Written evidence from Heathrow Airport Limited (STA0069)

Introduction

Heathrow Airport Limited owns and runs Heathrow Airport – the UK’s only hub airport. In 2014 the number of air transport movements at Heathrow was 470,695, moving 73.4 million passengers and 1.50 million metric tonnes of freight – worth £101bn in value, making Heathrow the UK’s biggest port by value.

Heathrow is one of the UK’s largest transport hubs with the UK’s only dedicated non-stop express airport rail-link, free travel zone, the UK’s busiest bus and coach station and the only airport with a London Underground station. Over the last 20 years passenger numbers have risen by almost 80% and yet airport related road traffic has remained broadly static. The number of passengers using public transport every year has nearly doubled from 10 million to 19 million and the proportion of our colleagues driving to work alone has fallen from 8 in 10 to just 5 in 10.

Heathrow is submitting evidence to this Inquiry because we believe there is opportunity for the government to better integrate its planning processes – across government departments, agencies, airports and other stakeholders – to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of surface transport projects to the benefit of passengers, businesses and local air quality. While this Inquiry is not looking at air quality issues, surface transport and air quality are integrally linked and are at the heart of our submission’s recommendation to government, which is more integrated planning.

Current strategic connections to airports and planning for predicted changes in demand

Heathrow currently has strong connections to the strategic road network with direct access to the M25 and M4; the M1, M3 and M40 and local access to the A4 and A30.

National Express currently uses Heathrow as a key interchange on their network of coach services. With over 500,000 bus and coach movements a year, Heathrow is currently the country’s busiest bus and coach hub. More than five million airport passengers and a quarter of employees travel by bus and coach every year, which are able to serve dispersed areas of demand more effectively and provide crucial early morning transport connections to support the airport’s operating hours.

Heathrow also benefits from strong rail connections to-and-from London. The Heathrow Express rail service is a critical part of Heathrow’s surface access proposition, providing a frequent and high-speed, premium rail service to-and-from central London. There is also the Heathrow Connect stopping service train, which services west London and the Underground Piccadilly line, which services west, central and north-east London. This mix of rail services provides choice, competition and resilience for passengers, airport employees and businesses. However, those travelling by rail outside of London need to travel to Paddington or make use of one of the rail-air coach services, so Heathrow connectivity can still be improved for the rest of the UK, as we will discuss through other infrastructure projects outlined in the next section.

Our future strategy will be more reliant on public transport

Background growth in road traffic is likely to result in worsening of congestion on the strategic road network. This will be particularly prevalent in London and the South East and remains a major transport planning and air quality management challenge. The Department for Transport (DfT) is projecting that road traffic and congestion will continue to grow on the strategic road network affecting reliability and journey times for airport passengers.

For these reasons and because of our commitment to air quality, Heathrow’s surface access strategy to support future growth will be public transport led. Improvements to rail, bus and coach services will allow faster and easier access and sustainable transport choices to Heathrow from across the UK. We continue to work with stakeholders to ensure projects that will provide better connectivity to Heathrow for passengers across the UK are delivered.

The priority is for schemes to provide direct connectivity to our biggest catchments, with other locations being served via key rail interchanges. Growth in passenger numbers while increasing public transport mode share will require additional capacity for rail passengers at Heathrow. Key projects include Crossrail, Western Rail Link, Piccadilly Line Upgrade, Southern Rail Access and HS2. Therefore, it is also critical that the needs of airport passengers are also considered by the Government in developing these rail stations.

For example, not only will Crossrail provide an additional 1,200 seats per hour and space for a total of 6,000 passengers per hour, it will also play an important role in relieving congested central sections of the Piccadilly Line for passengers. There are also opportunities to increase the number of Crossrail services to Heathrow to meet any further growth in demand that may come from expansion.

The Piccadilly Line upgrade will increase line capacity by 60% through a new signalling system and trains allowing faster and more frequent services. While delivery timescales are yet to be finalised, this could provide up to 18 trains per hour serving Heathrow. Western Rail Link to Heathrow is planned for delivery by 2021. This will provide a west-facing connection to the GWML offering direct services to Reading, Slough, Maidenhead and Twyford, with potential onward connections to Oxford, Basingstoke, Bristol and Wales. These catchments represent over 3 million journeys to-and-from the airport each year. Local stakeholders have made the case for better access to Heathrow to maintain the strength of the Thames Valley economy and support key businesses in the area.

Southern Rail Access would improve connectivity with Heathrow to key catchments in South London, Surrey, Hampshire and the South Coast, representing 3 million Heathrow passengers a year. A feasibility study by Network Rail is now with the DfT for consideration. It is critical that momentum is maintained by initiating a formal development project with Network Rail through their GRIP process. This is a project that should be taken forward irrespective of decisions on airport expansion.

The new HS2 interchange at Old Oak Common will be served by frequent Heathrow Express and Crossrail services, providing important connectivity to key cities in the Midlands and the North. This will transform Heathrow journey times for the north, bringing Birmingham within an hour of Heathrow and both Manchester and Leeds within around 90 minutes. This will make rail journey times to the airport significantly better than those by road and also avoid multiple interchanges through London by rail.

With these additional rail services in place, the number of trains per hour serving Heathrow would double by 2030 to 36 trains per hour with capacity increasing from around 5,000 seats per hour to almost 13,000.

We continue to work with local stakeholders to deliver improvements to local transport connections, including bus services and the cycle network. Improved local connections benefit local communities, making local areas more attractive for residents and businesses, while reducing the need to travel by car.

Future needs can only be met by planning in partnership

There needs to be a focus on collaborative working and decision making to deliver strategic long-term transport planning, because there is no single organisation with all the relevant information and expertise. We have recently seen a number of recent long-term planning processes across different transport sectors:

• The Airports Commission has considered the long-term requirements for additional runway capacity, with airport surface access an important consideration in the review;
• Network Rail has adopted a new approach to its planning of rail capacity through its ‘Long-Term Planning Process’;
• Highways England has completed its Route Strategy process to identify the needs of the strategic road network.

Long-term planning by Network Rail and Highways England is being progressed on a collaborative basis, ensuring input from across industries and user groups. This has helped better address all stakeholder and market requirements. Both studies are using Heathrow’s future forecasts and we welcome new collaborative planning processes such as these that illustrate the importance and success of working together to deliver outcomes that address a wide-range of the UK’s future needs.

Networks Rail’s long-term planning process recognises airports as a key market in their own right and sets out conditional outputs against which to specify new and improved airport rail propositions. Importantly, it acknowledges that new and improved rail services to major airports and their integration with other transport modes is critical to providing more sustainable travel options and improving overall connectivity.

We welcome the introduction of longer funding periods for Highways England, as this provides greater certainty for planning and delivering projects. However, there needs to be a long-term strategy for the strategic road network to ensure that the long-term needs of the road network are properly understood and can be adequately planned over successive funding cycles. As one of the busiest sections of the strategic road network, the recently announced M25 south-west quadrant study is an important example. We welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with all stakeholders on supporting this work.

However, long-term planning still operates in relative silos. There is a need for better integrated planning across sectors, Government departments and agencies to ensure more effective and efficient planning. The development of aviation and high speed rail strategies is a good example of a missed opportunity for delivering an integrated transport system for the UK. The two disparate processes have been unable to properly assess the wider sustainability, connectivity and economic benefits of integrating the new, high-speed network with the UK’s only hub airport. This approach is also inconsistent with European best practice.

Transport planning at the local level is also critical to filling connectivity gaps, which cannot be achieved via rail and the strategic road network. Local strategy integration and collaboration between local authorities and transport agencies is not mandated, although partnership working, certainly around Heathrow, ensures collaboration via a number of working groups. Some of these are led by local authorities within the London region and outside of London by LEPs, while Heathrow operates its own transport forum to bring together sub-regional and cross-boundary interests.

Effective local transport planning is crucial to delivering cycling and bus routes to get airport workers out of cars and using more sustainable forms of transport. Devolved transport funding via the LEPs is helping to deliver local transport improvements, but the challenge remains of effectively delivering cross-boundary transport initiatives where local authority transport planning is often not aligned with more strategic LEP and transport agency objectives.

Achieving joined-up planning that delivers local and sub-regional objectives remains a barrier to securing better surface access to airports. The fact that many local, sub-regional and regional policy objectives continue to demand better surface access to airports highlights the weakness in the current system of delivering such improvements.

There is a need for the Government to better integrate freight planning to ensure the UK’s future competitiveness

Heathrow is one of the UK’s most important ports because it carries more freight by value than any other port. In 2014, £101bn worth of goods passed through Heathrow, which is more than the combined value of the UK’s two biggest container ports – Felixstowe and Southampton. With exports so important to the UK economy, there is a clear opportunity for the Government to better integrate freight so it sits more strategically within its planning processes. We support the development of a collaborative national freight strategy to ensure joined-up investment and planning to better support the UK’s freight industry.

Freight demand should be considered alongside airport passenger demand to ensure that strategic road and rail investments are considering all users of the network. For example, some of the key challenges in the Heathrow area include the provision of suitable rail freight facilities and adequate HGV parking. Heathrow has started working more closely with key industry and local stakeholders to deliver more efficient freight operations, but the UK freight industry and UK exporters could benefit significantly more if freight initiatives and projects – such as surface transport to airports – were better supported and prioritised by the Government.

The importance of surface transport in freeing up existing spare capacity in airports

There is no substitute for providing more hub airport capacity

Improved surface transport does not replace the demand for additional airport capacity at Heathrow. A hub airport like Heathrow benefits passengers, airlines and businesses because it brings together domestic traffic (from across the UK) together with short-haul traffic (from European airports) and freight. This pool of passengers and freight fills the spare capacity of each plane and makes routes viable for airlines. That is why four out of five of all UK long-haul flights are from Heathrow and why long-haul routes at many other UK airports have struggled to become sustainable because they do not pool and ‘hub’ passenger demand (local, UK, European, international – plus leisure and business passengers) as Heathrow does. Heathrow also operates at 99% capacity, while other UK airports operate at a lower capacity.

Better surface access will spread the benefits of airport connectivity to more of the UK

Improving rail connectivity to Heathrow will grow the number of people and businesses that can access the airport and its global connections. Heathrow’s surface access strategy sees substantial increases in the number of people who could reach the airport by public transport. Shifting airport passengers from private cars to public transport will free up capacity on the highway network and provide increased demand on public transport services throughout the day.

The Airports Commission concluded that better rail connections could bring a further 470,000 people within 30 minutes of the airport and 10 million within three hours. In many locations this will mean that public transport is directly comparable or better than the alternative journey by road helping support the Government’s objectives on modal shift and reducing road congestion and emissions. Some of the key journey time savings are summarised in the table below:

The Government's role in planning surface access to airports in conjunction with airport owners, local authorities and Local Enterprise Partnerships

Long-term planning is getting better at recognising the importance of access to airports

We welcome recognition of the importance of airports as a market within Network Rail LTPP and Highways England Route Strategies. Both have been open and collaborative processes that have allowed a broad range of stakeholders to express their views on the current challenges and requirements for the future.

Whilst progress has been made, the development of the strategic road and rail networks is still largely being developed independently. There is a need for greater collaboration across modes to develop and deliver strategic long-term infrastructure for the UK.

The Government needs to take a lead role in co-ordinating the requirements for future infrastructure and making decisions on investment to meet the objectives for the transport network. We would welcome the opportunity to work in partnership to enable more collaborative decision making and transparent planning.

LEPs have a key role to play in ensuring regional level thinking

Many LEPs have recognised the important role of airports in the local economy and have made the case for improved surface access infrastructure and better connectivity to local airports and the UK’s only hub airport, Heathrow.

For example, the Thames Valley LEP has played an important role in making the case for a Western Rail Link to Heathrow making it their top priority in terms of transport infrastructure. The Enterprise M3 LEP has also made a strong case for improving surface access to airports and the need for Southern Rail Access to Heathrow because of the benefits it provides to their local catchment areas.

Heathrow is taking a lead to encourage collaboration

Heathrow is playing its part by working collaboratively with all of its stakeholders. We have already been working closely with Network Rail and Highways England on their strategic planning processes and engaging on specific projects. This has included sharing data on future demand.

We recently instigated the Heathrow Area Co-ordination Group – with Network Rail, Highways England, Transport for London (TfL) and the Environment Agency to co-ordinate a plan for all of the major projects in the Heathrow area. With a significant amount of work planned in the area, the purpose of the group is to:

• Exchange information and share data in relation to the following projects: Heathrow expansion, Southern Rail Access, HS2 Ltd, Western Rail Access, M4 J3-12 Smart motorway, M25 J10-16, Piccadilly Line Upgrade, Crossrail and Lower Thames Valley flood risk assessment;
• agree planning assumptions and methodologies; and
• identify interdependencies, conflicts and opportunities.

At a local level, we play an active role in a number of the LEP meetings and continue to work closely with local stakeholders through the Heathrow Area Transport Forum (HATF). Through our recent document ‘Reducing traffic: a new plan for public transport’ we launched a new £1 million local transport fund to develop and deliver projects that will support local authority and Heathrow priorities.

The funding of strategic connections to airports, particularly:

• The DfT’s role in ensuring that surface access infrastructure is planned and built in a joined-up way where different parts of the infrastructure are funded by different parties.
• The level of responsibility that should be borne by the taxpayer for funding access and interfaces with national networks.

There are clear benefits to the UK of better connections to airports

Airports are an important part of the UK transport network. The global connectivity they offer provides opportunities for UK businesses to export goods and services and attract inward investment and tourism. We believe that funding for transport infrastructure should be based on the benefits they deliver.

Better rail connections to airports will deliver modal shift from private to public transport. This will help reduce congestion and related emissions, which are key government priorities. Airport passengers provide additional revenue to help fund the operation and expansion of the rail network. In particular, they provide additional demand outside the traditional commuter peak hours and in the contra-peak direction, where usage is typically lower by other rail users.

The Airports Commission indicated by 2030 that 53% of airport passengers would be using public transport of which over 40% would be by rail. Even with current runway capacity that could be 25 million rail passengers per year to Heathrow, which would help grow revenue for TfL and key rail franchises. Projects such as Crossrail, Western Rail Link and Southern Rail all have a strong business case for Government investment.

The Government's effectiveness in ensuring that its own policies, such as modal shift, are being achieved in decisions about surface transport to airports

Delivering change through partnerships

Government has a greater role to play, beyond its current role of setting policy guidance and relatively ‘hands off’ in supporting delivery. Equally, government guidance on transport assessments and evaluation need to be reviewed so that the economic importance of air passengers and their time sensitivity are better recognised. Heathrow has delivered significant behaviour change in surface access journeys by passengers and airport colleagues. This has been delivered in partnership through the Heathrow Area Transport Forum (HATF), which is made up of local authorities, transport operators, Transport for London, Network Rail and Highways England. The Forum is responsible for agreeing targets for modal shift and developing a strategy to help deliver against those targets. Progress is monitored on a quarterly basis through a Steering Group made up of local stakeholders.

The work of the HATF has delivered steady growth in the number of airport passengers using public transport.  Now over 40% of airport passengers use rail, bus, coach and London Underground services. This represents almost 20 million public transport journeys. We have also seen a substantial reduction in the number of airport colleagues who drive to work alone. Over the last 25 years, this has fallen from just under 80% to 51% today. As a result we have seen total daily traffic levels to-and-from the airport remain relatively stagnant, while airport passengers have grown almost 80% in the same period.

Heathrow has a strong track record of delivering surface access and sustainable travel initiatives. For example, Heathrow has the UK’s largest Free Travel Zone; we also provide support for local bus services and cycling. Heathrow has a strong commuter programme, which has delivered innovative projects like the UK’s largest single site car share scheme, the airport travelcard, discounted travel products and Heathrow’s Cycle Hub.

We will continue to invest in local sustainable transport projects, to support improved passenger experience and behaviour change for passengers and airport colleagues. However, to deliver further substantial shift to public transport we are reliant on delivery of major transport infrastructure projects such as Crossrail, Western Rail Link and Southern Rail Access.

The extent to which airport customer preference and DfT policy concur in terms of preferred modes of surface transport to airports

Airports attract a wide range of passengers with different preferences and drivers of mode choice. In some cases, travel by car will be the most efficient and appropriate mode of travel. While offering choice of modes to passengers is an important part of improving passenger service, there are some locations and times of day when it will not be cost effective or efficient to provide new public transport services. Even at the leading airports for public transport mode share, a significant proportion of passengers still arrive by road-based modes and in most cases the majority of passengers (as bus and coach services make up a proportion of public transport trips).

October 2015