Gatwick runways and planning policy

I was speaking with a lady in Broadfield at the weekend and amongst other topics, the proposed Gatwick expansion came up. As it is now back in the news, I thought it might be useful to explain a bit about exactly what is being proposed and how it will be decided.

Background

Gatwick Airport was moved into the boundaries of Crawley Borough Council and West Sussex County Council in 1974, as part of the last major restructuring of local government in England. In 1979, the airport signed a legally-binding agreement with the county council not to build an additional runway at the airport for 40 years, as part of the process of gaining consent to build an emergency runway at the airport running parallel to the main runway (this will come up again later).

At this time Gatwick, along with Heathrow and Stanstead, were all run by the state-owned British Airports Authority, which went on to be privatised in the 1980s. As Heathrow acts as the UK’s lead airport, it attracted the majority of BAA’s focus and investment over the following years, resulting in a general stagnation of their other airports. In 2009, after an investigation by the Competition Commission, BAA were forced to sell a number of airports including Gatwick.

Since that time, Gatwick’s owners–the largest of which first being Global Infrastructure Partners and subsequently Vinci Airports–have undertaken billions of pounds of capital improvements to the airport and adopted a much more growth-focused approach, the consequence of which is that by the time of the pandemic annual passenger numbers were far beyond what was initially believed possible on a single runway.

Having not built a new full-length runway in the UK since the South East since the 1940s and a general growth in demand for aviation, in the mid-noughties the Government began the process of considering where a new runway should be located in the region.

While a formal decision was taken in 2009 that a third runway should be built at Heathrow, this was then overturned as part of the Coalition Agreement which followed the next General Election, only to then restart the process of deciding where to locate a new runway beginning again a few years later.

Under new ownership, Gatwick now submitted a number of options for new runways to compete with those proposed at Heathrow. With the Airport Commission only allowed to propose one new runway in the South East, two of Gatwick’s options were ruled out due to their close proximity to the existing runway capping its potential capacity. This left the ‘Wide-Spaced’ runway as the only remaining Gatwick option, which would have required the demolition of part of Manor Royal and delivered a route which would have effectively run down Steers Lane, directly over the–at the time planned–development of Forge Wood.

The Airports Commission recommended a third-runway for Heathrow again, due to its larger potential economic impact for the UK, which despite a lot of political hand-wringing and a pause while the Government worked how it could authorise a new runway while keeping to its legally-binding carbon reduction commitments, was eventually approved.

Another bite of the cherry

In theory, that was the matter of runway capacity in the South East addressed for another generation. However, in practice, with the exception of Boris Johnson’s proposal to build a new runway in the middle of the Thames Estuary, the third-runway proposal is the hardest of the options to actually deliver. It requires the demolition of a lot of existing residential and industrial space and the relocation of the M25. Consequently, at the very least it is going to take a very long time to deliver–even by the UK’s almost unparalleled poor standards at delivering infrastructure, if it ends up being deliverable at all.

So, in addition to proposing a third-runway for Heathrow the Government’s 2013 Aviation Policy Framework proposed that in the meantime the country needed to make ‘best use’ of existing runway capacity in order to meet the growth in demand. Now, the guidance around a proposed ‘best use’ of existing runways only really names increasing the cap on passenger numbers for existing runways as a means of achieving this, but it does leave other options open, presumably making sure that all the available slots are used and using bigger planes to move more people per flight.

This is where Gatwick’s emergency runway comes back in. Gatwick’s argument is that they already have two runways and so making ‘best use’ of them involves allowing both to be used for slots at the same time (one for take-offs and both for landings). It’s certainly a creative interpretation of the strategy. More so, because their close proximity means that you cannot use both safely at the same time. Instead, the Northern runway will need to be relocated 12 metres North of its current location.

While Crawley Borough Council is the Planning Authority for the area, there are parts of planning which fall outside of the council’s powers. The most frequent example of this in our area are applications relating to West Sussex County Council, where have the power to determine applications in relation to schools, minerals, highways, and any land they own. When it comes to runways, that falls into the same category of planning as other forms of major transport, water and waste water, and energy, with the Planning Inspectorate–Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities–being the sole decision-maker for the application.

Planning is a quasi-legal process and only some arguments are deemed relevant to determining an application, with all others being entirely discounted in the decision-making process.

So, as hard as it is for some people to believe, whether the council expresses its most enthusiastic support for a new runway, or its most fervent opposition carries essentially the same weight as expressing its preference for Coke or Pepsi does Tesco’s national approach to procuring soft drinks. That isn’t to say that the council doesn’t tend to take a position, we always do and its always a free vote with members voting across party lines, but frankly it’s always a pointless waste of time.

This proposal has been in the works for a long time, so it actually went to Full Council all the way back in December 2018, at which time the council expressed its opposition with most arguments focusing on concerns that the proposal did not put in place measures to resolve the impact that it would have upon local infrastructure.

However, where the council does have some involvement is as a statutory consultee, where both host (Crawley/West Sussex and due to some cable running through a field Reigate and Banstead/Surrey) and neighbouring authorities (those adjacent to the host authorities) are asked to respond to the technical aspects of the planning application. It was in this capacity that I chaired a board council leaders and chief executives representing the host and neighbouring authorities from the time the proposal first started to emerge until I stood down as Crawley’s Leader in May 2022.

In order to engage and respond effectively with the process, we adopted a collective approach. One of the main challenges involved was financial. In theory, the fee applicants pay is supposed to cover the cost of the planning process, something which is particularly important when council taxpayers are already having to choose between losing local services or paying more to cover cuts from central government.

However, for national infrastructure, where paying for outside expertise is most important in order to be able to respond effectively, the fee goes to the Planning Inspectorate. There is a requirement in the process that statutory consultees are able to engage effectively and so there is an incentive for applicants to provide some level of financial support in order to enable this to happen, and for most of my time on the board that was the main area of debate. While I am no longer directly involved in the process (in fact the landslide in Tories losing control of local councils means essentially the entire board’s membership has changed since I was on it, I do know that local councils did not feel the funding was sufficient, but that Gatwick felt that it was and ultimately the Planning Inspectorate appears to have sided with the airport.

Where are we now (5 Sept 2023)

Having completed several rounds of competition, Gatwick Airport Limited submitted their Development Control Order (a planning application relating to national infrastructure) to the Planning Inspectorate in July, which was accepted for examination in August, and which will now be subject to extensive public examination by experts before the Inspectorate takes a decision.

As of today, local residents are able to remain involved in this process by registering as an interested party by going to the application’s page on the Planning Inspectorate’s website (you can also access all the documents relevant to the application and a current timeline as to where they have reached in the process): https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-east/gatwick-airport-northern-runway/

Final thoughts

It’s hard to know exactly how likely Gatwick’s application is likely to be approved. The fact that a new main runway hasn’t been built in the South East in over 70 years suggests that it’s an uphill struggle, particularly given the opposition to local runway development often comes from both the left and the right of political opinion (although for different reasons).

On balance, I suspect it will be approved. So long as the idea that relocating a runway is the same thing is using the same runway (which is the major question that all of this hands upon), then it falls into line with Government’s decade-long aviation strategy and due to a number of the adopted policies around this effectively has to be approved.

Politically, it is certainly less of a challenge than Heathrow to approve, both due to the smaller population sizes affected and the fact that it doesn’t have to go before Parliament. It also would be entirely privately-funded, unlike Heathrow which will have cost the taxpayers many billions of pounds by the time that it has been approved.

That being said, I do wonder if even with permission the application would be carried out. Gatwick is still recovering from the pandemic and there are still options for growth even without dual-runway operation. Gatwick’s principal owner, Vinci Airports, spent £2.9bn buying the airport in mid-2019, only for a global pandemic to turn the airport from an enormous asset to a huge liability just months later. One way of recouping the hundreds of millions of pounds in losses they experienced due to COVID-19 would be to increase the value of the airport and then sell off some of their shares, the first planning approval for a main runway in over 70 years would certainly do the job (Heathrow is still a long way off from submitting an actual application).

For those of us who live here that raises a number of questions as to how we are to adapt to a doubling of passenger numbers over the coming decades. Clearly there are direct immediate impacts upon transport infrastructure, noise and air quality, but beyond that the potential economic impact will bring a need for additional workers and consequently more housing demand with pressure upon services. Which isn’t to say that more jobs or housing is inherently a bad thing, but it does have a big real-world impact. The important thing is that it is recognised, planned for, and has the level of resourcing it needs to avoid having a detrimental impact upon those already living here.

Longer-term, I am concerned about the future of aviation. In the pandemic, we saw just how vulnerable Crawley is to any shock to the aviation sector, it literally resulted in the local economy taking the biggest hit in the entire country. Doubling down on the same sector is doubling the risks.

Resolving this and giving people the opportunity for better-paid jobs and real career opportunities requires that we diversify the local economy. This is something the council has been working on in trying to attract industries from real growth sectors like green tech into the local area, such as by directly marrying up companies with appropriate buildings/sites for their needs, improving the infrastructure on Manor Royal, and creating the Fusion Innovation Centre.

If the UK is going to meet its legal commitments to achieve Net Zero by 2050, it is hard to see how that is going to be achieved while enabling further growth in the aviation sector. However, much Gatwick works to ensure the airport itself is as green as possible, the reality is that we are still a long way off from a model of aviation which isn’t entirely dependent upon burning large amounts of fossil fuels to make planes fly. Until that is achieved, the growth of the sector within the town just increases our fragility as we head towards the 2050 deadline. Fail to protect the sector and the town’s economy burns, fail to cut the emissions and our planet does. Crawley urgently needs a third option.