The Airports Commission has unanimously concluded that a third north-west runway at Heathrow should be built but what might happen next. EG takes a look at the options and what might happen once the final decision is in.
A long road lies ahead, as securing final approval for any development will take years, explains Martha Grekos, partner and London head of planning and infrastructure at Irwin Mitchell.
Grekos said: “The new government will now be pressed to make a decision on airport expansion. However, the government is not bound to abide by the Commission’s findings. The report is merely an independent recommendation. The government is said to decide by the end of this year whether to accept the recommendation or to opt for an alternative, but the decision could also be put back further still until after the 2016 London mayoral election, which will now be dominated by the airport-runway debate given the recommendation for Heathrow.
“The Airports Commission has urged the government ‘not to prolong this process and to move as quickly as it can to a decision as further delay will be increasingly costly and will be seen, nationally and internationally, as a sign that the UK is unwilling or unable to take the steps needed to maintain its position as a well-connected, open trading economy in the 21st century”. It has taken the Airports Commission already two and a half years to review the evidence and produce its final report.”
Then, once a decision is finally taken, two main consenting routes are open at the moment: a development consent order (DCO) under the Planning Act 2008; or a hybrid bill examined in parliament.
DCOs are specifically designed to deal with nationally significant infrastructure schemes of this type and their associated development, and constitute a de-politicised procedure in which management of the examination process rests with the Planning Inspectorate and the final decision would be in the hands of the secretary of state for transport.
However, the DCO process would largely be dependent on the successful designation of a national policy statement (NPS) on aviation, following strategic environmental assessment, and there is currently no aviation NPS in place.
Also, the application and decision-making process is also heavily regulated; depending on the size and complexity of project, it can take between two to three years to carry out the pre-application consultation requirements.
A hybrid bill, promoted by the government, on the other hand, involves no pre-deposit consultation requirements, speeding up the process at first.
However, decisions of the secretary of state taken during the run up to the promotion of the bill can be susceptible to judicial review challenge, causing potential delays.
The bill’s passage through parliament may also be affected by factors including the number of petitions deposited and parliamentary capacity, and for it to gain royal assent may ultimately take as long as it would to secure a DCO.
As Grekos puts it: “A DCO may start slowly owing to the pre-consultation requirements compared to a bill, which hits the ground running pretty quickly, but the DCO speeds up, thanks to its strict timetable requirements.”
Read the Practice & Law section in this week’s Estates Gazette to get the full story on the potential consent process for Britain’s next runway.
