Economically, it means billions of pounds in additional growth and thousands of new jobs. Strategically, it boosts the UK’s position as an international travel hub – preventing the loss of momentum and opportunities to competitors like Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
In terms of quality of life, it’ll mean continued improvements in business and leisure travel connectivity around the globe for Brits, over and above the bean-counting upsides.
Put like that, the amazing thing about this news is not that it’s happened but that it didn’t happen sooner.
To some extent, that’s simply part of our national infrastructure paralysis. The same toxic combination of Nimbyism, short-termism, over-regulation and chronic indecision has left our famously rainy island facing water shortages because we haven’t built any reservoirs since 1992.
Officially, of course, there’s no tension at all between net zero and economic growth. In the same way that officially the Employment Rights Act won’t increase unemployment, and that it’s just a coincidence that after years of deliberately driving up energy costs, we now have a cost of living crisis and a dying steel industry.
square MARK WALLACE Is Keir Starmer already toast? I don’t think so
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This is where the Gatwick decision is so interesting, because it reveals both that these tensions exist and that the Government privately knows that it is on the horns of a dilemma between two competing priorities.
That was a wise realisation – and as we can see in the current opinion polls, without growth it is in real political trouble on every other aspect of policy delivery, because it can’t spend what it might like and instead must tax and borrow more than we can afford.
Of course, while some environmentalist critics make out that airport expansion – or in some cases, mass air travel at all – is incompatible with a greener economy, the reality is more subtle. Since 1990, the standard climate emissions benchmark date, CO2 emitted per air passenger per kilometre, has fallen by more than half, via significant logistical and engineering innovations.
While the right decision has been reached this time, that doesn’t signal an end to the Government’s increasingly uncomfortable attempt to keep one foot planted on the net zero train and the other on the growth train at the same time. Economic reality means the two tracks are diverging, and riding both will require the Government to do the splits at ever more extreme angles.
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group
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