Britain has achieved many things over the past 50 years. But few can match not building a third runway at Heathrow. We’ve been at it since 1968, ever since Harold Wilson set us off on our flight path to nowhere. And still no third landing strip: a remarkable achievement by any standards.
We’re having another go now. And guess what? After half a century on the job and enough documents to fill a fleet of A380s, Heathrow still doesn’t even know where to put its new runway. The best it can offer is three options, with “length varying from between 3,200 and 3,500 metres”. Moreover, that’s just the most glaring key fact missing from Heathrow’s latest consultation paper, the 70-pager apparently giving you the “opportunity to have your say to help shape the emerging proposals”.
Yes, “emerging”. In fact, so many crucial details are still up in the air that it’s hard to spot what the ten-week consultation is consulting on — a point driven home by Wednesday’s parliamentary debate, secured by Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable, MP for Twickenham.
Apart from the multiple choice runway location, there are three possible sites for a new terminal, a smorgasbord of potential taxiways and some gobbledegook about “realigning” the M25. Having noticed that the “M25 is one of the busiest roads in the UK”, Heathrow says it “will ensure that our proposals do not result in disruption”.
So how does it square that with this? “Our current thinking is to reposition the M25 carriageway by approximately 150 metres to the west, lower it by approximately seven metres into a tunnel and raise the runway height by three to five metres so that it passes over the M25 between J14a and J15.” Nothing disruptive about any of that.
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What about costs? Heathrow has magically got the cost of the runway down from an initial £17.6 billion to £14 billion. But it’s not just Sir Vince who’s troubled by Transport for London’s estimate that rail and road links to handle an extra 60 million passengers a year, plus tons more freight, will cost £18 billion. “Where that will come from is one of the big unanswered questions,” he told MPs. Heathrow is offering only £1 billion towards it, even if it disputes TfL’s figures.
Two other crucial issues — illegal air quality and noise — get no more than platitudes. And partly because of one vast hole in the consultation. Because the location of the runway isn’t fixed, no one knows where the new flight paths will be. As Ruth Cadbury, Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth, put it in the debate: “What is clear in the Heathrow consultation is what is not clear; so little is said . . . If it is not yet possible to map the detailed impact on local communities, what is the point of consulting right now?”
Indeed, 50 years on, Heathrow still reckons it’s at such an “early stage in the process” that “it is not possible to know the exact location of flight paths” — something it admits “may be frustrating”. It’ll only pin that down after a “wider programme of airspace modernisation”. And all followed by another consultation.
Yet that will come only after MPs vote later this year on the Airports National Policy Statement, the poll that determines whether the third runway goes ahead. As consultation processes go, it’s all a bit of a sham.
Kwek threats fail
Happy days at Millennium & Copthorne. Kwek Leng Beng, the Singaporean with 65 per cent of the 130-hotel chain, was promising any minority investor who turned down his “final” 620p-a-share bid an absolutely splendid stay: years of pricey building works and pretty much no divvy.
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And still his threats have failed. He needed the backing of just over half the independent shareholders to land his £2 billion bid — and got only 47 per cent. The upshot? The bid’s lapsed, the shares are down 5 per cent to 546p and he now has to continue co-habiting with his rebel joint-owners. They include the trio that led the revolt: International Value, MSD and Classic Fund, together holding 12.7 per cent.
Friendly relations look a challenge. For months, investors have been rather cross with Mr Kwek, and Millennium’s independent directors, for thinking he could get away with a low-ball offer. Before his bid was unveiled, he’d had two sighting shots rejected by the independent committee, led by senior independent director “His Excellency Shaukat Aziz”, ex-PM of Pakistan.
It bumped him up from 510p to 540p before the committee foolishly recommended 552½p. True, the shares had been knocking around pre-bid at about £4. But minority investors pointed to an estimated net asset value of more than £10 and forced a higher offer. A final 620p, again recommended by the committee, was always a risk.
So it’s proved. Back in 2007, Mr Kwek declared: “If I was to run the company as a private company, I could improve it by 35 per cent.” A boast that’s come back to haunt him.
May’s Davos delight
Fourth at Davos. Who’d have thought Theresa May was capable of that? She may be clinging to power over here, but still got her head in front of the likes of Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel — at least according to Talkwalker, the analytics outfit that tracks topics of conversation on social media networks, news websites and blogs.
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Our PM starred in 27,791 conversations directly linked with Davos, upstaged only by Emmanuel Macron (40,975) and India’s Narendra Modi (62,227) — plus, of course, The Donald. He clocked in with ten times Mrs May’s mentions: 273,195. Still, a lot of them were about his alleged affairs. Fields of wheat can only get you so far.
