Getting Britain off the ground
Labour governments stand and fall on the power of the state to transform people’s lives. Unlike the right, we believe the state can be a force for good. It is this belief that drives our radicalism for reform when things aren’t working. At the moment, the state too often prevents prosperity, through the paralysis of veto points, excessive centralisation and the fact it lacks many of the capabilities needed to change the country. This makes state reform one of Labour’s essential tasks.
This is the first in a series of Labour Together papers, in collaboration with some of the country’s best experts, to provoke how we can reform the state. Every paper in this series starts with a hard problem and outlines the radical reforms that the government would need to pursue to solve them.
Using Heathrow as a symbolic example, this paper - co-authored with the Centre for British Progress - looks at how the state could move more quickly to get Britain building.
Summary
A runway is a several kilometre length of reinforced pavement. Building Heathrow’s first runway took around a year. It is everything else that now takes time.
This paper tries to answer a simple question: could the government speed the construction of Heathrow’s third runway to such an extent that flights take off before the next election?
This is not just about building a third runway. The Public Bill and special development order mechanisms we outline here could give ‘decision in principle’ consent to an array of infrastructure projects, with environmental offsets and consultation settled afterwards by the relevant ministers and departments. Parliament could confer this conditional, fast-track consent on entire classes of nationally significant infrastructure - electricity transmission, floating offshore wind, reservoirs, rail - dramatically speeding up the building process.
Labour’s cost of living strategy starts with some basic truths. More clean energy means cheaper bills. New transport links mean more people can get to higher paying jobs. More houses means fewer people sleeping rough on the streets. More airport capacity means cheaper holidays. Reducing the cost of essentials and the cost of luxuries; that is what the British public has been instructing politicians to do since 2022. We have to rip out the process that delays their ambitions.
This paper demonstrates that this approach is feasible for a third runway, if three constraints are tackled head on:
Regulatory drag and risk aversion. The Development Consent Order (DCO) process can take six years or more, with billions in investment turning on single veto points, making it rational for developers to spend enormous amounts of time mitigating every potential risk ex ante. A bespoke Heathrow Expansion Public Bill can compress the process for all consents into a single Parliamentary instrument and effectively eliminate the legal risk of judicial review, replacing it with a politically accountable process.
Political time-tabling. Using the Public Bill route, programmed for seven months, could deliver Royal Assent by early 2026. If ministers are prepared to override Standing Orders as the government did with Scunthorpe steelworks, the Bill could be enacted even faster.
Construction challenges with a long runway. Relocating the M25 makes a long runway nearly impossible within one Parliament. A short-haul runway (for domestic and European destinations) is feasible without moving the M25 and would free long-haul capacity on the main runways.
The strongest constraints on building a third runway are the regulatory process and the construction challenge of moving junction 15 on the M25 without seriously disrupting London’s traffic flows. We believe both of these can be addressed.
Building a third runway by the next election would be a significant and tangible achievement for this Government. It would demonstrate that Britain can build things, at scale and efficiently, in a way that delivers for ordinary families. Perhaps most importantly at a time when the global economy is increasingly closed, hostile and stagnant, this and other schemes like it will spark economic growth and confidence in Britain.