Politician calls for public inquiry

2:28pm Thursday 10th April 2008

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AN INDEPENDENT public inquiry has been called for by a local politician regarding the recent consultation into the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

The action by John McDonnell MP for Hayes and Harlington has come after MPs slammed the Government in last week's House of Commons debate.

The Department of Transport (DfT) has been accused of "fixing" data in the consultation.

It has emerged the DfT received 70,000 responses to the consultation but Jim Fitzpatrick the aviation minister had previously only admitted to 18,000.

Mr McDonnell has put down an Early Day Motion calling for a halt on any decision on a third runway and sixth terminal until the inquiry into the consultation process has been set up and reported back.

He said: "For many people out there, the message that comes across loudly is that this place is becoming good enough only for climbing on the roof and hanging their banners, and useful for nothing else."

David Stewart, spokesman for the DfT, said: "Before the debate in parliament we never quoted a figure and the 70,000 mentioned by Jim Fitzpatrick was the first released.

"Somewhere in the press it was published that 18,000 responses were received but that never came from us."

He added: "There was a lot of preparatory work done before the start of the consultation into expansion of Heathrow Airport.

"Every piece of information that was relevant to the consultation was publicly made available." Chaos loomed for the airport operator following the opening of the exclusive £4.3bn British Airways Terminal 5 on March 27, prompting campaigners and politicians to question the reliability of further expansion.

In just one week around 400 flights were cancelled and a backlog of around 20,000 bags built up due to technical problems at check-in. Last week, John Randall, MP for Uxbridge, said that although he understood there may have been teething problems at a new terminal, he thought it sent a bad message out.

He told the Hillingdon Times: "The people who are supposed to be coming forward with proposals for the third runway are BAA and I think this raises serious concerns about whether they should be doing it.

"I think this casts a huge shadow over the whole operation."