Heathrow expansion report sets alarm bells ringing at Birmingham Airport
Jan 29 2009 Post Comment
The Campaign for Better Transport makes little secret of the fact that it doesn’t much like airports as a means of getting around.
Its website contains the following message accompanying a plea for financial donations: “Airport expansion means bulldozed villages, noise, air pollution and climate change. Help us fight airport expansion and campaign for better alternatives to flying.”
It is pretty clear, therefore, where the CBT is coming from, and in normal circumstances it would be tempting to take its dire warnings about the impact of the third Heathrow runway with a pinch of salt. Something along the lines of they would say that wouldn’t they springs to mind.
But the organisation’s latest study, which claims that an enlarged Heathrow will be gobbling up two-thirds of Britain’s aviation carbon quota by 2050, deserves some prompt answers from the government. If the CBT is right, growth at regional airports including Birmingham will be severely curtailed and perhaps even cut back if the country is not to end up producing vastly more aviation carbon emissions than the target that has been set.
The truth is that the carbon question was left hanging in the background when transport secretary Geoff Hoon gave the go-ahead for the third Heathrow runway earlier this month. His comments to the House of Commons about why there would not be an emissions problem were less than convincing.
Mr Hoon said then that getting Britain’s emissions levels down to 37.5 million tonnes by 2050 would be achieved by introducing biofuels and a new generation of less polluting planes. At the same time, his civil servants were predicting that emissions would rise to 60 million tonnes over the same period.
The implication for Birmingham and the West Midlands, if the CBT study is correct, could be deeply worrying. The extension of the runway at Birmingham International Airport is desperately needed in order to allow non-stop long haul flights to the Far East and the west coast of America to take place, and to put this region’s businesses and wealth creators on a level playing field with the North-west and South-east.
The longer runway will also be attractive to the 60 per cent of West Midlands passengers who opt each year use London’s airports or Manchester when they travel abroad because they cannot get the flights they want from Birmingham.
This in itself will produce a green trade off, since millions of West Midlands people who currently take long car journeys to other airports will be able to use Birmingham – reducing carbon emissions as a result.
The danger that the government appears to be getting itself into is that the aviation industry will become even more concentrated in the South-east of England, damaging the West Midlands economy as a result.
