UK CAA pushes for increased airport capacity

The UK government needs to commit to a long-term aviation policy that focuses on consumers and allows airport capacity to develop, specifically in southeast England, the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said in a report released last month. It warned that without such a policy there is a risk that fares would go up, route choice would drop and the UK economy would suffer.

According to the CAA, the capacity constraint could add £10 per passenger on a return fare by 2030. It also pointed out that thelack of available capacity at London Heathrow (LHR) has already had a negative effect on the UK’s ability to liberalize Air Services Agreements with foreign states, which could potentially open up routes into emerging markets.

“Additional capacity would offer significant benefits for consumers, and for the UK as a whole,” CAA chief executive Andrew Haines said. “However, as we haven’t built a single runway in the south east of England capable of handling Boeing 747s and Airbus A380s for over 70 years, the difficulty of increasing capacity is obvious.”

The only runway long enough to handle 747s and A380s that has been built at a major UK airport since the Second World War is located at Manchester (MAN). In 2010, the UK’s coalition government scrapped plans for a third runway at LHR and said it would also refuse any additional runways at London Gatwick (LGW) and London Stansted airports (STN). It is currently in the process of drawing up a UK aviationpolicy framework and a first draft is expected to be published in March.

“The challenge facing the government is to create an aviation policy that stands the test of time; not a policy for five years, but one for 30 years. If the private sector is to have sufficient confidence to deliver additional capacity then it needs to be convinced that government policy is based on robust evidence and is likely to last for at least a generation,” Haines argued.

While calling for additional airport capacity in the southeast of the country, the CAA report "Aviation Policy for the Future" sets out five criteria that any proposed new capacity would need to meet: It has to be beneficial overall to the consumer; be affordable and commercially viable; be operationally feasible; be integrated into the surface transport network; and be environmentally sustainable.

The government’s future aviation policy “should frame outcomes in order to maximise emissions reduction while minimising carbon leakage and competitive distortions,” the CAA advised. It also defined a series of measures the government could take to tackle noisenuisance caused by airports, which has had significant impact on previous proposals to increase runway capacity in the UK. These include wider economic instruments like a UK airport-cap and trade system for noise similar to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.