Heathrow (Third Runway)

I appreciate that, but on issues such as Cranford and mixed mode, different views have been held in different constituencies; I know that because Old Windsor, in my constituency, will be affected seriously and views have changed there over time. To be fair, what I said was not criticism—it was praise. I praise anyone who would change their mind if the facts are changing, because that is the right thing to do. What would we be doing here otherwise? Surely people must be reasonable and accept the evidence as it is and as it appears. There is capacity at Heathrow for expansion; the Government's own figures show that up to 85 million passengers could be accommodated just with larger aircraft and by using the airport in a slightly different way. The argument I make is not even an argument against expansion in air travel. The world has changed, as have the circumstances. In 2003, when the White Paper was developed, it contained information from two or three years earlier, so much of the information in that predict-and-provide document is now about 10 years out of date. I welcome the fact that the White Paper will be updated, because that is the right approach to take. Several of the predictions and several of the observations made in it have already not proven to be correct—that is certainly the case given the downturn in the past 12 months. What changes are taking place at the moment? One is that we are now in a recession. A major downturn is occurring, and as NATS has said, there was an 8 per cent. reduction in flights in December compared with the previous December. That change must surely be taken into account when making this decision. We have discovered today that Schiphol has been laying off workers and reducing its operations. As 2 million or 3 million people could be unemployed over the next 12 to 24 months, surely it logically follows that the number of flights will reduce to a certain degree, especially given the reducing economic activity. I am not arguing that, in the long term, demand for air travel will not increase again, but this gives us three to five years in which we can look at the alternatives and make a decision based on that delayed time scale. The urgency came from the fact that we would be running out of capacity. If there is an international downturn and air travel does not grow as fast as predicted in the White Paper, that changes the date by which this decision must be made.