SerpApi.Org
Andy Burnham may be forced to nationalise Heathrow if a row over its third runway plan cannot be resolved, the head of one of the airport’s biggest carriers has warned.
Sir Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, described the spat over the length of the £49bn runway as “childish” and said the new Prime Minister should have his ministers “bang heads together”.
The veteran boss said the prospect of nationalisation could not be discounted amid a conflict between Heathrow’s owners and Surinder Arora, the hotel tycoon.
Mr Arora owns part of the site and has formed a consortium proposing a shorter, cheaper third runway that would also remove the risk of diverting the M25.
Thomas Woldbye, the chief executive of Heathrow, has warned shareholders – including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and China – could walk away from the airport if faced with the prospect of competing terminals.
Sir Tim, speaking at the Farnborough air show, said that while bringing Heathrow under state control would be “hugely complex and very expensive”, he was floating the idea because he “couldn’t see any end to the bickering”.
He said that though the initial privatisation of the airport under Margaret Thatcher was “probably a good thing”, it was now “too vital and too important”.
He said: “The stakeholders are at each other’s throats and this is not the way to go.
“This slightly childish way of going around things is not helping. They need to work together and get this job done.”
Sir Tim said that Heidi Alexander, who will remain in post as Transport Secretary under Mr Burnham, should be “banging heads together and saying, ‘We’re getting nowhere with this’”.
Heathrow has been operating at the limits of its two existing landing strips for years while rival hubs across Europe and the Middle East pile capacity on to their multiple runways.
Dubai, where Emirates is based, surpassed Heathrow as the world’s busiest international hub in 2014 and Istanbul is expected to displace it from the number one spot in Europe.
Emirates operates six flights a day to Heathrow using A380s super-jumbos, but Sir Tim said an effective cap on passenger numbers from the airport was increasingly hurting the UK’s economic growth.
“The state is being deprived of a measure of wealth that comes from taxation, job creation,” he said. “I just hope that they can see sense, otherwise you might get the eye of nationalisation swinging towards Heathrow.”
Sir Tim said that he was agnostic about the length of a future runway, but that the shorter version proposed by Mr Arora appeared adequate to deliver growth and could be expanded later.
He said: “Anything is better than nothing. ‘Short’ gets the job done.”
Sir Tim added that Mr Arora’s landholdings at Heathrow meant that he would need to be involved in the runway project or Heathrow would risk “ending up in the High Court for years”.
The Emirates boss also urged Mr Burnham to review “ferocious” levels of air passenger duty imposed on airlines and passengers and to reconsider allowing tourists to reclaim VAT on shopping.
Affluent visitors from the Middle East had begun travelling to Paris to shop for luxury goods even when spending time in London, he said.
