Airport Policy

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 26 May 1977.

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Photo of Sir George Sinclair Sir George Sinclair , Dorking 12:00, 26 May 1977

As the House will see, I am in close touch with my colleagues from the other areas. We have, individually and jointly, on behalf of our constituents, been pressing the Government to reduce the unacceptable effects of Gatwick. In this we have had the well-co-ordinated and determined support of the three county councils involved. They have made their joint and individual representations to the Minister in response to the consultative documents. In addition, in the past ten days a delegation from Surrey, supported by the serving Members, put their case personally before the two Ministers most concerned with this problem, and we are grateful for the reception that we received.

The full impact of the uncontrolled growth of Gatwick has been felt not only by residents but by the county councils which have had to shoulder heavy new responsibilities and rapidly increasing demands for services of all kinds, such as roads, housing, health, schools, police and fire services. All this has been necessary as a result of airport expansion over which these local authorities have had no planning control.

Present airport planning in the South-East is based on the assumption that passenger traffic will roughly double in the next ten years and that freight will keep pace. With the cancellation of Maplin, all this increase will have to be accommodated at the four main existing airports in the South-East, Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted. The impact on Gatwick of this development has been made clear by the airport authority. The current rate of passenger traffic at Gatwick is about 6 million a year. By 1985 this is planned to reach 16 million, and by the early 1990s it is planned to reach 25 million, which equals the number of passengers now passing through Heathrow. By the end of the same period it is planned that Heathrow will take between 35 million and 38 million passengers.

Unless policy decisions are taken now by the Government to limit the growth of these airports in the South-East, a course supported by the hon. Member for Harlow (Mr. Newens), it seems clear that Stansted, with its great runway, is in jeopardy of being developed steadily to take as much traffic as Gatwick will take in the early 1990s, about 25 million passengers. That is the risk. The Government should not think that simply by having no policy of control, they can off-load the whole of the growth of air traffic in the South-East on these four existing airports. That would lead to a serious human backlash.

The Government have promised a White Paper for the late summer or early autumn. Unless the Government set clear limits to the growth of traffic at these airports, I believe they will face growing resentment and resistance from people living in those areas that would be most deeply disturbed and disrupted by such uncontrolled development. That would lead to more reversals of policy in response to public indignation. The resulting uncertainty would be bad for the airports, bad for the airlines, bad for residents, and I fear that it would be worst of all for Stansted.

To relieve pressure on the four existing airports in the South-East, there are three main strategic courses open to the Government. I hope that in their White Paper they will commit themselves to all three.

The first course is to accept that pressure of air traffic in the South-East in the 1990s will outrun the capacity of the existing airports and may well, before that, outrun the tolerance of those living in the areas most affected by the expansion. If the Government accept that the bulk of the traffic must be accommodated in the South-East, they should follow the advice of the Surrey and East and West Sussex County Councils and begin to plan for an additional airport that will cause less dislocation and disturbance than the further expansion of the existing four airports.

The second course is to set limits to the expansion of the four airports. That would achieve two good results. It would give hope of relief for those living in the areas and it would give a real impetus to the development of alternative airport capacities to meet the overflow of demand for more air traffic.

For the orderly expansion of the four South-East airports within the limits set down, the public should be given a more effective say in what they can be persuaded to tolerate. It is they who are being made to bear the cost of the expansion in disturbance, in urban overdevelopment and in increased rates and taxes. One of the best ways of achieving this would be to require airport authorities to go through the normal planning procedures whenever they are seeking a significant internal expansion of airport capacity that will make new demands on the local government services required outside the airports. The planning authorities concerned with Gatwick—and all three counties worked together on this issue, through their standing conference—would, I know, welcome such responsibility.

The third course is to work out now a programme for diverting air traffic from the South-East to the regional airports outside the South-East that would welcome expansion. We have heard the arguments from successive Governments and we have heard the arguments expressed again today by the Minister and by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South (Mr. Parkinson)—namely, that no significant relief for the South-East could be achieved by such action. However, if the Government limit expansion of the existing airports in the South-East, the surplus demand for travel to and from the United Kingdom will seek outlets elsewhere.

As I shall explain later, an incentive should be added. Before I turn to that issue, I remind the Minister that a promise was made by the Labour Government when they cancelled Maplin that they would ease the burden of air traffic on the existing airports in the South-East by developing regional airports. Perhaps the Minister will say what they have achieved in redeeming that pledge by comparison with the amount of investment that they have put into the existing four airports in the South-East.

I believe that there is a course of action available that would provide additional incentives. That is outlined in Part 2 of the consultative document at Appendix 5. If combined with a limitation on traffic at the existing main airports in the South-East, this would spread the burden and the benefits of air traffic more evenly between the South-East and the other regions. Put simply, it would be to levy a charge on aircraft using the South-East airports. This should be reinforced by using the revenue to make a comparable reduction of charges at airports in other regions. The main prospect of achieving large-scale diversions to regional airports outside the South-East by the joint measures of limitation in one area and financial reward in the other would, I suggest, be in the charter business, and especially in the package tours.

The Minister has just pointed out that two-thirds of the air passenger traffic in the United Kingdom is leisure traffic. A major opportunity is to concentrate on the package and charter tour operators to see whether the airports that they use can be spread more widely.

With the spectacular improvement in inter-city rail services, which have been mentioned by the hon. Member for Bristol, North-East, the package tour operators could make good arrangements with the hotels in regional cities and with British Railways to use regional airports more fully. That point has been made strongly to me by my hon. Friend the Member for East Grinstead (Mr. Johnson Smith) who has once or twice intervened successfully.

Such a dispersal would spread some of the economic benefits to the regional cities and would offer easy mobility between them and London. Above all, it would relieve the South-East of the unfair share of air traffic serving the whole country with which it is now overburdened.

So much for the strategic plan for airports. One other basic factor mentioned by the Minister which has so far caused the greatest public indignation, resentment and resistance, not only in this country, but in all countries with great international airports, is aircraft noise.

Good international progress has been made in requiring that planes being built now or in future shall have to pass noise tests before they can get their noise certificates. Already a quieter generation of planes is emerging, however slowly. We believe that the Government, in their White Paper, should lay down a programme over the next few years for the steady reduction in the number of planes without noise certificates. A first step, and a great relief to residents living near airports, would be to reduce rapidly to zero the number of non-certificated noisy planes which are allowed to use our airports during the night.

By 1985—only eight years ahead—the American Federal Aircraft Authority aims to have introduced a much improved American domestic regulation which would drive many of the second-hand noisier aircraft off the American routes. But many of these would find their way into the international market. Unless steps are taken by our Government to control the licensing of such aircraft to fly in Britain, many of them could find their way to this country or to European operators using our airports.

The problem of concentrating noisy planes is already acute at Gatwick. It is all very well for the Minister and others to hold out hopes of quieter planes bringing relief, but listen to these figures relating to Gatwick: of the 116 planes based regularly on Gatwick over the last year, only five held noise certificates, and only 1 per cent. of the total jet movements at Gatwick during that period were by noise-certificated planes.

Recently, the Department of Trade announced its intention to move airline operators of wholly chartered services at Heathrow to Gatwick. An obvious danger in this move is that the majority of wholly chartered service operators are not major flag carriers and would therefore be more likely to operate old and noisier types of aircraft and, in some cases, second-hand aircraft purchased from the major airlines as they replace their fleets with noise-certificated aircraft.