Livingstone backs Eighties plan for £30bn floating airport on Thames

A scheme to build a huge offshore airport in the Thames Estuary is being resurrected by Ken Livingstone in his plans to boost the east of the capital. The Mayor of London has ordered a feasibility study into a revised version of the Marinair project, a £30bn scheme from the Eighties seen as the answer to lack of air transport capacity.

The Hong-Kong style project would involve a three-runway airport on an artificial island near Sheerness, Kent, linked by a high-speed train tunnel to Essex. The airport would handle up to 160 million passengers a year, more than the total capacity of London's airports, sparing millions of residents from noise and disturbance.

The scheme has also attracted the attention of Mr Livingstone because, unlike plans to build an airport in Kent itself, it would not destroy marshland or birdlife. Mr Livingstone has also been encouraged by a recent indication by Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport, that he will consider plans for an offshore site.

The Thames Estuary Airport Company Limited, which has lined up financial backers, is to submit its proposals to the Government as part of consultation on increased capacity in London. Ministers have suggested that a sixth terminal could be built at Heathrow, but residents will fight such plans with even more vigour than those for a fifth terminal.

Mr Livingstone, who has funded objectors to night flights at Heathrow, said he was keen to assess the idea of a Thames Estuary airport. "One of the things I'm looking at because we've got this proposal for these vast numbers of runways all over London, is to look at what Hong Kong did, which was to build an airport that floats, actually in the sea," he said. "Planes land on it so you are not taking a wonderful bit of old marshland where millions of birds roost, and nobody lives around it at all and then you have a rigid tube that connects up a train to it.

"I have asked for a report on what it cost Hong Kong to do that, to put it in the Thames Estuary so people in the east of London could get to it relatively easily because that's where all the jobs and homes are coming. It would be a very good idea."