The word is "If".
There has been no Government policy whatsoever on increasing runway capacity at London hub airports, particularly Heathrow, and/or on building an alternative in the Thames estuary, since 2000, and there wasn't one before then either.
The 2003 study cost £100m and provided a way forward of sorts; the problem is that the conclusion of the study could have been written on a fag packet before the consultants got involved, although I'm personally very grateful to the tax-payers for the generous income that study provided for 4 years.
But the report was shelved by the Labour Government the day after it was published, for all practical purposes.
Wasn't that the plan for what has recently been referred to as the "northern" runway option as opposed to "north west"? That being the case, and the process was started in 2003, it would be up and running by now.
Successive announcements have been made about studies into the problem, as though the 003 study did not exist. I think there's one being planned even now, although I don't bother to keep up.
The 3rd short runway at LHR was a good solution when Charles Stuart launched it in the mid '80s; I was proud to have helped him with it. But it got nowhere in the face of stupidity, commercial and operational incompetence and competing vested interests.
IIRC, didn't Labour approve it in 2009 after 6 years of dithering, just to have the Conservatives scrap it a year later?
That lethal combination means that no real addition to London airports' runway capacity is actually going to happen.
Looks that way regretably.
And that, in turn means that any hope of slots being allocated at a viable cost to routes from Plymouth to London is a pipe-dream.
Yes, it's probably the case, any potential West Country link to LHR would be EXT and NQY and PLH would be squeezed, unless an add-on to some EXT-LHR flights or a stop on some NQY-LHR flights. But this all conjecture.
If anyone is interested, the solution to the problem proposed in 2003, and shot down by BAA and NATS working together, was the 2000m parallel (to LGW) runway at Redhill, dedicated to regional services, with an 8-minute overland monorail transfer to Gatwick and a dedicated rail spur to central London from the terminal. When you see Gatwick promoting its own parallel runway, remember that in order to kill off Redhill as a competitor, BAA/NATs declared that a parallel runway could not operate safely without severe movement limitations. It was a lie, of course, but the DfT believed it.
This is dafter than daft. "Heathwick" comes to mind here! Who the hell would pay for a monorail from Redhill to Gatwick (and what would it do to fares!) and what use is it if people need to go to Heathrow?
If there has to be a satelite for "regional services" (think this means "thin domestic routes" (?)), it has to be at Northolt, which is also not particularly suitable but better than Redhill, and it has to be a stopgap till Heathrow is expanded.
Of course it could be a very long stopgap.