a fairly large workload in order to work with the promoters of these NSIPs. Once you submit as well, the timescales for going through an examination are quite tight, and quite a lot of work is required by all parties. There is this new basis in there, and the cost associated with attendance at meetings or the counter-evidence that may need to be produced will be impacted through that. Although it is not necessarily specified within the NPS, it is through some of the other national planning infrastructure guidance.
Ian Thynne: From our perspective, there is not enough attention on what is picked up by the local authorities in the area as a consequence of hosting the airport. That means public health, policing—all the public sector burdens that are placed on them by the millions of passengers coming through an airport all at once. It has impacts on our housing. You have the immigration issues—you know, it is a port authority, and I am not going to make any complaints about that, but that then falls on to the local authority to pick up.
What we have asked for during the process is a proper impact assessment for all the local authorities on what it actually takes. We are undertaking some of the work to put a fiscal cost on that at the moment. It is certainly fair to say that we do not recoup enough of the funds to enable us to undertake our statutory services. There is an extra burden of hosting an airport that is missed.
Michael Coughlin: I totally agree with Ian. There is an absence of understanding of the cumulative impacts of those various demands and pressures. There are also the demands on the authorities in contributing to the process, both during the DCO process, which is part funded, but also post consent. In some of the activities that need to follow, requirements will be placed on the authorities as statutory bodies.
There are also impacts on their communities, as Ian has set out, that they will have to respond to. Noise, air quality and so on are all in there. I think the one that is perhaps overlooked the most is the housing issue: the pressure on housing of 20,000 workers coming into the area and of new people coming to work at the airport; the land pressure that the taking of the land for the airport creates; and, as Ian said already, the pressure to find the land to build the housing that is going to be needed, with the consequent impact that that will likely have on housing costs, because of the shortage and pressure created by demand. That all exacerbates the housing situation, which is, as we know, pretty intolerable.
Q376 Ashley Dalton: I am going to take a guess from what you are saying that the answer to this question is no, but does the draft NPS address those impacts adequately, particularly the increased demand for schools, healthcare and housing, which we know the policy assessments have anticipated?
Michael Coughlin: No.
Ian Thynne: No.
Q377 Ashley Dalton: I could probably have guessed that one. Ian, moving on from that, what are your views on the decision to retain the compensation approach developed in 2018?
Ian Thynne: Compensation as in compulsory purchase?
Ashley Dalton: Yes.
Ian Thynne: There are two fundamental issues with that. It is a massive loss to the borough—700-odd properties. That is a thousand people being put on to the open housing market, some of whom will have kids going to school in the area. That will have a pretty big impact on the housing market, which the local authority will probably have to manage—the airport is certainly not going to do that.
You then have the wider property offer zone. That is the land that is not within the land take for expansion. It is set out in the draft NPS as being offered to everyone below the M4, in effect, in the Heathrow villages. That is not actually correct. We know full well that Heathrow Airport Ltd has no intention of offering to buy all those thousands and thousands of properties. It will be subject to eligibility criteria. At this moment in time, we do not even know how many people will be left south of the M4. We do not know how many people will be entitled to this wider property offer—
Q378 Chair: So that is Longford, Harmondsworth and Sipson, basically?
Ian Thynne: Longford, no, because we know that that will be demolished, but Harmondsworth cuts in half, and then there is Sipson and out towards Harlington as well. It is all in the zone. That makes it really difficult to plan for the future. In terms of school places, how many communities do you have to look after? How many kids are in those communities? How many recreation grounds do we have to look after? There will be a fundamental disruption to the way that the south of our borough works, and that is completely lost within the draft NPS; it is almost like we will have to pick up the pieces. We have asked for that, and we have had some discussions with the DFT, but there needs to be much more protection within the NPS to allow us to get to where we need to get to.
Q379 Ashley Dalton: You talked earlier about the expectation on the local authority in terms of house building, generally speaking. Do you have any understanding of what replacement housing might be necessary as a result of Heathrow expansion and, if it is necessary, will it be on top of or a part of the expectations of house building in the borough? Or do you not know?
Ian Thynne: We know we don’t know.
Ashley Dalton: Always a great start!
Ian Thynne: We know that there is going to be a big problem here. We know that there are going to be a load more workers. There is going to be a load more infrastructure that supports the airport that is not included within the development consent order process, such as extra hotels, and all that that brings. A lot of extra supply chains will hopefully come to the area, which means local benefit and local growth, and with that comes housing.
We are going to lose a lot of housing. The mayor has given us a massive housing target. Where all this goes, we just do not know. This comes back to some of the problems with planning. We have talked about biodiversity net gain. That might be in some of the areas where we would be looking for housing, for example. We just do not have the full picture.
We also do not know the phasing. At what point are they going to be demolished? At what point are hotels going to be demolished to make way? At what point are new hotels are going to come on to offset those ones? Again, getting into the weeds of it, there is a lot to plan and we just do not have that in front of us.
There is no requirement in the DCO for proper place shaping—well, we spoke with them beforehand and there is a requirement for place shaping, but it needs to be reinforced. We were happy to see that addition. It was not in the previous version, so we worked really hard with the DFT to get it in. But it needs to go much further to enable us to get a masterplan out for what this might look like in the future—not what Heathrow wants now, but what we want to plan for in the future and what we have to plan for.
Q380 Ashley Dalton: Mark and Michael, what role should local authorities, and the wider group of local authorities that you represent, be playing in shaping and determining compensation measures? Do you think it is reflected to any extent in the HENPS? Please do also come in on the issues that I have already raised and that Ian has responded to.
Michael Coughlin: I think less so on the detail of the strict compensation measures. The work we have done, as a collection of authorities, with DFT colleagues—engaging with them over the last two years or so—has been to seek to strike a better balance between the impacts, the mitigations, the opportunities and the consequential benefits that might come to these local communities.
I agree with Ian that when we talk about growth from the perspective of local authorities, it is not necessarily growth at Heathrow airport or growth associated with the airport; it is the supply chains, the hotels and everything else that comes from the ancillary activities around the airport. Some of our members, particularly the chief executives and the elected leaders that we work with, are saying that they would really like to see some of that growth and benefit captured to devote and invest in the communities that have hitherto been disadvantaged or left behind, not just because of airport impacts, noise and air quality but because they have not had the infrastructure benefits. We have talked about surface access. They have not benefited from skills provision. They have not benefited from jobs or high-quality employment opportunities. We have seen this in the HENPS, in which there is a paragraph that says that promoters must come forward with plans for local, regional and national growth, and they must ensure that plans are in place, working in partnership with others to ensure that that growth is equitably distributed across the Heathrow subregional economic area.
We might be slightly bold in saying, “We put that forward and it is now in the HENPS,” but it took a lot of work to get it in there; it was not in the previous version in 2016. It is about ensuring that it gets delivered and carried through, and how we might look at opportunities and mechanisms. I do not think I am surprising Ian when I say that we are already working with others on how a business rates review programme might help to recoup some of the additional business rates.
I am not talking about taking anything away from Hillingdon, but we are looking at some of the additional business rates that might come from expansion. There is an opportunity to look at how that might be used differently from how it might currently be apportioned out, to create some of that benefit at a much more granular local level for those communities our authorities believe need it most. I suspect that Hillingdon has a similar set of communities who might benefit from that in a way that perhaps has not been reflected in the HENPS to date.
Ian Thynne: We would say that that might not necessarily be what the business rates are intended for.
There is also a throwaway remark in one of the later paragraphs on community funding that that would come through the extra business rates from all the future hotels, and I got a little excited by that. I got a bit angry, because that is just not acceptable. There needs to be a much better funding package put up front to enable our communities to co-exist with a massive construction, as well as local authorities being able to give their services.
Mark Frost: The compensation piece more generally is quite a confused chapter, because it talks about the compensation scheme for the property, it talks about the mitigation for the noise insulation, and then it talks about this £50 million-a-year compensation scheme, suggesting that it is above and beyond all these other things. Well, it was £50 million in 2018—we are in 2026, so that should be £70 million or £80 million, or whatever. It is not really clear how that is going to be used; there is no governance associated with it. More information is needed on all that. Then you have the business rate piece at the end, as well. I read that as it is being stacked; you read it differently, Ian. It is all a bit confused.
What we do know is that there needs to be a new compact between the airport and the local communities, so that success at the airport genuinely filters through to the communities, as opposed to what happens at the moment, which is just sort of inferred and tangential.
On the housing thing specifically, to Heathrow’s credit they are looking at worker accommodation in a way that they were not doing in 2018, so in that respect it is positive. But we think that there is a lot more we can do to that. I would draw your attention to some work that West London Business has done on employer-related accommodation, and the fact that the airport could help to bring on development schemes that may have struggled for viability or may not have moved through the planning pipeline as quickly as they could have by underwriting some of the demand for that housing. There is quite a lot of innovative thinking that could be done here that could make a net positive overall on this stuff.
Q381 Chair: Depending on which option is chosen, the scheme, if it goes ahead, will include some of the things you have already touched on, such as demolition and the need to replace schools, community facilities and community services. It is not just council-related; you also have the Colnbrook waste incinerator, the Harmondsworth immigration centre and a number of public services and public facilities that may be in different ownership. Should their replacement be funded out of this scheme? Is there any suggestion that some or all of them will be? Sorry, I have not mentioned council housing; I do not know whether any council housing is affected.
Ian Thynne: There is council housing affected. We would expect the council housing to be paid for under the same compulsory purchase arrangements as private property, so—
Q382 Chair: But will that fund the replacement housing at an appropriate cost?
Ian Thynne: Well, that is the next question. That is the next bit of work that we have to do. There is a tenant in there—what is our responsibility to that tenant, and does that require us to go on to the open market and buy properties? Is that sufficient? Because obviously it will not be in the south of the borough; it might be somewhere else. These are all the dilemmas and traumas that we are trying to grapple with at this moment in time. So is that funding package enough? I don’t know.
As for the other public buildings, we would expect them all to be paid for. We would also expect them to be safeguarded for future growth and capacity increases at the airport so that the public sector does not have to put its hand into its purse to improve them later down the line. I think that is a fair request. There are a lot of them, as well; there are a lot of impacts that we have to look at.
Q383 Daniel Francis: Anna, is there a precedent in planning policy for adopting a specific scheme as the basis to inform a national policy statement, and how do you think this has affected the draft NPS?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: Is this with regard to the two airport proposals that are on the table right now?
Daniel Francis: Yes.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I am not personally aware of that going through. If you look at the other sector NPSs, there has not been a case like this. Going forward, however, if you are looking at needs of other infrastructure, it is somewhat predetermined by the locations of existing infrastructure. That is probably as far as I can answer that question.
Mark Frost: We do not think that there is any precedent, and it is a huge concern for the councils. Dealing with one DCO is mind-numbingly terrifying; dealing with two at the same time is very significant. We think that there is a real risk, because at the moment the NPS is silent on how those two promoters should work together. There is not necessarily an obligation for there to be a common baseline or for them to have common forecasting, so you could end up at a development consent order examination, essentially arguing in two very different elements of the truth, and no one being clear on what the impacts or mitigations are. There is a real requirement upon the NPS to set the rules of engagement in terms of competition between those two promoters. Otherwise, it is unworkable, and we just do not think it is there at the moment.
Ian Thynne: I would probably go a little further than that: I would say that it is absolute madness to have two promoters on the scene at the same time. I think that, because of the way that the funding is given by the CAA, it is effectively getting one scheme for the price of two. Again, that is ripe for challenge. The airlines are probably not going to want to see their money going down that route. If two schemes are paid for, or allowed to be paid for, by the CAA, is that funding that is going to be taken off some of the other environmental improvements that the local authorities are seeking?
We talked about this on the trip: the communities must somehow deal with two competing promoters and two competing DCOs. If someone is trying to purchase their property and the aim is to get as many properties as possible purchased earlier in the process to enable the blight to be removed and people to make decisions, that is a resident potentially dealing with two separate law firms and two separate offers. It just starts to spiral from there, and that is before you have even got through to the examination, where you have two evidence bases, some probably different. It is ripe for legal challenge. It might speed things up now, but it is just kicking a massive can down the road, and it will be a massive problem when we get to the examination stage.
Q384 Daniel Francis: Do you think that there is a risk that the NPS could be predetermining some matters that would normally be examined at the DCO process?
Ian Thynne: I would hope not, but if you have not predetermined some of the stuff between the two promoters, you are going to have fairly robust examination and two competing proposals being looked at equally. That is also fraught with danger. We were talking about this before: the easiest thing to do would be for the planning inspector to approve both of them and give that to the Secretary of State to work out.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: On the mechanism of it, you would see them as two separate applications that are also probably going through at separate timescales. It is probably not a matter of planning policy, but in terms of the wellbeing of all people involved through a DCO process it will be incredibly challenging. How the Planning Inspectorate would have to manage that is a head-scratcher for me.We want national policy statements to provide a clear foundation, but I think this one currently has ambiguity in it. There are enough other areas we need to resolve; this might be one that we can get some agreement on to smooth what will be a challenging and complex process.
Ian Thynne: Ultimately, our residents just want certainty about what is happening next. They do not want to get through an examination process, and then have it all be taken to the courts with two developers having an argument in public. That cannot happen. There must be a way of removing that risk, because it is going to be put on our communities, which have already had too much to bear.
Q385 Chair: Anna, how has the draft HENPS taken on board the legal challenges to the 2018 ANPS, and—this goes back to the debate about CNGI—could the strength of the economic welfare and strategic cases for expansion be tested through legal challenge?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I think that it has taken on a number of the challenge areas, but this will be challenged in the courts going forward whether it has gone far enough or not, in the views of many. I think that it has gone quite a long way, but there is still further it could go.
Q386 Chair: Is there anything else that you or any of the other panellists would like to bring to our attention that you have not already said, on how the draft HENPS will work as planning policy? We have covered quite a lot.
Ian Thynne: I think we have probably covered it ad nauseam. The thing to remember is that when we have normal planning development, it is set against a London plan as well as a local plan. A whole host of pass-or-fail tests sit within those policy documents. It comes back to that point that the draft HENPS seems to result in a yes, no matter what happens. That bit really is a concern for us. The last point is that if it does have to happen, our communities deserve better at the end of it than they got after the last time it was expanded.
Mark Frost: The issue of affordability as a threat to achieving our obligations to safeguard our communities is a real challenge. The worst situation is that we put in blood, sweat and tears for the next couple of years trying to get the best possible—or least worst—scheme, only to be told, “Sorry, that is not affordable, so we are going to strip all this mitigation out.” That feels to me like a genuine risk in the current draft of the HENPS.
Chair: That is a case that the airlines have also raised with us.
Mark Frost: It is. We are sympathetic to the airlines; we understand that they talk a lot about the cost of it and the fact that you undermine the very case for this by charging the £60, or whatever fees they were saying. At the same time, maybe this scheme is unacceptable—maybe that is the truth of it. At the very least, it must be mitigated in full. Who pays for that may be a different question.
Michael Coughlin: To reflect a comment made on the previous panel, I think that the disjunction between the vision and intent and the detail on the deliverability and accountability is a real, critical factor with this. Some of the conditionality of the language—“may”, “seek to”, “try to” or “endeavour to”—makes it a very weak document in giving our local authorities some certainty and security around how this will play out in practice.
Alex Mayer: Anna, you said that it will be challenged and that there will be some kind of judicial review.
Chair: Well, it is likely.
Q387 Alex Mayer: I think you said “will”! Do you have a view on the grounds for that?
Anna Sutherland Bamber: No, but I think it is fairly common that most DCO projects go through a judicial review process at the back end once a decision has been made. Whether the courts accept it or not, there are normally several lodged.
With the very nature of national infrastructure, you are creating an infrastructure asset regardless of its sector, and it has impacts on local people. Different promoters go about that in different ways, and that normally results in a challenge. The Thames Tideway tunnel, for example, is cheer-led as one of our national infrastructure gems—
Q388 Alex Mayer: So your view is that big stuff tends to be challenged; there is nothing specific in this proposal that concerns you.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: Yes, my view is that big stuff gets challenged.
Q389 Jacob Collier: Does that add to the timeline?
Chair: Or has sufficient time been included? I know that they have factored in a legal challenge.
Anna Sutherland Bamber: I am not a lawyer, and I can feel all my lawyer colleagues in NIPA staring at me from behind. There is obviously the JR reform process going on regarding judicial reviews on DCO projects, which is placing structural efficiencies in the process for national infrastructure projects. It would still add time to the process. Once a decision has been made by the Secretary of State in either direction, if there is a challenge, it will add time to the process. That goes to the certainty point that has been discussed here.
Chair: Thank you for your evidence and for the time you spent preparing for today. If there is anything that you did not get a chance to cover fully today and that you would like to expand on, please feel free to write to us.