10.06.05
With every UK airport looking to have expansion ambitions, the BBC sought to capture the two ends of the debate.They got the views of the Friends of the Earth, who oppose any expansion, and BAA, the UK's biggest airport operator, who say they will expand if there is enough demand. Both groups told the BBC why their view was the right one.
Mark Mann, from BAA told the BBC: it is the government that is driving airports expansion [not the airport owners / operators]. The Government, along with other groups, including the CBI and the airlines, have made the arguments for increased revenue and have suggested that more air travel is good for the economy and will generate revenue for businesses through tourism.
Our airports are completely capacity constrained. At peak times there are no spare takeoff and landing slots at Heathrow or Stansted to accommodate more passengers. These airports are close to capacity. Gatwick is returning to its pre-9/11 levels too.
At the moment we are working to get the maximum possible use out of all of our airports before expanding. The government has asked us to do this and we are spending £500m making sure it happens.
From this we can accommodate 3% growth a year, but we are anticipating demand of 3.9% growth. By the time current planned expansion comes on stream - a second runway at Stansted by 2013 at the earliest - any slack in the current system will have been taken up.
But expansion is not a forgone conclusion. This is not expansion at all costs - this is not the airports going out there to carpet the countryside in concrete. Any expansion will be done on a sustainable basis, with approval from the relevant authorities, and only where it is needed.
Richard Dyer from Fiends of the Earth told the BBC: There is absolutely no justification for building more runways. We could be flying a lot more passengers from the ones we already have. At the moment there are around 200 million passengers flying [to and from the UK] every year, but with our existing capacity, we could handle 300 million passengers.
In addition, the government is expanding airports because they predict that the numbers of air passengers will continue to rise. But we have proved using the government's own projections that if they taxed fuel and added VAT - essentially stopped subsidising the aviation industry - the numbers of passengers would stay the same or fall.
The government also needs to work on the train network to give a better alternative to air travel. The trains need to be better at linking across Europe and need to be cheaper, faster and easier to understand.
Finally, we also do not accept the economic benefits from having more air passengers. Most flights from regional airports go to holiday destinations like southern Spain. British people spend far more on tourism abroad than foreign holidaymakers do in Britain.
So that is a quick summary of the tow sides positions. They seem to be saying similar things on utiliting current capacity. The big differences are the economic justifications for expansion in terms of benefiting the UK (which BAA do not claim to have made and Friends of the Earth dispute) and taxing aviation fuel, which would increase ticket prices and could dampen growth. We were surprised to see no mention of greenhouse gasses from Friends of the Earth.
