The runway guessing game is never easy

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/30/the-runway-guessing-game-is-never-easy

Version 0 of 1.

Your story about our campaign against a third runway at Heathrow (Greenpeace airport stunt that stalled, 26 June) fails to mention a crucial fact. Importantly, while the land we bought in 2009 was on the site of the proposed runway, and therefore represented a legal block, the airport’s owners have now submitted a proposal to build the third runway in a different place, away from our plot. Therefore, even if we still owned the land, it would no longer do what it was originally designed to do.

It would have cost many thousands of pounds of our supporters’ money for us to maintain ownership of a piece of land away from BAA’s proposed new runway.

Contrary to what the article implies, when we launched Airplot we were straight with the beneficial owners who signed up. On the Airplot website we said: “If the third runway is cancelled we have promised to return the land to its previous owner and focus our efforts on other threats to the climate and the planet.”

By May 2010, both the prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg had given their word that a third runway at Heathrow would not go ahead, and the pledge was included in the coalition agreement. David Cameron couldn’t have been clearer about his commitment, saying: “The third runway at Heathrow is not going ahead, no ifs, no buts.” He even agreed to adopt a tree growing on Airplot, while Clegg had become one of the beneficial owners. We said at the time that the Airplot “probably won’t be needed now”.

As it is, the prospect of a new runway has returned, albeit in a different place, no longer over the village of Sipson where we bought the land.John SauvenExecutive director, Greenpeace UK

• Some of the suggestions for moving institutions out of London (This town ain’t big enough, G2, 30 June) may be fanciful, but surely the one that makes most sense is to move Heathrow to the east Midlands. Given a blank sheet of paper, who in their right mind would have planned to concentrate the UK’s main hub airports in one small corner of the country, relatively inaccessible to the majority of its inhabitants?Dr John DaviesKirkby in Cleveland, North Yorkshire

• Of all the alternative sites for a hub airport, I don’t think Nord-Pas de Calais has yet been suggested. High-speed rail links to London, Paris and Brussels already exist from the location, as do motorways east, south and west. Three capital cities are thus within about an hour and the terrain offers large areas of relatively flat farmland. Approach paths could be largely over water and no major cities would be overflown. Either Heathrow or Gatwick could be closed, the other remaining for local routes.

In anticipation of the xenophobic frisson that would arise from the idea that our major airport is on French, albeit one time English, soil, France might be persuaded to lease the several square kilometres of land to a multinational consortium, owned by Britain, France and Benelux.

Do I have a vested interest? Yes, I have a few shares in Eurotunnel.Alec LeggattFarnham, Surrey