Heathrow runway faces delay as court wants climate-change review

London Heathrow’s plan for a third runway faces further delays after environmental activists won an appeal over an expansion that Europe’s busiest airport says is needed to boost flights and allow it to compete with rival hubs.

Appeal court judges on Thursday overturned a May decision, and focused on the U.K. government’s commitments to its international environmental agreements. Judge Keith Lindblom said that the then-transport secretary acted “unlawfully when failing to consider climate change.”

The $20 billion expansion at the London airport was delayed for decades because of concerns about extra aircraft noise, increased pollution, the demolition of homes and the impact on already crowded roads. The decision risks causing further uncertainty to a project that was proposed in 2002, and poses a quandary for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who previously opposed the plan.

“Today’s landmark Heathrow judgment is a victory for Londoners and future generations,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said in a statement. “We face a climate emergency and I’m delighted that the Court of Appeal has recognized that the government cannot ignore its climate change responsibilities.”

A Heathrow spokesperson said it will seek to appeal to the Supreme Court, and added that any issues were “eminently fixable.”

The government won’t appeal the ruling, because any expansion would have to come from the private sector, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said on Twitter.

“Airport expansion is core to boosting global connectivity,” Shapps wrote. “We also take seriously our commitment to the environment.”

Shares of British Airways parent IAG SA, which were already falling because of the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, slumped further after the ruling. The stock was down 7.8% at 11:01 a.m. Shares of Heathrow’s biggest investor, Spanish infrastructure specialist Ferrovial SA, traded 2% lower in Madrid.

Thursday’s decision doesn’t rule out an eventual expansion, the judges said, but instead forces the government to review its so-called Airports National Policy Statement in light of climate-change legislation. Britain is a participant in the Paris Agreement, where almost 200 nations agreed to work toward dramatic reductions in fossil fuel pollution by the middle of the century.

“The Paris Agreement ought to have been taken into account by the Secretary of State in the preparation of the ANPS and an explanation given as to how it was taken into account, but it was not,” Lindblom said. “That, in our view, is legally fatal to the ANPS in its present form.”

Johnson’s spokesman, James Slack, told reporters Wednesday that the Heathrow runway “is a private sector project” while reiterating that it must show it can meet air-quality and noise obligations “in order to proceed.”

In 2015, Johnson promised to lie down before bulldozers to stop construction of the runway, but missed the 2018 Parliament vote that that kept expansion as part of a national policy statement. Being part of that policy plan would help to minimize further procedural logjams, with planning authorities confined to considering elements of the proposal rather than whether it should be built at all.

The airport operator has spent years trying to win permission of the expansion. Last year, it was only able to boost passenger numbers by 1% because of a shortage of slots.

On Wednesday, the airport’s chief executive officer, John Holland-Kaye, stepped up his defense of the runway, saying a government decision to block the project would amount to “financial suicide” and hamper U.K. efforts to boost trade after Brexit.

Holland-Kaye said an expanded Heathrow, opposed by campaigners and some politicians because of its environmental impact, is “essential for a global Britain.” Thwarting the plan will only benefit competing economies such as France, he said in an interview.

But environmental groups said the decision opens the way for challenges to construction and infrastructure projects that haven’t had proper environmental impact reviews.

“This ruling is an absolutely ground-breaking result for climate justice,” Will Rundle, head of legal at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “This judgment has exciting wider implications for keeping climate change at the heart of all planning decisions. It’s time for developers and public authorities to be held to account when it comes to the climate impactof their damaging developments.”