Bringing Northolt into better, productive use was among the excellent ways of improving quickly and cheaply the runway capacity around London, by using non-BAA properties, that the BAA managed to get the Dept for Transport to kick into touch in the 2003 White Paper.
Another was the scheme, that was entirely financed by the private sector, to place a 2000ft runway, parallel to LGW at Redhill with an 8-minute suspended monorail connection to LGW South to feed connecting traffic. The owners of Redhill already owned all the land needed for this project. The runway and terminal would have relieved LGW of 125,000 ATM by short-haul and UK regional services, thus allowing LGW's long-haul traffic to grow, and thereby removing the need for LHR to have a third runway. Opposition was confined to a relatively low number of people who lived close to the present airfield.
When BAA realised that the Redhill scheme was
(a) Very feasible and a very sound business proposition and,
(b) Being taken seriously by DfT
they pulled out all the stops to get it killed, including enlisting NATS (which had just been bailed out of bankruptcy by BAA) to make outrageous statements about operational viability, such as "You cannot operate a parallel runway at Gatwick", later necessarily modified to "we don't know if it can be done without studying it, and we are not going to study it". When they were asked about the plan for a BAA-owned parallel runway at LGW they said ...............
"No problem".
And the Secretary of State concurred. Now he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer; I wonder why the British economy is rapidly collapsing?