Disclaimer: I live in the North East of England and have no relatives who live or work in the South East therefore have no bias towards the situation.
I thought I would post some of my comments on this issue.
I personally think that the way in which the political parties are using the South East airport issue is appalling. They are using this debate as a political weapon to win votes and parliamentary seats, not putting the interests of the country and more importantly, the future prospects of the country at the forefront. One look at the constituency map around Heathrow says it all...
All we ever seem to do in this country is set up commissions/inquiries or whatever and a final report is produced which pretty much tells us exactly what we knew at the start. Then, politicians decide they don’t like what is in these reports and choose to ignore them anyway.
In July 2012, China announced that they would build 82 new airports and expand 101 current airports before the end of 2015. Now, granted that China is a much much bigger country with more people who arguably have no human rights at all, this still a huge leap compared to what we in the UK will ever achieve.
Another example: Dubai. Concourse A was opened in January of this year and in the first month of operations handled nearly 600,000 passengers. Over the year that’s a potential of another 7.2 million passengers, just over 10% of LHR’s current capacity. There is also a Concourse D already in the planning which is expected to open in 2015. Compare this to the UK, and more specifically T5. As another poster mentioned, it took 15 years to finally get T5 open.
It’s things like this which make me not proud to be British. We are losing out hugely to other countries and we quite frankly seem to be doing nothing about it. Other countries must look at us and think that we have no ambition whatsoever.
I personally think that a third runway needs to be started soon at LHR (as in the next year or so) and a second at Gatwick to be constructed as soon as the curfew passes if we want to even attempt to catch up to other countries in the world. But of course there is no way that will happen. I’m 18 and it honestly wouldn’t shock me if in we are in the same position (that is with no future runway/airport expansion planned) by the time I turn 25.
I also just cannot see this airport on the opposite side of London working. As someone commented before, why do 202 out of the 300 top UK companies have their headquarters within a 25 mile radius of Heathrow. It’s not because the land is cheap, because it isn’t; it is because they know that their top executives and managers can travel down the road and jump on a flight to other offices across the world. I’m sure they would love having to travel over an hour to get to this new proposed airport. Then there’s the 10,000’s who are going to be on the dole; has Boris factored that in to the already astronomical cost of the project to start with? I just don’t see the logic whatsoever.
Anyway they’re my comments, no doubt they’ll probably get torn apart by someone
