The Department for Transport announced yesterday that the final verdict on airport expansion will be put off until summer 2016. Back in October, The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer predicted in his ‘Any Other Business‘ column that the decision would be delayed until after the mayoral election in May:
The Great British Runway final between Heathrow and Gatwick is beginning to look like a game of two halves. The visit of China’s President Xi Jinping is a bonus for the West London team, who can claim that Chinese investors with bulging wallets are more likely to be impressed by landing at an urban mega-airport than an expanded flying club in Sussex. But the Volkswagen emissions scandal has been a gift for Gatwick, because as chief executive Stewart Wingate said: ‘Heathrow’s poor air quality already breaches legal limits and it’s difficult to see how expansion could legally go ahead with the millions of extra car journeys an expanded Heathrow would generate.’
Airports Commission chairman Sir Howard Davis, busy in his new job as chairman of RBS having concluded in favour of Heathrow, retorted that ‘limited weight should be placed on the suggestion that air quality represents a significant obstacle to [Heathrow’s] expansion’.
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