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Heathrow

I have not got time to give way. In a very revealing article in March last year, The Sunday Times showed how the Government created that canard—by allowing senior executives from BAA to"““select alternate input data for the environmental predictions until they got the right results””." They did it by removing international flight arrivals from the calculation and by other spurious and misleading devices. As a result, I wrote later in the same month to Stavros Dimas, the EU Commissioner for Environment, asking him to make his own investigation to decide whether he thought the third runway was compatible with EU air quality and noise standards. I received an answer in July, which stated in the third paragraph:"““Technical reports underpinning the Heathrow expansion suggest that nitrogen limit values near Heathrow will be significantly exceeded in 2010, the year in which those limit values become mandatory, and that this will be the case even after 2015.””" Even if the derogation occurs, 1 January 2015 is the final date by which the mandatory targets become operable. In my view, that settles the argument. There is absolutely no way, when NOx levels are already significantly above the required limit, that adding nearly 250,000 additional flight movements can somehow reduce them. This project is not supported by the Government’s own Environment Agency; it does not command a consensus, as we have seen so clearly today; and if the Government recklessly press ahead, the EU is bound to block it. Now is the time for the Government to have another very close look at the issue.