Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he would wait for a consultation and hear from Londoners before deciding whether to support a third runway at Heathrow. The £33bn project, originally due to open in 2035, may not open before 2039, the airport says.
A third runway could raise Heathrow’s annual flight cap from 480,000 to 720,000, nearly 2,000 flights a day on average. The expansion is estimated to create 100,000 jobs, but would require demolishing hundreds of homes, diverting rivers and routing part of the M25 through a tunnel.
Heathrow hopes to secure planning permission by 2029 and open the runway within a decade, but says meeting the original timetable is increasingly difficult without steps to simplify planning. Environmental campaigners, local resident groups and London Mayor Sadiq Khan oppose the scheme; Unite and GMB support it. Heathrow says its polling shows growing community support, while the Department for Transport called the timeline “always ambitious”.
