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Heathrow

For literally thousands of my constituents, the debate is too important for party political knockabout or policy making by electioneering. According to the Government’s figures, at least 1,500 of my constituents will be forcibly removed from their homes in the village of Sipson. Another 4,000, in the villages of Longford, Harmondsworth and Harlington, will have their homes virtually surrounded by the airport or the road network. Noise and air pollution will render their homes unliveable in, and they will lose not only their homes but their communities. Those villages have survived for 1,000 years. They have community halls, churches, a gurdwara, a doctor’s surgery and so on. All will be wiped off the face of the earth. The only difference between those communities and others is that they will be sacrificed for BAA’s profits. It has been argued that people should have known before moving into the area that the runway posed a risk. However, we are considering settled communities, with families who go back generations in the area, and successive Governments have assured them that no further expansion of Heathrow will occur. I remember vividly the community meeting that BAA representatives attended. One of them read out the ““Dear Neighbour”” letter, which gave the assurance that BAA would not seek a third runway if it gained a fifth terminal. My constituents have been subjected to a litany of lies and deceit about the development of the airport. First, we were told that there would be a runway but no terminal. In weeks, there was a lobby for a new terminal. Then we were told that the development would encompass only one village; we now know that it will encompass all the villages to the north of the airport. We have recently seen plans for the road network. To my constituents’ distress, one of the roads is planned to go through our local cemetery. The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick) assured us in the House that that was not the case, but subsequently had to apologise to the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) and admit that he was wrong because BAA had supplied the information. I am told that this week I will receive another letter from BAA, assuring me that there will be no road through the cemetery. I will believe that—just as I believed the Sir John Egan letter of several years ago. When the White Paper was published, the Government gave us assurances that any development had to stand the test, especially for air pollution, that an independent consultation exercise would take place to verify that, and that the process would be peer reviewed. The process was peer reviewed, but the information that went into it was not; it was largely provided by BAA. It reached a farcical level when, as has already been mentioned, fictitious aeroplanes were invented. I am told that QinetiQ was involved in some of the assessments of the supposedly independent process, yet an advert in the Financial Times only a few weeks ago listed it as one of the companies that supports the expansion of Heathrow. BAA tainted the evidence, confidence in the process was undermined and integrity was breached. Ministerial statements, which are so positively in favour of the third runway, are interpreted as pre-empting the Government’s decision and the consultation. All that leads to the conclusion that if the Minister announces that a third runway is to go ahead, litigation will ensue because the consultation was contaminated. If local residents lose, the litigation will be followed by a lengthy public inquiry, which, covering a sixth terminal and third runway, would make the terminal 5 inquiry appear almost brief. It is time to stand back and review the position, because the situation, and the evidence, have moved on since 2003. We now know more about the effect of air pollution, which will cover the south of my borough. We now know that the new aeroplane technology that we were promised would be developed has not materialised. We now also know that we already violate the European Union’s air pollution directive. That means that a number of my constituents are already living in a poisoned atmosphere. It also means that with a third runway, we will have no chance of meeting the European directive limits, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter) said. Reference has been made to the ANASE study, which I welcomed, and which said that the level of noise at which people get annoyed and their quality of life is affected would be 50 dB, not 57 dB. That means that 2 million people, rather than 200,000, as was originally envisaged, will suffer. On the health of my constituents, like other hon. Members, I have been urging a health impact assessment, but the Government have consistently refused to undertake one. We are told that one will take place during the planning inquiry process, but that will be too late to inform the Secretary of State’s pre-Christmas decision, which we await. We now know much more about the effects on health, however, including from the Chicago study on the links to cancer and from more recent studies on the links to stress and heart conditions. We were given a reminder of the safety risks at Heathrow only two years ago, when an aeroplane fell out of the sky and was literally minutes away from crash-landing in one of the most densely populated areas of the country. I still fear for people’s safety with all this over-flying, particularly given the risk of terrorist attack. Our position on climate change has moved on since 2003. I welcomed—indeed, the whole House welcomed—the commitment to the 80 per cent. target in the Climate Change Bill. I voted for the Bill, but there is no way that we will be able to meet that target with the expansion of aviation at Heathrow. The Tyndall study basically says that if we want to cope with the increase in emissions from aviation on our current growth path, we will virtually have to shut down the rest of UK industry. That is obviously not feasible. The two things are not compatible. That is why Lord Smith, the chair of the Environment Agency, told the Government that building a third runway at Heathrow would be a mistake. It is not just him saying that, however. The Government’s Sustainable Development Commission and the Institute for Public Policy Research, in the joint study that we commissioned, have said that the Government should stand back and allow an independent review of the White Paper. The European Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, has made it clear that we are already violating EU directives and have little chance of meeting them in future. I listened to what the Secretary of State said last week about the existing limits, and the impact of our non-compliance on the health of Londoners overall worries me. We are now revisiting the economic arguments, too. What concerns me is the automatic acceptance of some of the economic arguments that were put forward in certain studies—I would not say that they were shoddy, but it is now coming to light that those studies were paid for by the industry. New information comes to light even as we drill down into the consultation paper. I refer to the work of Jeff Gazzard, the aviation expert and environmentalist, that was published this week. He says that even with the 480,000 limit still in place, the Department for Transport and BAA agree that we can grow passenger numbers at Heathrow from 67 million in 2006 to 85 million in 2015 and 95 million in 2030. Why? Because aeroplanes are getting bigger and can carry more passengers in each flight. That throws into question the very need for expansion. With regard to competition with other European airports, we now have a world-leading aviation industry in London and the south-east, with a five-airport system. Each of those airports plays a specialist role, developing and competing effectively. The reason Schiphol and other airports have different flight movements is that we have won all the best at the Heathrow—the most profitable ones. I will not rehearse the point about how the economic arguments have been exaggerated, but alternatives have been brought forward. It is not just the Conservatives who have proposed the alternative, high-speed link; it is the coalition of rail and other unions, which has commissioned its own independent study. It means that we have the opportunity to expand our transport network overall without the significant environmental cost of the expansion of Heathrow. I must also say that the breaking up of BAA by the Competition Commission has urged the Government to review their aviation policies.