Heathrow's third runway is ready for take-off... or is it?

Hurdles both ideological and practical still need to be cleared for work to begin

- JONATHAN PRYNN

Let's put it in pilot language. Heathrow's long-delayed third runway project has at last been given permission to leave the gate where it has been stuck for the past 16 years. Following Rachel Reeves's ringing endorsement of the £20 billion scheme - the star turn of the growth revolution the Chancellor hopes will transform her reputation - it can finally begin taxiing to the end of the airstrip.

But take-off? Even with the most favourable tailwinds imaginable, that is a good decade away still. More likely, given the troubled recent history of mega infrastructure plans in the UK, and the scale of the opposition already mustering its forces, it could be the 2040s before it get airborne. Or indeed never.

The third runway plan, originally approved by Gordon Brown in 2009, was slammed into cold storage in February 2020 just as the pandemic began to rip up all the aviation industry's assumptions about future demand for flying. No one knew when, or even if, travel restrictions would be fully lifted, and what level of enthusiasm there would be for international holidaying in the post-Covid world. Perhaps the staycation summers of 2020 to 2022 would prove to be the new normal? But they did not.

As it happens, the sceptics were wrong. People really want to fly, more than ever it seems, especially from this rain-lashed chilly island.

Almost 84 million passengers passed through Heathrow last year, a record, representing a far faster recovery to pre-Covid levels than most pundits predicted. Even in a severe cost-ofliving squeeze, a foreign holiday was one of the few spending categories most consumers were not prepared to compromise on.