'Heathrow is a monster. It must be fed'

For a decade, John Stewart has fought the third runway, creating in the process one of the most formidable civil coalitions Britain has seen

John Vidal
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009

Next week, world crises permitting, No 10 will give formal permission for an application to be made to build a third runway at Heathrow airport. Environment groups will howl, the village of Sipson will prepare to be wiped off the map, and airport operator BAA and a few construction companies may crack open the champers at the prospect of the world's busiest international airport growing by as much as 50% to handle an extra 600 flights a day.
But one veteran transport campaigner will just hitch up his trousers and get on with scuppering the project he has been obsessed with for years.
John Stewart, 59, chairs Hacan Clearskies, which sounds like a Turkish cloudspotters' association but is actually one of Europe's largest aviation groups, made up of 5,000 paid-up members and nearly 60 resident and amenity groups from across London and the south-east. As Heathrow's only full-time, and paid, watchdog, he is credited with assembling over 10 years possibly the most formidable coalition ever formed against any single building project in Britain. Thanks largely to this mild Highlander, who has been marooned in London for 25 years and now lives alone, more than 20 local authorities representing 4 million people, six unions, the National Trust, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the WWF, 50 rebel Labour MPs and all the opposition political parties are now opposed to the expansion. In addition, the EU has expressed doubts that the development can meet pollution laws, the locals are furious and there has been tacit opposition in cabinet from climate change secretary Ed Miliband and environment secretary Hilary Benn.
The sheer imbalance between opponents and supporters of the plan is remarkable, says Stewart. "You have to ask yourself why so few people want a third runway? It is not logical at all." And yet it looks set to go ahead, because, he says, "Heathrow has become a mindset, a mantra for growth. In the eyes of the government it has become synonymous with growth without limits. Because the government has identified itself so strongly with the global economy and planes are seen as the workhorse of globalisation, Heathrow just has to keep growing. It's extraordinary that they are going ahead, but [Gordon] Brown has made up his mind. He is obsessed with the global economy and the fact that it is coming off the rails does not matter. Heathrow is a monster that must be fed."
Those who support the expansion, of course, see it very differently. The aviation industry predicts a £10bn a year boost to the economy from the runway, as well as better air quality and more jobs, and the Confederation of British Industry says the third runway will allow London to remain a global financial capital - although that was before the recession. Together, they claim to have "proven" that the noise and pollution limits will not be broken.
Stewart has no truck with the claims of the government and the aviation industry, which he says are misleading. This new runway won't just be a length of concrete, but a multibillion-pound project to effectively bolt a new airport on to Heathrow, he says. The intention is that the runway will handle up to 250,000 planes a year - more than Manchester and any other airport in Britain except Heathrow itself and Gatwick. Because it will be far from the existing terminals a sixth terminal will be needed, and because Heathrow is not big enough, 700 houses, mainly in the village of Sipson, will have to be demolished, along with the school, the church, the cemetery, the pubs, the restaurants - and, of course, the community itself. To top it all, the scheme is expected to generate an extra 20m car journeys a year and may only be possible with a giant rail terminal. The World Development Movement pressure group calculates that it will emit nearly as much carbon dioxide as Kenya.
"It is quite, quite mad," Stewart says. "It will completely blow away Britain's legally binding climate change reduction targets. I am driven - even obsessed - by it because I feel this whole thing is fundamentally wrong and a terrible mistake."
But he does not blame Brown, or the ministers who for the last 30 years have said they would stop Heathrow growing. "The whole history of Heathrow is one of deception," he says. It started with Harold Balfour, the aviation minister in the second world war, who admitted in his memoirs "deceiving" his cabinet colleagues into thinking the small aerodrome was needed as a military base.
That trend continued in modern times, Stewart says, when in 1979 the Terminal 4 planning inspector reported that the noise climate around Heathrow was "unacceptable in a civilised society". He recommended that it be built only if it was the last significant expansion of Heathrow. A year later, aviation minister Lord Trefargne agreed: "the government conclude that the idea of a fifth terminal ... should not be pursued. This effectively limits expansion," he said. The same year, the government agreed to limit the airport to 275,000 flights in and out of Heathrow a year. This was wholly ignored. By 1986 there were more than 300,000 flights. Terminal 5 opened in March last year.
Stewart also points to a BAA statement in 1998, in which it called on the government to rule out a third runway and reassured the community that it would not seek one, and to transport secretary Stephen Byers's pledge in 2003 for a limit of 480,000 flights a year. Within nine months of that the government was consulting on plans for the third runway which could bring flight numbers to over 700,000 a year.
"People living near Heathrow are very angry," Stewart says. "There is no question that the impact of the airport on people is now greater. The emails and letters we get from people who have lived near it for 30 years all say the sheer volume of planes is now driving them crazy. These are ordinary people who believed the ministerial promises and who, on the basis of those promises, decided to buy into the areas or to stay. Now they feel they have been misled. They get even more angry when they hear ministers saying noise is improving."
Stewart has made transport campaigning his life for 20 years but remains a David to the corporate and governmental Goliaths. He earns pitifully little but is rewarded by the policy changes he has forced - such as the near-abandonment of the Tory roadbuilding programme in the 90s - and the wide admiration of his peers who voted him Britain's "most influential environmental activist" last year. But he accepts he has paid a personal price and may no longer be the "nice" man who came to London in his youth.
"I have learned that you have to fight dirty and clever," he says. "The other side plays dirty and you have to match them. When I started 20 years ago I was pretty naive about the ways of the world and the way that the establishment worked. I realised you had to become a bit nastier."
It has been a lesson in British power. The problem, Stewart thinks, is not so much the ministers who come and go as the "wholly unreconstructed part of the Department for Transport" and civil servants who "shamelessly manipulate" the data. "They have decided the growth of airports is imperative to the nation. There is no doubt there has been deep collusion between the civil servants and the industry in the Heathrow decision. They are driving the politicians. I believe the DfT has consistently fed distorted information to ministers for years. I would put a lot of the blame on them."
He names names: "David Gray, the Department for Transport's Heathrow development project manager, and Jonathan Sharrock, another senior DfT official, are the two people in charge of the Heathrow project. They are both very clever and Gray is arrogant and they spend their time trying to get BAA permission to expand and find ways of keeping it within pollution limits. But I believe they do not give independent or neutral advice to ministers.
"For instance, they will start a document with a statement that aviation is 'critical to the economy'. That is taken as read but actually it is loaded. People read it a certain way. Equally with noise. They rig the figures, clearly. They give far too much weight to the noise of individual planes and not enough to the sheer number of them flying overhead so they are deliberately underestimating the level of noise that people hear. It's not quite lies but it is certainly misleading."
A DfT spokesman said: "This claim has been made before and is utter nonsense. DfT officials have provided objective, impartial and honest advice to ministers at all times on this issue.
"Our Heathrow data and modelling has been subject to careful scrutiny and review by a range of experts. The analytical process has been thorough and rigorous, and we have published nearly 1,000 pages of technical documents which report the assumptions and methodologies used and present the results for comment."
Stewart, however, quotes Labour MP Chris Mullin, who said of his time as aviation minister from 1999 to 2001: "I learned two things. First, that the demands of the aviation industry are insatiable. Second, that successive governments have usually given way to them."
Stewart's opponents are impressed. "He is a professional campaigner who understands the need to engage," said Steve Hardwick, who crossed swords with Stewart for years when he was BAA's communications director. "In earlier years he was anti the development but not anti-BAA. Later I felt he had been pulled by the younger, more aggressive campaigners."
Lord Soley, a former Labour MP and now campaign director for Future Heathrow, an alliance of trade unions and industry groups backing the expansion plan, is less kind: "He is seriously misguided, profoundly wrong - but to be fair, he listens."
One industry insider said: "Off the record, he is a very determined, single-minded, uncompromising bastard. But I genuinely like him."
Hacan does not organise direct action but Stewart predicts plenty in the next few years. "The runway project is dangerous for government. They face concerted and continual direct action and not just from climate change activists. Over the autumn hundreds of west London residents have been having direct action training with Seeds for Change and Plane Stupid. The breaking of the promises after Terminal 5 made people more radical and angry. There is a sizeable number of residents now who have now been radicalised and who are preparing to break the law and who will take direct action. They have nothing to lose."
On Monday, around 1,000 people are expected to "rush" one of the terminals and the police are on standby for people breaking the perimeter wire. Stewart is no stranger to the picket lines but has never been arrested. He chaired Alarm UK, the umbrella group of hundreds of communities opposed to Tory road-building plans in the 90s, fought the M11 extension in Wanstead, north London, at times from a chestnut tree, and was in front of the bulldozers at Twyford Down. He was one of only three people injuncted not to go near Heathrow in 2007 when 3,000 activists camped at the airport. "There does come a time when I am John Stewart the man and not the chair of Hacan. I will be there and will be proud to be there."
Now he's fed up with planes and has moved away from west London to Leytonstone, in the east of the capital. "I have lived with planes so long now. I am probably obsessed with them dangerously. I hadn't taken one in years, but recently I was sent a ticket to go to Siena to talk to people opposing a runway. Within 10 minutes of landing the Evening Standard had phoned and was running a piece in its diary column."
Now that the gloves are off for Heathrow's runway, Stewart is optimistic, believing that the climate change debate and European law will ensure that it is never built. "Heathrow on its own will scupper any government targets to cut CO2 emissions," he says.
"Yes, I have enemies. Definitely the DfT. They have now broken off all contact with us. I hope they feel threatened because we are going to get in their way in a way that has not been seen before. Then I suspect we will see them [use] heavier tactics."