Chancellor Hammond has just confirmed that the government has plumped for an extra runway at Heathrow. At a time when business travel is declining, when leisure travel from the UK is clearly affected by the decline in the value of sterling and when we should all be concerned about the contribution of air transport to global warming this does seem to be a regressive move.
My party colleague Denis G. Campbell will no doubt have more to say at UK Progressive.
2 comments:
agree. Also mad to build in most congested part of London. Better to have gone for Stanstead or Gatwick. it will also suck at least £60b from other projects.
What is it with Tories wanting big projects rather than spreading money around on smaller projects.
Also, as Jenny Randerson reminds us, the development will remove up to 800 homes from a region where the housing shortage is most acute. Heathrow expansion will only add to the overheating of an already overheated local economy.
We have email, the Web, Skype and computer conferencing making the need for business travel less necessary in the future. Enabling the well-heeled to make it easier to visit Disneyland or the New York shops is insufficient justification.
There may be a case for providing extra facilities for air-freight, which it seems is increasing (though one wonders what the effect of Brexit will be). But this surely should be directed *away* from London, which depends largely on financial transactions not manufacture? Why not Birmingham, Manchester, East Midlands?
The fact that Labour supports this as well as leading Conservatives leads to the conclusion that the project is being promoted by the big construction companies, to the benefit of few ordinary people except for building workers who would be better employed putting up affordable housing.
Post a Comment