27 January 2008The GuardianRobin McKie, Juliette Jowitt and Tim Webb
Mike Russell has lived close to Heathrow Airport for more than 25 years. Once he could sit in his Chiswick garden and never notice the planes. But not any more. Today there is hardly a moment when an aircraft is not roaring above his home. 'It's like a neighbour with builders who start up their circular saws every 90 seconds,' he says.
Such is life near the world's busiest international airport: air pollution, congested roads, constant noise. Neither are Mike and his wife, Tessa, alone. Thousands of other families in the area have to share these conditions.
And if British airport chiefs have their way, many thousands more will be added to this list. They are pressing for approval for a £12bn project that would see a 2,200-metre runway, Heathrow's third - as well as a sixth passenger terminal - being constructed on the airport's northern perimeter. In addition, use of existing runways would be expanded to allow increased numbers of flights to take off and land.
Public consultation over the scheme opened last year and is scheduled to end next month. The government, which is known to support the project, has said it will announce this summer whether it approves or disapproves of the runway plan. Most observers expect it will be given the go-ahead.
It will be a controversial decision nevertheless, and will make the airport the focus of a new type of eco-battle that will dominate British life over the next decade. Other major transport schemes, including the expansions of Stansted, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff and Belfast, are being considered as well the widening of the M6 and other motorway schemes. All concentrate green fears about raising carbon emissions in Britain. None will be as controversial as Heathrow's third runway, however. Its capacity would rise from 480,000 flights a year to 702,000 once the runway is completed, despite a government pledge in 2001 that flight numbers would be pegged. In addition, 4.5 million extra Tube journeys would be made to the expanded airport, trains would carry an extra four million passengers, and 25 million extra car trips to Heathrow would be taken.
Heathrow's expansion would also lead to the demolition of 700 houses, including the whole of the village of Sipson, while the number of schools around the airport where children would experience noise about 63 decibels - designated as a nuisance - would rise from 14 to 20.
Then there is the issue of climate change. Surprisingly, this has turned out to be the concern that local people say has most incensed them. Britain has committed itself to cutting its carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Yet here it is talking of massively expanding an industry that is blamed by many for the world's ecological woes. Hence the widespread hostility, as Mike Russell explains: 'The government says global warming is the greatest challenge we'll see, far-reaching in its consequences and irreversible in its destructive power, and then goes on and does all sorts of things that are radically making the system worse.'
For their part, aviation supporters say the climate change argument has been grossly exaggerated. Carbon emissions from planes account for less than 2 per cent of all the greenhouse gases across the planet (although for the UK alone, the figure is 5 per cent). Focusing so strongly on aviation distorts public debate, they say - taking pressure off major polluters such as road transport, which generates nearly a quarter of the UK's carbon emissions.
This complaint was backed last week by a National Statistics survey which showed 40 per cent of the UK population believes air transport is the most environmentally damaging mode of transport while only 35 per cent blames cars and lorries.
However, aviation's current modest impact is destined to change dramatically, campaigners retort. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says air emissions will account for 12-15 per cent of global greenhouse gases by 2030 when Heathrow's third runway will just be reaching full use.
In addition, aviation emissions have a disproportionate effect at high altitudes. Thanks to an effect known as 'radiative forcing', carbon in the upper atmosphere produces 2.7 times more warming than emissions near the ground.
The crucial point, say climate campaigners, is that Britain cannot afford to have any increases in carbon emissions in any area if it is to meet the 60-80 per cent reduction in emissions that scientists say must be implemented to fend off the worst effects of climate change.
The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research calculates that Britain's entire carbon budget would be used up by 2037 by the UK's ever-expanding aviation industry (see 'The science', page 34).
Hence local anger at the project. At a public meeting in Chiswick, more than 1,000 people turned up, overwhelming the church hall and spilling local folk on to the street. Similar meetings in Richmond and Putney have also attracted large audiences. In addition, all four main candidates in the forthcoming London mayoral elections are committed opponents of the runway.
Nevertheless, the government is adamant that Heathrow's expansion is compatible with its climate change aspirations. No third runway will mean the airport will no longer be able to act as an international flight hub. Amsterdam's Schiphol airport already has five runways and Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport has four. Both are poised to take up intercontinental flights that cannot find a home outside London.
'If Heathrow is allowed to become uncompetitive, the flights and routes it operates will simply move elsewhere,' says Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly. 'All it will do is shift capacity over the Channel. It will make us feel pure, but with no benefit to the rest of the planet.'
The third runway's supporters also point out it will be bring a massive economic boost to the economy while ensuring that London retains its position as one of the world's business capitals. Without it, our economy would be in trouble. Indeed, Heathrow is already facing the strain because of its queues and delays, as Colin Stanbridge, chief executive of the London Chamber of Commerce, recently discovered. At a recent commerce conference in India, where he was trying to sell the advantages of settling businesses in London, he was publicly berated about the city's air transport. An executive of an Indian company stood up and told him: 'Do something about Heathrow.'
It is a sentiment shared by Ric Lewis, chief executive of the London investment company Curzon Global Partners. He spends much of his life flying in and out of cities to generate business for his firm. Lewis knows a thing or two about airports and his opinion about Heathrow is simple: it's a national embarrassment. 'Heathrow is the first experience many people have of the UK. That first impression should be saying, "Welcome to one of the best cities in the world". Instead it says all too often, "Caution: you're about to have a bad day".'
That warning applies to any visitor heading into the airport, says Lewis, but particularly to business travellers. More of them use Heathrow than Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and London City combined. BAA, the former British Airports Authority, owner of Heathrow, says 35 per cent of its passengers are business travellers and this fraction is rising rapidly. By 2030 it could reach 50 per cent, according to research.
Yet Heathrow remains a thoroughly miserable experience for all these business travellers - and it's getting worse. There are security queues that can take hours to clear, public transport that is unreliable, failures to get gates available for incoming flights, lengthy queues through passport control, and a host of other problems that have made the Heathrow experience an unpalatable one - and which have critical consequences.
'We can't rely on Heathrow,' says Lewis. 'Now, if we absolutely have to be at a meeting overseas, we get there the night before, even on short-haul trips.' In other words, being able to hop on to a plane for a business meeting in Frankfurt or Paris and be back at home the same night is becoming a luxury.
'I've got two young children,' Lewis says. 'I'm trying to plan my trips so I can get back in time to put them to bed in the evening, but I've lost count of the number of times that a service problem at Heathrow has conspired against me.'
John Cridland, the CBI's deputy director-general, says UK directors of international manufacturing companies need to visit their operations overseas. 'But if a managing director can't fly to China via London, he might go via Amsterdam for his connecting flight,' he says.
If this happens repeatedly, global companies based in the UK may question why their UK head offices and research facilities should be based here if they are so badly connected. 'If you've got UK-based managing directors flying to Amsterdam every night, in the end the company might think about basing everything there too.'
Of course it's not just business that would benefit from the new runway, say supporters. Future Heathrow, the industry lobby group, argues the airport is the largest employer on a single site in the UK, with 72,000 workers. It also supports 100,000 other jobs in the area, one of the more economically deprived in London. A third runway would be a great stimulus for the local economy.
But business projections mean little to those who find the very air they breathe affected by Heathrow flights. In particular, nitrogen dioxide - which is produced by cars and aircraft - has been linked to breathing problems among local people. From 2010 strict limits on nitrogen dioxide will come into force across the European Union, but there are indications that these new limits have already been breached in the Heathrow area.
Ministers have promised the UK will improve its act, but campaigners claim the government may simply ask the EU for 'derogations' from such commitments. Already it has asked for a postponement for introducing the EU's limits until 2015.
As with so much about the Heathrow controversy, the problem is exacerbated by a history of reneged promises: residents have been told there will be no more than four terminals, no more than two runways, no more than five terminals, no more than 480,000 flights a year; and now, before terminal five has even opened, consultation is proposing a sixth terminal, a third runway, and more than 700,000 flights a years. Stephen Nelson, chief executive of BAA, even suggested last week it may need to build a fourth runway and a seventh terminal.
Public reaction was unsurprising. 'The time has come to say enough is enough and call a halt to any expansion of Heathrow,' said John Stewart, chairman the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise, a view shared by Edward Lister, leader of Wandsworth council, part of the 2M group of councils claiming to represent two million people living under Heathrow's flight paths. 'When it turns out in 20 years that we can't do it [run new runways within promised pollution limits], we will not be able to put the cork back in the bottle,' he said.
The real driving force behind the 2M group is not local pollution, however, but the continual noise of incoming and departing airliners. It is an issue that has united councils stretching from Kensington and Chelsea to rural Buckinghamshire, and which is described by Mike Russell as 'like being in a small room with a vacuum cleaner'.
Other parents say they cannot even hear their children chatter about their day at school as they walk them home and complain of mental and physical illness. 'Even if you're moderately angered, if you start to get stressed you are at risk of heart attacks. Certainly you get demotivated,' said Stewart.
Yet such problems are destined to increase if the government approves the third runway after consultations end. If so, Russell predicts a riot. Previous campaigns over Heathrow expansion have been hard-fought but have failed. This time things may be different.
'There are enough people in West London - I'm not talking about young firebrands, I'm talking about retired people who don't worry about this any more - who are prepared to take direct action,' he says. 'They'll go through the consultation, and if at the end the government announces it's going ahead you'll find there are masses of West London residents who'll take direct action.
'There's anger: everybody was told it was about choice, then they get no choice whatsoever. A democratic government is elected on behalf of its citizens, and if it always sides with the corporations it's a dereliction of its duties.'
