Airports Commission

The Airports Commission was an independent commission established in September 2012 by the Government of the United Kingdom to consider how the UK can “maintain its status as an international hub for aviation and immediate actions to improve the use of existing runway capacity in the next 5 years”. Alongside the proposal to build HS2, the question of how to make best use of and expand airport capacity has become the UK's most significant infrastructure issue over the last few years.

The five person commission, which was chaired by the economist Sir Howard Davies and reported to the Department for Transport (DfT), produced an Interim Report in December 2013 and delivered a Final Report in July 2015.

London, with six commercial airports in its metropolitan area, has the world’s busiest airports system. However the question of how to expand the capacity of the system to cope with growing air travel demand is an issue that successive governments have failed to address since the 1950s. A previous commission – the Commission on the Third London Airport chaired by Eustace Roskill – sat between 1968 and 1971 and recommended that a site at Cublington in Buckinghamshire (to the north west of London) should be developed as London’s third airport. A member of the commission, Colin Buchanan, wrote a dissenting report and recommended that an airport should be developed at Foulness (later known as Maplin Sands). The Government accepted Buchanan’s report and an Act of Parliament was passed – the Maplin Development Act 1973 – that paved the way for a Thames Estuary Airport at Maplin. However the project was cancelled in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and the existing airport at Stansted (which was not shortlisted by the Roskill Commission) was subsequently developed as London’s third airport.

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