I think the version I'm looking at is slightly more up-to-date. It discusses why the 2295m (Family B) and 2800m options have been discontinued, leaving the original 3500m proposal and an option shortened at one or both ends to 3200m.

Interestingly, one diagram does show exits on both sides of the current northern runway at the western end:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.gmf...f724046dac.jpg

VATis recoverable if you are a company and CT?? That s why people employ accountants.....

No, that was me reverting back to the original from when I worked there.:uhoh: It's hard to keep up with the different designs once you are out of the loop. That being said what is actually being built will likely be different again and we could well see a return to the shorter runway.

The point I was trying to make however, was that the new capacity created from a new runway changes the dynamic at LHR and it's not just about the value of the slots anymore. New LH routes would be fed in part by the new regional routes and there would be enough capacity freed up for both. A fourth runway would have been even better of course and there is so much money to be saved by building it at the same time but that won't happen.

VAT is recovered on most things yes but there will still be considerable VAT generated from a project this size. CT will be paid on profits and the accountant is there so you only pay that and not 40%.

Labour MPs will get a free vote on Heathrow go ahead next Monday.

Democracy in action !

I do spot one minor problem however.

Like Tory, SNP,, SDLP and UDP MPs they won't actually have a clue what they are voting for other than a new daily 777 service to Wick and a new logistics hub bringing 40,000 jobs or is it 89,000 ? (no matter) , to Swansea.

it's a 10 from Len !

..this assumes we still have a government by Monday given todays vote.

Yes, Prestwick will be invaluable when they start to airfreight in all that concrete and aggregate ...

Joking aside, while it will be sad to see PIK get sold off for housing or a business park, the massive growth of GLA and EDI combined with improvements in aircraft range and economics mean that its continued existence as an airport is going to be very hard to justify.

Dave your getting confused that concrete and aggregate is coming in from [INSERT CITY OF CHOICE].

In another astounding episide from Yes Minister Grayling will Monday give assurances under law that an 8 hour night ban will be imposed in tandem with R3 go ahead.

Total madness making the airport totally uncompetitive against AMSTERDAM PARIS FRANKFURT etc.
If you come in from Asia you will be lucky to arrive at Wick before early afternoon !

It demonstrates how totally out of touch the idiots are, who are voting on this. Justine Greening and Ruth Cadbury being the exceptions to the rule.

"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away"

I guess you dont live under the flight path....

Either Grayling is pulling your leg, or you're pulling ours. :O

Published yesterday, a welcome (and timely) update to the longstanding House of Commons briefing paper on Heathrow:

Heathrow Airport

H Harry

To be fair the noise issue is a different subject..

My comment was in relation to the fact that they are extending potential capacity but at the time slicing off the most profitable pipeline !

It demonstrates how much ministers understand aviation ie zero !

Prophead wrote: "You have still not answered my question though Ozzy. How is scrapping a project that would be beneficial to the whole of the UK and building one only helping the SE a reasonable answer to the North/South funding imbalance?"

You have overdosed on too much HAL propaganda. R3 is not net-beneficial to regional UK. Locally-awarded construction-related contracts will be short-term, thinly-spread and competitively-tendered. They won't revitalise the regions. Those much-vaunted PSO-funded extra domestic flights (if they happen) will be more than offset by the loss of a forecast 74000 fewer direct flights from the regions per annum by 2030 rising to 161000 per annum by 2050 (Transport Select Committee - June 5th). And many of these will be high-impact long-haul scheduled services. Regional UK is best served by retaining and building upon direct long-haul services of its own. Meanwhile, one-stop connecting flights are already easily available via more user-friendly hubs than LHR when required. Probably at cheaper fares too.

London's capacity-crunch really is a SE-specific issue. And given that the strongest demand growth is driven by short-haul budget airlines, new runways at Gatwick and Stansted provide a much better solution at a far lower cost. Two new runways in the SE mean at least double the new capacity of one at LHR anyway. Especially in view of the latest proposal for an extended eight hour night curfew at LHR. Deduct 90 minutes of movements times three runways at times of high-value demand and that is devastating to the business case for LHR as presented so far. All financial calculations must be reworked. Note too that the tax income windfall you attribute to the build programme applies similarly to alternative projects.

Finally - but not least - Regional UK is by far best-served by overdue investment in its own infrastructure priorities. Trickledown is comprehensively discredited. Opportunity cost is real. Billions in public funds allocated to Heathrow access works cannot simultaneously fund regional priorities. Your notion that that road and rail upgrades around Heathrow "need doing anyway" - so they will be funded - is a very entitled way of thinking ... peculiar to London as that is the way things have always been there. There are lots of "desperately need doing right now" projects across regional UK but they simply don't get funded at all. That needs to change urgently. And making regional infrastructure competitive again really will bring national benefit.

What "latest proposal" ? Whose ?

Other than a single, unsubstantiated post earlier in the thread, I haven't seen any reference whatsoever to proposals for an 8-hour curfew.

AFAIK the Airports Commission recommended a 6.5 hour curfew (from 11:30pm to 6am), Heathrow somewhat disingenuously interpreted this as 11pm to 5:30am so that early-morning arrivals could start half an hour earlier, and the Commons Transport Committee called for 7 hours (without specifying exactly when).

Who will pay for LHR?? - FT Friday
 

https://www.ft.com/content/98e6b128-...1-31da4279a601

Fears mount that taxpayers and passengers will be landed with big chunk of bill - leveraged structure seen as inappropriate for such a large project

The contentious Heathrow Northwest Runway scheme is by a factor of 2 the most expensive option of the three considered.It involves lavishing £14bn or more on a third runway that will have to bridge 12 lanes of the nation’s busiest motorway. It will also entail further billions in spending to upgrade train and road access links to what is already a highly-congested airport.

What puzzles onlookers is how these astronomical sums will be paid for.

If you have a lot of debt on your balance sheet you are less able to absorb any shocks.

Since 2006, when Heathrow’s then-listed owner BAA was removed from the stock market, the airport has been owned by a consortium led by the listed but family-controlled Spanish construction company Ferrovial. This has steadily expanded and now includes sovereign wealth funds from Singapore, Qatar and China, and the UK’s own Universities Superannuation Scheme Pension Fund. The regulatory system surrounding airports allows owners to collect a return based on the regulatory value of their assets — inadvertently encouraging them to expand regardless of whether it makes sense. This stable framework has allowed Heathrow to operate with almost no equity capital.

According to Heathrow Airport Holdings’ 2017 accounts, borrowings stand at £13.4bn — not far shy of the £15bn value of its regulatory asset base. Equity stood at just £703m.Indeed, investors have been pulling out more in dividends than Heathrow has been earning. Last year they received a payout of £847m even though post tax profits were just £516m, implying that the corporate debt was used, in part, to fund these returns.

Most agree that this leveraged structure is wholly inappropriate to support a project as large as the third runway. It offers no leeway for construction risk on what will be a highly complex engineering challenge. Willie Walsh, the chief executive of IAG, has fiercely opposed the runway and has said he has “zero confidence” that it will be built on time and on budget.

Martin Blaiklock, an infrastructure consultant and former project banker, believes that Heathrow needs substantially more equity capital. He accuses investors of “gradually stripping the company of assets, so that the company is close to being “bust”. “The current (unsecured) creditors could bring LHR to its knees by demanding immediate repayment,” he said.“If you have a lot of debt on your balance sheet you are less able to absorb any shocks such as cost overruns because you still have to keep paying the interest, whereas, if such costs are funded by shareholder equity, you can just stop paying distributions.”Heathrow already needs to raise a lot of debt simply to stand still. Around a third of its borrowings — some £4.5bn — will fall due within the next five years. And while the rating agency Moody’s has given the company a stable rating, it noted that “this high level of maturities and the company’s high leverage limit its ability to withstand unexpected external shocks.”

According to the UK Airports Commission, an independent body set up in 2012 to consider how the UK can “maintain its status as an international hub for aviation”, the new runway could saddle Heathrow with as much as £27bn of debt.

Critics also question the propriety of Heathrow’s complex and opaque structure given its privileged status as an infrastructure asset of national importance, first built by the state. There are at least 10 corporate layers between Heathrow Airport Limited — which is licensed by the aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority — and shareholders. “If you’ve stripped out all the profits and dividends, and then you get a regulatory settlement that supports your new capital structures that really is having your cake and eating it,” he said. “Taxpayers are not funding them directly, but ultimately we will end up paying whether it’s through the price of a beer in the airport or the cost of the ticket."

It’s nothing short of scandalous that those costs are not being scrutinised in more detail.May, Grayling, The SNP, most MPs, The Airport Commission, Transport Committee BBC are all culpable.

May needs a big ticket item to show London sorry Britain is “open for business”, apparently at ANY cost what a stale comment that is.

Grayling......well as Lisa Nandy MP indicated,
“do you think we are all mugs”?

The SNP are eyeing a juicy £3bn for Holyrod under the Barnett Formulae and devil the consequences.

Davies, no comment , well not one that’s printable.

As for the BBC , they are either totally oblivious or happy to play ball.

Meanwhile

Credit Guido Fawkes

The airports vote has been pencilled in for Monday 25 June but Chris Grayling faces more trouble over yet another cock-up. DAC Beachcroft, legal advisers to the Heathrow Hub consortium proposing an extended runway at Heathrow, have today indicated that they will challenge the DfT’s National Policy Statement. They say it wrongly calculated the capacity of the extended runway option after a mistake by the Airports Commission (dating back before Grayling was Transport Secretary), thus erroneously finding the 3rd runway option had a higher capacity. This was one of the principal reasons why the extended runway was rejected.

The Planning Act – Section 13 to be specific – allows for a Judicial Review of an NPS in the six weeks after it has been designated, following a vote in parliament. If this was objectively an error of process then it does not look good for Grayling…

But by no means the only one.

Other reasons were:

a The safety case for the extended runway option was unproven

b There was almost no possibility of meaningful runway alternation, which would have made it politically and environmentally unacceptable.

I'm amazed that Heathrow Hub haven't just packed up and gone home. A JR is going to cost them a small fortune and the outcome is entirely predictable.

Western Rail Link to Heathrow
 

I have just received from Network Rail that this rail link will cost £1 billion and that the sponsor - the Dept of Transport - state Heathrow will contribute a "fair and reasonable contribution to the cost of the scheme".
So an unknown percentage could be spent elsewhere on rail schemes for many other UK regions other that just for a private company to somehow reduce staff & folk from the West to use the train to Heathrow.:*

Would you feel less angry if Heathrow was nationalised?