Heathrow will launch a public consultation to finalise its proposals for airport expansion, following the recent decision by the CAA to cap early spending
Heathrow’s submission to the Planning Inspectorate will detail how the airport will expand and connect all of Britain to global growth, whilst meeting the requirements of the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS).
It will also restate their commitment to ensuring a Heathrow expansion, meeting strict environmental targets, delivers tens of thousands of new high-skilled jobs and honours our commitments to local communities.
Public consultation timeline
The consultation will run from April through to June ensuring that communities can review and feedback. Heathrow will be writing to local authorities in the coming weeks with more information, offering them the opportunity to feedback on our approach to consultation.
Responses will feed into the final planning application, to be submitted to the Planning Inspectorate towards the end of 2020.
If Heathrow’s plans are approved by the Secretary of State on the recommendation of the Planning Inspectorate, the third runway is expected to open between early 2028 and late 2029.
The cap on spending has prolonged the construction period of a new third runway and means Heathrow will need to undertake refreshed modelling of key aspects of the plan – including public transport to and from the airport – to evidence that ANPS targets can be met.
Consultation events
In the coming weeks, Heathrow will announce dates and locations for consultation events as it also prepares to become one of the first major international airports to operate carbon neutral infrastructure.
Heathrow’s executive director for expansion, Emma Gilthorpe, said: “This country is ready for a decade of infrastructure delivery underpinned by expansion at Heathrow.
“We are keen to ensure our plans continue to be supported and shaped by local people as we prepare to deliver the economic boost Britain needs.”
The expansion’s impacts on the crises in biodiversity and climate, and the more local destruction of communities and illegal air quality, and noise (and the psychological damage caused through sleep-loss and disruption) impacts on hundreds of thousands of people nearby remain staggering in scale.
The campaign to manipulate the “consultation” through the press and misinformation is well underway. Going by past consultations, questioning will be loaded and meaningless with open questions (which cannot be data analysed) only regarding the actual issues. I know first-hand how the worthy efforts of consultants to make whatever small dents in the environmental damage are being relentlessly spun in relation to ‘carbon neutrality’ and ‘biodiversity’ and ‘conservation’.
This is exemplified in CEO John Holland-Kaye’s claims in a national newspaper’s commentary piece that “In the coming weeks, our airport infrastructure will be carbon neutral…” This reveals the type of campaign currently being engaged.
Meanwhile while Australia burns, the UK’s potential to lead by example as hosts of the next COP talks is undermined completely.
The Heathrow consultation I looked at had no provision of a western rail link or a route from Waterloo to allow people from western parts of the country or south London and Surrey to use public transport to easily travel to the airport. There was however provision for what would be the second largest car park in the world which would only encourage driving so how any claims of being carbon neutral can be taken seriously is laughable, this is not to mention the re-routing of local rivers and other disruption this project would cause.