Heathrow has submitted its latest plans for a third runway at Europe’s busiest airport. The total cost, including new terminals and infrastructure, will be £49 billion pounds. The airport says expansion will create up to 40,000 new jobs and add 0.43% to the UK’s GDP by 2050. However, the plans will face fierce opposition from locals, politicians and climate campaigners. Report by Jonesia. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
00:00It's been touted many times before, and now Heathrow has unveiled its latest plans for a third runway at Europe's busiest airport.
00:09The airport says this would enable an additional 276,000 flights a year, and would almost double terminal capacity for passengers.
00:19Heathrow's CEO is keen to emphasize the urgency of the project.
00:23The airport we see behind us is full, and that is to the detriment of the UK economy, to the detriment of trade, and to the detriment of connectivity.
00:33To spur economic growth, thousands of jobs, billions in investments, we need a third runway to the benefit of the UK.
00:41The runway will only be here in about 10 years' time, and during those 10 years, markets will increase, and we will not be able to follow.
00:48So this is absolutely crucial for both UK trade and UK economy.
00:53The plans include redirecting the M25 motorway underneath a tunnel between junctions 14 and 15.
01:00The total cost, including new terminals and infrastructure, will be £49 billion, which Heathrow says will come from private funding.
01:09Sir Howard Davies, who led an independent inquiry into Heathrow's expansion, says it's not just London's economy that will benefit.
01:16We need to have the capacity to be a large aviation hub.
01:23That's important, particularly for the regions of the UK, because what you can see at the moment is that a lot of our regional airports connect to the rest of the world via skip-on, because there is no capacity at Heathrow.
01:36Plans for a third runway go back as far as 2002, then, as now, the proposed runway would involve demolishing hundreds of homes immediately to the north of the airport.
01:49Residents of these four villages remain vehemently opposed to the project.
01:53The whole of the Heathrow villages area, not only Harmonsworth and Longford, but Sipson and Harlington, will effectively be uninhabitable, because if they're not demolished, the planes will be coming so low so frequently that, you know, it's just not possible to have a decent sort of life if you were still there.
02:16So that's 15,000 people that have got to be rehoused somewhere.
02:21There's no provision made for that in any of the plans I've seen.
02:27Where do you find maybe 1,500, a minimum of extra homes?
02:33The government is trying to build homes like there's no tomorrow.
02:36Well, they're just, this is an own goal from that point of view.
02:39Minera Wilson is the MP for Twickenham, which lies underneath Heathrow's flight paths.
02:43She and her Liberal Democrat colleagues are strongly against the airport's expansion.
02:49We will be opposing it every step of the way and we need to hand over a planet to our children and grandchildren, but also protect our community's health in terms of the impact of noise and air pollution.
03:02And so we, you know, the price is too great and the economic benefits really are unproven.
03:07And Heathrow Airport is saddled with £20 billion worth of debt and it's now proposing a £49 billion monster project.
03:15It's going to be passengers who have to pay the cost of that.
03:18And we're also yet to see what the cost is to the taxpayer because Heathrow have made it clear they're not going to pay for a lot of the infrastructure upgrades of rail and road that will be needed to support a third runway.
03:28Heathrow insists their job is to make flying greener and that it is incentivising the use of sustainable aviation fuel.
03:36One climate scientist, though, says this will not be sufficient to offset the environmental cost.
03:41It is not a silver bullet and needs to be deployed alongside demand management.
03:45The reason for that is because scaling up clean technologies such as sustainable aviation fuels will face significant challenges, particularly in the near term of scale-up.
03:54And the risk is, therefore, if they're not paired with demand management, the sector will not be able to decarbonise at the pace needed for the UK to stop its contribution to dangerous climate change.
04:03There are divisions within the Labour Party, too, over Heathrow's expansion.
04:07Whilst the UK government has given its backing for the project, Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, remains unconvinced.
04:14Well, it's obviously a matter for the Mayor of London to make the case that he thinks is strongest for the people he represents.
04:20But this government is clear that as part of our growth mission, we need to see that investment at Heathrow.
04:26In the 2000s, a proposed third runway at Heathrow threatened the homes of nearby residents.
04:32It was backed by a Labour government fixated on economic growth, yet opposed by a Labour Mayor of London.
04:39Here we are again in 2025, passing through similar storm clouds.
04:43Whatever happens over the next decade, fasten your seatbelts, there's turbulence ahead.
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