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Heathrow

The hon. Gentleman has made the point well. That was just one of the variables—a multi-billion-pound variable—completely missing from the Oxford Economic Forecasting report. We have to take a lot of that report with a pinch of salt, especially considering who commissioned it. I shall not go through the details of the CE Delft response to the report, but it undermines many of the main assertions and assumptions in it. I also want to challenge the idea that if we do not significantly increase the number of flights in and out of Heathrow, the concept of Heathrow being a hub will be undermined. I would put it this way: it is the five airports in the south-east and around the London area that constitute a hub. A few routes or destinations may have been lost in the past decade or 15 years, but where is the model that demonstrates the extent to which it is no longer viable for Heathrow to be a hub or part of a five-airport hub? I have even asked BAA to show me the evidence, but so far nobody has been able to present the relevant mathematical model or the relevant evidence from other places around the world. Again, the challenge is still there, but the facts and the model to demonstrate the extent to which Heathrow’s or the UK’s status might be undermined are not.