The Stansted Airport Folly

By J. W. M. THOMPSON

`rrHE Government has an open mind on this 1 question,' the public inquiry into the con- tentious proposal to make a third international airport for London at Stansted was told at its opening session this week. However sceptically the assurance was received, it was at least an indication that the Government is approaching with caution one of the most critical planning decisions Britain will have to take for years to come. It is easy, but wrong, to see such a dispute as one between a small local interest and the larger general convenience. In fact, whichever way this decision goes, the livelihood and well- being of millions are going to be affected.

Of the many questions arising, two seem to r:r N. stand out. They are: (1) Should Britain's air traffic, already disproportionately concentrated in the London area and the South-East, be increas- ingly and irreversibly funnelled into this con- gested region? (2) Would it matter if the last remaining stretch of genuine countryside near London (a very attractive one, as it happens) Were to be sacrificed in its entirety to the imme- diate interests of air travellers?

One notable thing about the Stansted proposal is the way the opposition has grown since an interdepartmental committee (set up in 1961) re- ported that Stansted in Essex, 'though not per- fect, seems • to'. be, the only suitable site' for London's third airport. Anyone who lives in or otherwise enjoys this piece of East Anglia has, of course, a vested interest in opposing its ruin, and energetic and resourceful local resistance is being expressed at the inquiry. (There are more than 240, objectors, including the two county councils concerned and a specially formed local organisation.) But the opposition, in fact, has developed, on a far wider front, culminating in this week,'s devastating condemnation of the scheme ,by, the Town and Country Planning Association:

Perhaps the widespread doubts owe much in the first place to the interdepartmental com-

mittee's final tucked away some distance from its choice of Stansted as a 'not Perfect' site, but the 'only' one. This stated: 'The question, whether and where London should have a fourth airport should be taken up in about five years'—i.e., within three years from now. This was enough ha alert many people to the idea that this crucial issue of air transport and airports was being dealt with in much the same way as had produced the present over- whelming mess in motor transport and roads— that is, on a piecemeal basis of improvisation and expediency, which in the end must prove extravagant, inefficient and frustrating.

For the overcrowded South-East, nothing could be less adequate than this approach, and it is no better for neglected and declining regions alse- where. An international airport is a massive stimulus to the economy of its region : Mr. Peter Masefield, chairman of the National Airports Authority, says that London Airport employs 40,000 people and supports 250,000 indirectly. It provides the kind of shot in the arm many parts of Britain urgently need, but which in other directions the Government is spending a great deal of money on keeping out of reach of the affluent South-East, Already this region, with less than a third of the country's population, has two-thirds of all .United Kingdom passenger arrivals at Heathrow and Gatwick.

A proper analysis of the boost given to a local economy by a major airport has not been undertaken, and certainly ought to be, but it is clear that the effect on the growth of office and industrial development must be on a major scale. The Town and Country Planning Asso- ciation quotes an American piece of research which concludes that an airport may create three or four times as many jobs in new business and industry as it employs directly, which seems more conservative than Mr. Masefield's figures. Put in the context of a region struggling to re- develop itself after a period of industrial decline, the figure may well be higher. At Stansted there would have to be substantial immigration to fill all these jobs, and the immigrants would come of course in the usual way from the North, from Scotland, and from Wales. Thus a decision to cram one more major airport into the South-East (one for the present: more later) would not only be piling congestion upon congestion, but robbing a needy region of a unique opportunity.

Hitherto, government policy has deliberately concentrated international air services upon London. Yet all political parties now talk end- lessly of the need to stop the drift to the South, and to bring new life to tired regions. One could

quote any of the party manifestoes at the last election, and huge chunks of party oratory

before, during, and since that election. The Minister of Aviation, Mr. 'Roy Jenkins,• is far too intelligent and civilised a politician to have forgotten that his manifesto promised 'measures . . . to check the drift to the South and to build up the declining economies in other parts

of the country.' Yet the assumption that inter- national air traffic must be focused upon London and its environs is precisely the sort of assump-

tion that makes nonsense of these hopeful words.

In any case, some other parts of England are going to demand international airports in the foreseeable future. It will be lunacy to insist (as a matter of 'planning') that the great masses of future air' travellers must always clog the strained' facilities of the South-East, wherever they happen to live and work. A decision to create one or more airports away from London now would prepare for this demand, while easing the appalling load upon the London area. It would also give time and encouragement to the bold plan already being discussed—to build. a new super-airport for London on the Isle of Sheppey, away from the crowded areas and mercifully near the sea. What is this masochistic folly which prompts a small island to site one international airport after another inland, instead of sending the din and danger over the water?

Thus the case of Stansted airport is a genuine and major test of our conviction, as a society, that we can and should use our intelligence to make the best and most humane use of our cramped land. It may be possible to exaggerate the importance in the public mind of the other large argument against. Stansted. because it has nothing or little to do with economics. Yet even this is not certain. Largely through the provi- dential inadequacies over the years of the railway services, the belt of Essex and Hertfordshire which would be appropriated by the proposal has almost incredibly survived as a region of unique rural character. If it goes now, it has gone for ever, and there is nothing else like it near London. That it gives pleasure to a host of Londoners in addition to those who live there (and I declare a marginal interest here) is apparent every weekend of the year from the countless car-loads which descend upon it from the northern suburbs. Some will think it senti- mental or reactionary to bother about the destruction of this. If London's hinterland were rich in such places, perhaps: but it is not.

Certainly any talk that may be heard about 'preserving the amenities' (and it usually is heard at planning inquiries) will be rubbish. The scale of jet operations envisaged would turn the whole countryside into bedlam. There is on top of that a requirement for a new town of 100,000 people at. Stansted (on the outskirts of the already ex- panding town of Bishop's Stortford and only a few miles from the expanding New Town. of Harlow). On top of that again will come the inevitable spread of office and industrial growth for many miles around, while the demands for a massive programme of road and railway de- velopment will be irresistible.

If the arguments against Stansted are defeated at the present public inquiry, it will be a classic example of planning taking the easy way out and letting the long-term interests of the country go hang. It will mean that London and its in- habitants had better resign themselves to living in a vast region of unrelieved subtopia, noisy and inescapable: while the inhabitants of less affluent regions elsewhere in the country will take the hint, and jump on the baud-wagon headirii south as fast as they can.'