Can Reeves get Heathrow’s third runway off the ground?

After last week’s bond market jitters, the Chancellor pledged to go ‘further and faster’ to improve the UK’s anaemic economic growth. An early test of that resolve looks now to be looming in the familiar form of a third runway at Heathrow airport. As I reported earlier this month, Reeves is poised to make a swathe of announcements intended to increase economic growth in a speech later this month. Among them includes giving a political green light to Heathrow’s third runway and an expansion of Gatwick and Luton airports, according to Bloomberg.

Successive governments – of various stripes – have ducked Heathrow expansion for decades, with the airport’s last remaining diagonal runway being decommissioned in 2003. Between 1990 and 2015, three major studies all concluded Heathrow’s third runway afforded the greatest benefits. The coalition government cancelled the Brown government’s proposed expansion, shortly after coming to office in 2010. Yet the idea was resurrected by Theresa May.