The Government supports aviation expansion. How this may be contemplated considering climate, environment, noise and traffic issues, public spending support, and a massive £40bn ‘tourism deficit’ as UK tourists flock abroad, remains to be revealed. As Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, threatens a legal challenge to the £49bn Heathrow project, it is appropriate to consider why airports should expand at all. Part one of this article covers particularly economic implications of airport and aviation expansion.
The Government wants us to fly even more?
Key UK government documents of the last two decades on civil aviation promise continuing aviation growth. The aviation policy [2013] is about expansion, as are successive government documents on this sector, despite no extant overall plan to decarbonise the whole aviation sector.
A key problem is that documents of this type reiterate economic and employment ‘benefits’ of aviation but do not place financial values upon alternatives to aviation, the climate impacts of rising aviation emissions, or give details of health or productivity impacts of aircraft movements. Also, pushing down the costs of aviation for consumers as suggested by governments periodically would mean even more flights with all the associated impacts.
Meanwhile, passengers have been hit by fluctuating oil prices and other factors, tending to inflate ticket prices. Government capacity to control costs is limited, and in any case would not be in line with climate goals.
It would be best to tax aviation according to its many impacts to reduce radical expansion into the future. The Government does, after all, acknowledge that an increasing proportion of UK greenhouse gas emissions will come from aviation as other sources of emissions are more quickly decarbonised.
Poor economics
Before the Government rushes headlong towards aviation expansion, it should consider that this sector is one of the worst for job creation per pound of revenue. In addition, whilst the civil aviation sector directly employs over 100,000 people at present, its job creation is in decline.
Indirect effects of employment expansion should include increased capacity for spending by workers and their households. However, from 2007 to 2022, air transport had the largest real terms decline in pay of any sector.
Assertions that aviation leads to other forms of economic growth in the UK do not appear to stand scrutiny. With Covid leading to the expansion of Zoom and similar technologies, it should not be surprising that business travel has gone down. From 2019 to 2023, there was a 29% decrease in business travel by air, accompanied by a £2.9bn reduction in business travel spending.
The Department of Transport, home to more carbon emissions than any other UK sector, believes aviation can move towards ‘sustainability’ whilst achieving airport expansion, especially in South East England.
Its Sustainability Appraisal process is allegedly guided by a variety of principles concerning protections against the consequences of airport expansion. However, the best way to implement such principles is not to expand airports in the first place, and instead to implement alternatives. Part two of this article will explore these alternatives.
Despite all the above, the Government [2022] promises net zero in aviation by 2050. How, you may well ask.
Traffic expansion follows aviation expansion
Since the Government favours airport expansion in principle, it must also implicitly accept that surface traffic to serve expanding airports will increase. There is no guarantee people will use public transport alternatives, as airport parking areas – particularly at major airports – are vast. Each application to expand should be required to meet conditions such as car parking reductions for passengers. The International Civil Aviation Organization has noted:
“Vehicle traffic and the emissions they generate are one of the largest contributing factors to environmental impacts around airports. Water usage, waste products, noise from road and rail traffic, and other types of air pollution are all elements of surface access that impact the environment.”
But environmental impacts are also economic challenges as each of them will have costs, often to be picked up by the state and constituting subsidies to the private sector activity of running airports.
Gatwick expansion impacts
The Government favours Gatwick expansion. Continued concern about proposals to do so include environmental impact, noise, and public transport aspects. This has led the Government to delay a decision until October 2025.
Moving the northern runway, currently used as a taxi way, is estimated to cost £2.2bn which Gatwick says will be met by private investment. This would take until at least 2030, but a planning process has yet to start.
Areas of Kent could be particularly hit by the traffic movements likely to occur from an enlarged Gatwick. Research suggests a substantial increase in emissions if Gatwick has an additional runway. A forest twice the size of London would be needed to offset emissions if both Gatwick and Heathrow are allowed to expand as suggested.
Heathrow expansion impacts
The Government favours a third runway at Heathrow. The Committee on Climate Change has already argued against any airport expansions without a capacity management framework to provide annual assessments – potentially leading to control of aviation sector greenhouse gas emissions.
Where efficiencies are achieved in reducing some aviation emissions, increasing demand will wipe them out. Worse, airport expansion could eliminate all of the cuts the Governments proposes to meet its clean power goals up to 2050.
It appears Heathrow expansion could lead to an additional 2.4 million tons of carbon dioxide being emitted each year by 2050. John McDonnell MP has claimed that expanding Heathrow would lead to the demolition of 4000 properties and a need for rehousing about 10,000 people, when responding to a speech by Rachel Reeves which supported Heathrow expansion. Economic policy to expand airports has social policy costs too.
About two-thirds of people do not support Heathrow expansion, with only 6% seeing such expansion as a transport priority. By contrast, 70% support the expansion of rail. Some desperation to raise support for Heathrow expansion is evident, including a Heathrow-funded group distributing leaflets in West London which appear to be highly misleading.
Economics for sustainable aviation without state subsidies?
The Government alleges aviation is critical to the UK economy. It has not, however, considered how greater economic benefits might accrue to communities if small infrastructure options – such as active travel investment – have more pervasive economic benefits.
In the case of active travel, there are clear health and productivity benefits of better options for people to walk and cycle. There is a wider general question here about how local infrastructure can help re-legitimise politics and contribute to the regeneration of communities. By contrast, national infrastructure development is notoriously slow, expensive, and prone to delays and cost-overruns.
Net zero aviation fuels and other techno-magical stories
‘Sustainable biofuels’ – also known as Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) – are generally sourced from crops are therefore a threat to better uses of land, given the scale of the biofuels that would be needed to displace use of conventional aviation fuel. Such fuels also do not abolish contrails.
The re-cycling of used oils is one source of SAF, but not likely to fulfil potential demand. Additionally, the supply chain for some biofuels is far from ‘clean’. Often, rather than already used oil, it may barely have been used.
Still worse, although virgin palm oil is not a permitted material for SAF as it has strong links to deforestation, the current self-certification regime for SAF undermines such ‘sustainability’ measures. Malaysia is one country implicated in the questionable aspects of this trade.
With regard to UK targets for SAF biofuels, it appears they will only lead to a 0.8% reduction in aviation sector emissions by 2040 due to rising aviation demand.
We may conclude that expanding the proportion of aircraft which are electric-only, powered by renewables, is the best economic and environmental option for the civil aviation of the future.
Community first
Government devotion to airport expansion does not sit comfortably alongside the priorities of other policies including the environment, climate, regional economies, and local infrastructure needs.
Rebuilding local government is a high priority after the futility and degradation of long-term government austerity – above needs such as investment, health, productivity, integrated transport, sustainability and more.
If there is to be a real renaissance in UK tourism and fewer UK tourists going abroad for holidays, then this surely has to mean enhancing the ‘local offer’ in as many areas as possible?
Given skills shortages in the UK, and the ageing of the construction workforce, the use of construction workers in the UK should be prioritised.
The sustainable retrofitting of the empty built environment for housing, addressing hospital, school and health centre improvements, and the long-term requirements for better coastal and estuary defences as the climate continues to change, are all examples of things which clearly matter far more than expanding any airport.
The Government’s insistence upon airport expansion is as economically insensible as it is inexplicable and unsustainable.
Author’s note: Thanks to Hazel Dawe and Professor John Whitelegg for their comments.
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