Stansted: Four Runway Proposal

15 July 2013, 13:36 | Updated: 15 July 2013, 13:39

Expanding Stansted, so it has four runways, is one suggestion from the Mayor of London about increasing capacity at the UK's airports.

Boris Johnson did put forward his outer Thames Estuary, artificial island plan - dubbed "Boris Island'' - for a new four-runway hub airport in a report published today (Monday).

However he also said that a new, four-runway airport on the Isle of Grain on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, a plan already outlined by architect Lord Foster, should be considered.

Mr Johnson's plans, which rule out expansion at Heathrow airport in west London, will be submitted later this week to the Government-appointed Airport Commission headed by Sir Howard Davies.

Mr Johnson said that a new hub airport would be able to support more than 375,000 new jobs by 2050 and add £742 billion to the value of goods and services produced in the UK.

He said a new hub airport could be delivered by 2029, with a hybrid bill being passed by parliament to secure approval for the airport, the surface access and the acquisition of Heathrow.

Talking about the future of the Heathrow area should a new airport be sited elsewhere, Mr Johnson said that part of west London, with good transport links, had the space and infrastructure to generate up to 100,000 new homes that London badly needed.

There was the potential to attract tens of thousands of jobs in a number of different sectors and while some workers at Heathrow would relocate to the new airport, many others would find work in a newly-developed Heathrow area.

Mr Johnson said: "Ambitious cities all over the world are already stealing a march on us and putting themselves in a position to eat London's breakfast, lunch and dinner by constructing mega airports that plug them directly into the global supply chains that we need to be part of.

Those cities have moved heaven and earth to locate their airports away from their major centres of population, in areas where they have been able to build airports with four runways or more.''

For London and the wider UK to remain competitive we have to build an airport capable of emulating that scale of growth.

Anyone who believes there would be the space to do that at Heathrow, which already blights the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners, is quite simply crackers.''

Mr Johnson's chief adviser on aviation, Daniel Moylan, said: "Heathrow can never solve our problems and our studies show that we're better off with a new site. 

The immense noise, pollution and congestion that would result from expanding an airport located in the heart of our suburbs would potentially devastate the greatest city in the world.''