Senior figures from Heathrow and Gatwick argued the case for their airport winning London’s new runway, at the GTMC conference in Marrakech.
Nigel Milton, director of policy and political relations at Heathrow, said the airport had invested £11 billion since 2003, and improvements such as T5 had seen the ratio of ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ passenger satisfaction scores rise from 39 per cent in 2006 to 80 per cent today.
Addressing delegates at the Four Seasons Morocco hotel, he added that the airport’s ASQ (Airport Service Quality) score had “broken the benchmark four points rating” in the first quarter of 2014, putting it in the same league as the world’s best airports.
“Once the new T2 is fully operational, 60 per cent of Heathrow passengers will be using the world-class facilities of T2 and T5,” said Milton.
“For more than 350 years, London was home of the world’s busiest port or airport – until this year,” he said. “Now, in 2014, Dubai has the world’s busiest airport. Does this matter? Yes, it does. We are a trading nation, we need to be connected to the world.”
“Heathrow has been full for a decade”, said Milton, with 40 key destinations missing from the UK route network due to lack of capacity – plus UK domestic routes lost in the last 10 years.
Milton said the construction plans included a “green ribbon” of vegetation around the airport, and pointed to a “significant shift in local political attitudes”. In 2009 four directly affected local authorities were against runway expansion, with one for it; now it is two authorities for, one against and the others neutral.
Milton said a three-runway Heathrow would be well-served by rail, with a link to the western mainline, the HS2 interchange at Old Oak Common and a southern link to Waterloo. By 2040, he said, rail capacity to Heathrow will have risen from 18 trains and 5,000 seats per hour today, to 40 trains and 15,000 seats.
Meanwhile, Gatwick’s chief commercial officer Guy Stephenson told the conference that his airport served more destinations than any other UK airport, and was delivering £2 billion annually in GVA (gross value added – a measure of goods and services produced).
He said the runway expansion at Gatwick had a much lower “deliverability risk” than Heathrow, it would be around half the cost and have less noise impact, making it the “obvious option for UK policy makers.”
Stephenson said Gatwick now had more than 25 per cent of UK market share, with 40 airlines whose destinations include 46 of the top 50 European business routes, and 11 UK routes. He added the airport had seen a 37 per cent growth to emerging markets in the last two years.
Stephenson told GTMC delegates the airport had invested £1.2 billion in infrastructure over the last five years, and the Gatwick Connect desk help more than one million non-interlined transit passengers a year make their connections, with 80 per cent of airlines participating within the next 12 months. He argued that data showed the greatest growth sectors would be short-haul and low cost carriers, which would best be served by an expanded Gatwick.
Greater capacity will be reflected in surface transport improvements, he said, including government commitment to a £50 million new railway station – set to open by 2017 – and the new Thameslink route helping triple rail capacity over the next 20 years.
Read a full analysis on the Heathrow – Gatwick battle for airport expansion