Launching Greater Heathrow
How to support the campaign for a third runway at Heathrow
Sign the petition to support a third runway at Heathrow.
For London to be the greatest city in the world, it needs an airport to match. The Government is right to start by building the third runway at Heathrow, and the Mayor is wrong to try and block it.
Campaigners are already lining up to fight the plan, as they did when Tony Blair approved a third runway in 2003, and when MPs approved the plan in 2018.
But we can’t let a small but vocal group speak for Londoners, because the expansion of Heathrow is in all of our best interests.
So today we are launching Londoners for Heathrow, the campaign in support of a third runway. Read about why we’re doing this, and support us by signing the petition.
Heathrow is an essential part of London’s economy, and its future.
In 2019 (pre-pandemic), it was still the world’s second busiest airport by international travel numbers. It is the perfect stopping-off point for international travellers between America, Africa and Eurasia, and for air freight taking the same journeys. And it means Londoners themselves get a better deal on international air travel, maximising the economies of scale from travelling alongside international tourists coming to London and travellers on layover.
But it was supposed to be even bigger. When it opened for civilian use in 1946 it had six runways, and the plan was for it to have nine in total. Over time it closed the smaller runways, which weren’t big enough for modern jets, on the assumption that it would rebuild longer ones when demand grew. That demand peaked in the 2000s, and with only the two existing runways it has been operating at full capacity (a landing every 45 seconds) since then.
But the rest of the world hasn’t stopped the clock like we have. Heathrow is losing out on air traffic from nearby competitors – Schiphol (six runways) and Charles de Gaulle (four runways). Internationally, we are an outlier in how small our airports are. Denver International has six runways, Atlanta has five, and Beijing has three. Dubai also has two, but plans to have more, and currently runs flights over 24 hours a day which makes numbers much less constrained. We are highly unusual in how much we are limiting Heathrow.
Air travel isn’t without its downsides. Aviation produces about 7 per cent of global carbon emissions. But the UK is already on track to have the lowest per capita emissions of any major economy by 2030, and it is perfectly possible to expand Heathrow whilst reducing overall emissions. To give one example of how a larger Heathrow can actually help cut emissions, it would allow more direct long-distance flights rather than layovers, meaning shorter journey times overall and therefore less fuel consumption.
Source: Heathrow Expansion: Britain’s Runway to Growth. David Lawrence, Pedro Serodio, UKDayOne.
And for residents, having one of the busiest airports in the world can be a mixed blessing. Noise pollution is bad for public health (something we’ve written about in the past). But ultimately, this price is worth paying. New air traffic will be focussed on the new runway, which is further west over less densely-populated areas so will cause less pollution. And in the long term, noise pollution can be reduced through better aircraft design – the economics of which will be helped by allowing more flights.
The most important thing about Heathrow is that it’s already a hub. Expanding Gatwick, City, Stansted or Luton isn’t enough, because it’s much more efficient to create more capacity for passengers and freight at the location where there’s already the best infrastructure for them.
And more capacity doesn’t just mean more flights. It means flights can be spaced out more, reducing the impact of delays, and the massive emissions from planes forced to circle in the sky for hours whilst they wait for a scarce landing slot.
Ultimately, there is no future for a better London without a bigger Heathrow. We are lucky to have the world’s best location for an airport right on our doorstep. 22 million people live within 100 kilometres of the site. London is perfectly positioned as a link between the Americas, Europe and Asia, which is why so many major firms still choose to have their head offices here. Our capital’s success depends on Heathrow growing, and we have to let it.
Too often, it is just the voices of a small number of NIMBY campaigners who get heard by politicians, and we want to change that. So our petition asks for your postcode, and we’ll be emailing your local representatives to let them know how many people in their constituency support the third runway going ahead.
Please support the campaign for a third runway by signing the petition.