Written contribution to CAGNE public meeting – 26/02/26

My apologies for being unable to attend tonight’s meeting. I agreed to attend election day in the Gorton and Denton By-Election some time ago and with the polls all extremely close, it’s not a diary commitment I feel able to break.

Gatwick’s potential expansion has been on the cards the entire time I’ve been involved in local politics.

When the Commission considered where to locate a new runway in the South East, I supported Gatwick over Heathrow out of the fear that—once it was built—airlines’ preference for Heathrow would endanger existing local jobs, something British Airways and Virgin Atlantic aptly demonstrated during the pandemic when they relocated all their activity from Gatwick.

With the third runway for Heathrow already agreed, that concern is no longer relevant, the only question now is whether extra capacity at Gatwick would be good for the area. That is a much harder case to make.

Crawley is already blessed with the second highest concentration of employment in the country outside of London, so an additional 14,000 jobs here is not the opportunity it would be almost anywhere else.

This is particularly true when you consider the nature of the employment. During the pandemic, Crawley suffered a worse economic hit than anywhere else in the country due to our over-reliance on the aviation sector for employment. Since that time, the focus locally has been on diversifying the range of local employment, with significant public money going towards a number of projects designed to ensure we never again find ourselves having to deal with the situation I faced as council leader during COVID-19.

If jobs are something we have enough of what we have too little of is housing. An additional 14,000 people moving into the area with their families to fill the new vacancies presents a huge challenge for an area with the UK’s second worst housing crisis. For all the housing currently proposed in our area, no council plan currently comes close to what would be needed to meet this increase in local demand.

Of course, commuting may well reduce housing demand, but here too there is an issue. Two-thirds of Crawley’s workforce commutes in daily and existing transport infrastructure is increasingly struggling to cope. The orientation of the South East’s roads towards London limits access to the workforce located to the East and West. More significantly, Brighton Mainline, the dominant public transport option for reaching the airport, is due to run out of capacity at peak times by 2030. That’s without airport expansion.

These are all points I made to both the Secretary of State for Transport and the Aviation Minister both before and after the decision was taken.

With economic growth being essential for resolving both the cost of living and enabling greater public spending, realistically the opportunity to secure an additional £2 billion per year for the UK economy without significant public spending was an offer too attractive for ministers to pass up.

While it may well have been inevitable that a Government would eventually approve expansion of the airport, I am surprised it did not require a change in existing aviation policy which required a ‘best use’ of existing capacity. You cannot move a runway. What is being proposed is that the stand-by runway is no longer used and a new runway is built further out to enable dual use. It seems hard to believe that was the intention of the ‘best use’ policy and it will be interesting to see how this point is addressed during the judicial review.

However, even if the legal case is successful, all it does is buy time until a new decision can be taken in-line with the law.

For those concerned about the area, that does not mean that the fight is over, but that the focus needs to change to minimise the impacts upon the local quality of life.

Clearly that will require significant investment in local transport infrastructure and housing, where a New Town would do much to enable access to housing without limiting the impact on existing conurbations, but additional measures are also needed to limit noise and pollution, and the significant local disruption which will come with the vast amount of material which needs to be extracted and replaced in building the new runway.

Beyond this, there remains the risk of a third runway. Crawley Borough Council has long been required to safeguard land South of the airport for a future runway. This is some of the most attractive land for economic development in the country and it is sitting idle. Given the costs and complexities of bringing a third runway forward at Heathrow, I can see a scenario in which the green space around the airport results in Gatwick becoming a more attractive lead option for UK aviation growth.

Crawley Borough Council are currently working to see whether this land can be released for development. It is something I would encourage local residents to support as they run through the process.