Heathrow (Third Runway)

The hon. Gentleman gives a very wise warning, and I am glad that that observation is coming from hon. Members in many parts of the House, because it matters. For my constituents, the third runway means planes overhead every 60 seconds rather than every 90 seconds, and our air will be more polluted. Traffic and access issues are sometimes considered as something to look at later, as though there is bound to be a way to deal with them. I invite the Secretary of State for Transport to come with me to see what it is like on the M4 and all the surrounding roads that feed off it, and the impact that that has on my constituency at peak hours of airport use. There is no easy answer. BAA has proposed what it thinks is a wonderful idea of increasing rail transport with the Airtrack proposal—wonderful if it was a proper and real proposal. For my constituents, it would be a transport route from Heathrow via Richmond to Waterloo, but it comes without updating signalling to 21st-century standards and without changing the stations. Consequently, because my constituency contains four level crossings, about 30,000 people will be marooned between a railway on one side and the river on the other, unable to get across the couple of congested bridges and completely unable to cross the railway line, because there are only two points where the level crossing barriers will not be down for 45 minutes in the hour. There has been no thought, no planning and no sincerity concerning the public transport option on offer. I would love it to be turned into something, but the BAA case is not convincing when it is presented in that unthought-out, undeveloped and unsustainable form. My constituents have been very clear that although there are local issues, they are taking a stand in this matter for broader reasons. Many of them have asked me to say today that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Sipson, where the community will be eliminated. People in Sipson face the elimination of an ancient community, but there are no arrangements for them to remain together as a community. It is regarded as simply a matter of paying compensation, but there are questions about how adequate the compensation will be. Those people simply have to find somewhere else to live. Given the difficulty of finding a home anywhere in the outer London area, this is a really serious issue: 700 families are suddenly trying to find a new place to live and a way to build a new community. That issue has been given very little thought: no attention has been paid to it, or effort made to deal with it. The people of Harmondsworth will be essentially marooned within an airport. What kind of life is that? What kind of commitment is there to people in south-west London when that is what this project offers? Climate change is obviously one of the underlying issues. I will not reiterate what has been said, because brilliant speeches have been made by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) and others who have gone through the climate change issue. I simply say that my party thinks that people must change the way in which they think about aviation and other transport. The Government seem to focus on making some marginal changes, thinking that they will constrain things until they meet a benchmark before going ahead. But we need to think outside the box. Climate change fundamentally adjusts the way in which we have to look at how we develop in future. Sustainability has to become absolutely core. That whole way of thinking has not been brought into the transport planning that underpins the decision to proceed with a third runway. Like many others, I believe that that completely destroys the credibility of the Government's argument. I am running out of time, so I need to move quickly. I will briefly raise two last issues. One of them is the economic argument, which is always presented in discussion on Heathrow. One would think that Heathrow was disappearing, instead of having more passengers than any other airport in Europe. It has 69 million passengers; there are 59 million at Charles de Gaulle and 54 million at Frankfurt. Heathrow is by far the largest airport. As others have said, if we think about all five London airports, the aviation option available to people who base themselves in London for business or leisure is completely out of scale. People say, ““There are so many runways at other airports.”” They will be conscious, as I am sure the Secretary of State for Transport is, that at any one point in time, those airports cannot use their full selection of runways. The typical number that they can use is two. There may be four runways at Charles de Gaulle, but only two can operate at any one time, so although there is slightly more runway capacity there, the reality is not significantly different. We never hear that point made in discussion. Often, when the business case is presented to the House, it is as though there had been some sort of major, serious study to enable us to understand the dynamic between aviation options and business in London. None of that work has ever been done. There is the occasional survey, but when one digs down into them, one finds that they were answered by only a couple of hundred people, and that 700 or 800 people refused even to bother with them. When people are offered the rail option, they choose it over aviation. The point is that if decision makers were serious, they would go around businesses across London finding out in detail what their needs were, where they needed to go, and what the constraints were. We would build the economic case from the ground up—but that fundamental, simple work has never been done. Businesses need sufficient flights to key destinations. They do not need to go absolutely everywhere, and they do not need to buy into the idea that there have to be ever more flights. People may say, ““We've got capacity constraints,”” but how many Heathrow flights use relatively medium-sized or small planes? The answer is: a significant proportion. I read today that the Aviation Environment Federation estimates that we could increase the number of passengers by about 30 per cent. just by reordering the flight make-up at Heathrow, so there are a whole lot of possibilities. Let me finish on the issue of democracy, because I think that it matters. I have constituents here today, and constituents of mine have come to these debates before. They are utterly disillusioned with the Government, and they are becoming disillusioned with Parliament. They say to me, ““This is only the beginning of the fight for us. We're not going to lie down.”” I say to the Secretary of State and others that if they will not allow MPs to speak on the Floor of the House, and go through the Lobbies, in Government time, and with a clear opportunity to say yes or no to the third runway, they will drive people to direct action—possibly sometimes illegal action, but never, I hope, damaging action. The Government will drive people to that if they do not allow democracy on an issue that is central to people's understanding of a sustainable future for their communities and for this country.