Andy Burnham can’t treat Heathrow expansion as a local planning issue
Has Andy Burnham’s commitment to devolution morphed into a convenient excuse not to lead? I ask, because he seems to have excused himself from the debate about a critical £50bn national infrastructure project: Heathrow’s third runway.
The project has been debated since the 1980s but officially kicked off in 2003 when Labour’s Alistair Darling, then Transport Secretary, backed the scheme. He said at the time “doing nothing is not an option.” He thought it could be constructed by 2015 but after decades of debate, shifting political priorities, legal challenges and reviews, it fell to the short-lived government of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to grant final approval after the pair rightly recognised the need for expansion and the growth-boosting benefits it would bring.
Enter Andy Burnham. He was asked five times on Sunday whether he supported his predecessor’s endorsement of the project and all he could say was that “it’s a matter for Londoners” – as if he’d been asked to name his favourite BBC London presenter.
Heathrow is a national issue, not a local one
The modernisation and expansion of Heathrow is a question of critical national infrastructure. In fact, it’s about international infrastructure given the hub is Europe’s second busiest airport. And yet the Prime Minister speaks of it like a local planning issue. Given the importance of Heathrow to the entire country, this position is absurd and warrants derision. Burnham’s ambivalence has delighted Sadiq Khan to such an extent that the mayor of London joked yesterday that the PM “delivered the lines I wrote for him really well.”
Today, Burnham will tell the Labour conference that “politics-as-usual has taken Britain backwards…more of the same isn’t good enough and isn’t going to get us where we need to be.” He will promise to deliver “less drift and more direction” in a speech that we’re told will represent bold, honest leadership, leaving the country in no doubt what he stands for. Tell that to Heathrow! Approving its expansion would have been the closest Starmer and Reeves came to a legacy, but with a new PM on the scene the entire proposition is back up in the air, so to speak.
Burnham will today set out more of his vision for devolution and “local control” of services and utilities. I’ve never been convinced by the devolution agenda, and I’ll be even more opposed if it’s used to derail vital national projects.