Mayor defends estuary airport plan

London Mayor Boris Johnson has defended his proposal for a new hub airport in the Thames Estuary east of London, after an influential House of Commons committee said the idea should be ditched in favour of a third runway at Heathrow.

In a report, the Commons Transport Committee said that the "Boris Island" option would be hugely expensive, could harm estuary wildlife and would also mean the closure of Heathrow.

Instead, the MPs said that an extra runway at Heathrow was necessary and also suggested that a fourth might have merit if the two new runways were located to the west of the current site. The current two-runway airport was "not adequate for the needs of the UK" and expansion of Heathrow was "long overdue", they said.

But Mr Johnson said that a third runway would be "obsolete" by the time it was built, and that the report made plain that advocates of this solution were effectively calling for a four-runway Heathrow, which he said would be "environmentally and politically undeliverable".

Committee chair Louise Ellman said: "We recognise that demand for air travel across the UK is forecast to grow, believe that aviation should be permitted to expand and accept that more capacity is necessary to accommodate sustainable aviation growth.

"We looked closely at the three main options by which the UK could increase its hub airport capacity. Research we commissioned made plain that building an entirely new hub airport east of London could not be done without huge public investment in new ground transport infrastructure."

Mrs Ellman continued: "Heathrow - the UK's only hub airport - has been short of capacity for a decade and is currently operating at full capacity. We conclude that a third runway at Heathrow is necessary, but also suggest that a four-runway proposal may have merit, especially if expanding to locate two new runways westwards from the current site could curb the noise experienced by people affected under the flight path."

Mr Johnson said that more runways at Heathrow would inflict environmental harm on Londoners living around the airport, while the cost of a fourth runway was "unquantifiable" and relocating runways to the west of the airport's current location would require a "colossal" amount of new transport infrastructure.

"It would probably be cheaper to move London slightly to the east," he joked.

The Mayor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The crucial thing is that the third runway, even if it were to be built by 2028, would be immediately obsolete, because there would be overwhelming demand, as Louise and the committee in this report rightly prefigure. There would be overwhelming demand for a fourth runway. The cost of that whole project is completely unquantifiable. Nobody knows how much it would cost. The environmental damage to London is very, very considerable."