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London mayor outlines plans for £50bn, four-runway airport and transport hub in Thames estuary
The closure of Heathrow, Europe's largest airport, would be a "fantastic opportunity for London" to develop a garden city or a new royal borough, the mayor has said as he outlined plans for a new £50bn hub in the south-east.
Boris Johnson warned that business travellers would need a "shift in mindset" to use public transport to reach his proposed four-runway airport, to be located in the Thames estuary or at Stansted, as he claimed that extended high-speed rail lines would put more people within an hour's travel of the hub than are currently served by Heathrow.
The mayor is submitting detailed proposals for three potential sites to the Airports Commission: one on the Isle of Grain in the Thames estuary, an offshore estuary option, and a transformed Stansted.
He argued that Britain needed an expanded hub airport to maintain its position in global aviation and reach emerging markets. He said: "Ambitious cities all over the world are already stealing a march on us and putting themselves in a position to eat London's breakfast, lunch and dinner by constructing mega airports that plug them directly into the global supply chains that we need to be part of.
"Those cities have moved heaven and earth to locate their airports away from their major centres of population, in areas where they have been able to build airports with four runways or more. For London and the wider UK to remain competitive we have to build an airport capable of emulating that scale of growth. Anyone who believes there would be the space to do that at Heathrow, which already blights the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners, is quite simply crackers."
Johnson claimed it was a myth that Heathrow would be "a tumbleweed infested ghost town or a waste land". Instead, he said that the land could house up to 250,000 people and "offer hope to millions of Londoners increasingly priced out of decent accommodation".
His chief adviser on aviation, Daniel Moylan, said he believed the site could be transformed within 20 years. A price tag of £15bn has been notionally put on the airport by Johnson's team, although they note that the value would depreciate quickly should the hub airport be built.
Heathrow airport said it was "extraordinary" that any mayor should propose closing it down, pointing out that the plan would leave 114,000 people facing redundancy and cost taxpayers far more than expanding the present hub. The mayor claims some of the workers could relocate and others would find new work in the redeveloped borough.
Figures supplied by Transport for London on behalf of the mayor claim that the estuary options would put either 9.4 million or 10.7 million within an hour's journey of the airport on public transport, compared to 9.2 million at Heathrow. However, these numbers do not cover door-to-door journeys, and many air passengers outside London – especially the business travellers on which the hub argument largely relies – are likely to drive or at least live more than a few minutes' walk from their nearest public transport service.
The figures also depend on massive infrastructure investment in roads, high-speed rail and expanded Crossrail and conventional lines beyond that currently planned by the government. Heathrow's own figures, supplied by external consultants, show that more than twice as many people would live within an hour's journey of the west London hub than the estuary, even after the transport upgrades.
The mayor's team claimed that a new hub airport would be deliverable by 2029 with a combination of public and private funding that would cost the government a "net spend" of £50bn over the 2020s – a decade when a similar sum has been earmarked for HS2.
Heathrow airport will lay out its own ideas for expansion on Wednesday with a series of specific options for a third runway, a move likely to put new swaths of London homes under threat of extra noise or even demolition.
Heathrow is likely to try to head off Johnson's demands for a four-runway hub by claiming three runways will suffice. But both believe that only extra capacity at a larger hub airport, with enough connecting flights and passengers to make long-haul routes feasible, will servesBritain's aviation needs.
The commission will announce a shortlist of new runway options by the end of the year, with detailed studies to be carried out in 2014. It will set out its final recommendations after the general election in 2015.
The environmental group Friends of the Earth said: "The only reason Boris has concocted his pie-in-the-sky plans for a Thames estuary airport is because backing Heathrow expansion would pit the whole of west London against him. The region doesn't need more airport capacity; London already has more flights to the world's top business centres than any of its European competitors."