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Heathrow

The hon. Gentleman has asked me that before, and I shall have to give him the same answer. If that is what is necessary, that is what is necessary. I believe that the answer to the question, ““Can we all agree on anything?”” is—to quote someone else—““Yes, we can.”” Do we not all agree that shutting Heathrow is a bad idea? Do we not all agree that Heathrow has problems? Do we not all agree that we want a better Heathrow? If I am right, and we all agree on those points, that means that we are all signed up to keeping Heathrow open, curing its problems and deciding how to make it better. If Heathrow is to survive it has to prosper, which is the opposite of what is happening at the moment. To keep Heathrow open, we all need to be against the proposals made by the Mayor of London. As he rightly says, for his scheme to work Heathrow will have to be shut. If that happened, where would it leave the 70,000 people who work inside the boundary fence? They would face redundancy. I hope we all agree that redundancies are a bad thing. Heathrow’s key problems are all horribly familiar to us: frustrating departure delays, annoying landing delays, cancelled flights, missing bags—[Hon. Members: ““Noise.””] I shall come to noise later; do not worry. We all agree that those problems have to be overcome. The problems of planes queuing to take off and circling overhead before landing can only sensibly be solved by another runway. Many cancellations are caused by delay: if runways are 99 per cent. full, when flights are delayed they simply cannot be slotted in between the other flights that are waiting to take off, and they become cancellations. Many of the bags that go missing do so because of landing delays. Those delays leave too little time for a bag to make it from the flight that it has come in on to the flight that it should go out on. Again, the solution is to get rid of landing delays, for which we need another runway.