If growth is ever to take off, we need to talk about Heathrow’s FOURTH runway…

As Britain’s busiest airport records record passenger numbers, the government makes the case for another runway at Gatwick – but to really turbo-charge Britain’s fortunes, it must go even further, says James Moore

First Heathrow – now Gatwick. Runways, baby!

A few short weeks after chancellor Rachel Reeves declared that a third runway at Heathrow was needed – and should be operating in a decade’s time – new passenger figures showed why: traffic at the west London airport grew last year by 6 per cent, to a new high of 83.9 million passengers. Pre-tax profits also went skyward, increasing by 31 per cent.

Not to be outdone, transport secretary Heidi Alexander has announced that she is “minded to approve” runway number two at Britain’s second busiest airport.

London Gatwick‘s second runway actually already exists, but at the moment is used only for taxiing and emergencies. But proposals would see it brought into full use, largely for short-haul destinations, with a customer base of holiday-makers and business travellers. Heathrow’s extra runway would, by contrast, be all about long-haul passengers and freight.

Being “minded to approve” something is not quite a full green light. Instead, a new deadline of April 24 has been set for the airport to accept further conditions, covering issues such as noise and pollution. Alexander has given herself until October to make the final call.

The courts will also have their say. Opponents, notably including local residents who are not at all keen on having to put up with a greatly expanded number of flights zooming over their homes, have pledged to seek a judicial review. But the direction of travel is clear.

The motivation for these projects is the economic growth and jobs they promise to deliver, which a beleaguered government badly needs.

The Davies Commission said that building a third runway, to the north-west of the current Heathrow estate – requiring the partial bulldozing of the villages of Harmondsworth, Sipson and Longford – would provide for around 40 new destinations, and create more than 70,000 new jobs by 2050, adding an estimated £147bn to GDP.

Gatwick, meanwhile, claims its “shovel-ready” £2.2bn second runway project will inject an additional £1bn into the UK economy every year, and create 14,000 jobs across the UK. With a few qualifications, the union Unite has voiced its support.

The climate, I hear you say. What about that? Well, Alexander told industry leaders earlier this week that she’s "not some sort of flight-shaming eco-warrior” and that she “loves flying”. I suspect that we’re going to hear a lot from government sources about "sustainable aviation fuel” which, as things stand, looks like carbon capture and storage: a PR sop.

The UK climate change committee reckons that to meet the nation’s climate goals, emissions need to fall by 17 per cent compared to 2003. That’s clearly not happening because it depends on less planes in the sky.

So what you have here is Janus policymaking. While Ed Milliband bangs the eco drum, Alexander and Reeves are effectively saying that net zero needs to take one for the team if growth is to take off.

That said, there is at least strategy here. A political commitment to back runways and airport expansion, however controversial.

A source within government told me that it was a shambles and ministers seemed to be throwing darts at a board in the hopes that one or two would stick. The fact that we now have decisions – more or less – being made and a policy settled upon is a welcome change to that. Decisiveness is preferable to dither and chaos and making things up as you go along.

Does this mean a third runway for Manchester in future? A new terminal at Leeds-Bradford, which Reeves – whose Leeds West & Pudsey constituency could be expected to feel the impact – initially opposed but now says she’s changed her mind?

And if the business case for a third runway at Heathrow was made decades ago, surely the government ought by now to be lobbying for a fourth? Europe’s best connected airport, Frankfurt, already has four; Schipol, in Amsterdam, six.

We’ll see. But if you’re going to go for air expansion, you’d better go big or go home – and the north really should be allowed to join in.

With the aim of going big, London mayor Sadiq Khan, a vocal opponent of airport expansion, has in effect been told to get knotted. You can expect angry MPs in affected west London and home counties constituencies to receive the same treatment.

But these projects (and a proposed expansion of Britain’s fifth biggest airport, Luton) still have a lot of hurdles to clear. Judicial reviews take time. So does the haggling over conditions, which is why the final decision on Gatwick has been kicked down the road. And there will have to be a planning process, too. Should opponents really feel discouraged? Or are the shovels ready to get started on the Gatwick project going to rust before they start digging? I’d put the odds at evens.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, not one to mince words, has been withering about the prospects of Heathrow expansion turning into something concrete. Noting the lack of dates given by Reeves when she announced her support, he described it as a “dead cat”.

“If it ever arrives, it will be about 2040, 2045 or 2050. It will not deliver any growth,” he said. I’d be interested to hear O’Leary on Gatwick. He’s not one to mince words.

O’Leary argued that Reeves should scrap the air passenger duty (APD) that she put up if she wanted aviation to deliver growth.

I guess the message to Reeves and Alexander is this: Can you prove him wrong?