Another summer of delayed flights, lost bags and moaning about Heathrow

From The Economist print edition

“NOT fit for purpose” is a curiously British phrase, hauled out only in extremis and as good a sign of despair as any. Until recently it was most often applied to the government and all its works: the Home Office, reform, the country's drug policy. Now it is being hurled at Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport.

Heathrow-bashing has long been an English pastime, but it has gained a new shrillness of late. The Daily Telegraph preposterously claimed that using Heathrow was more stressful than being mugged at knifepoint. Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, accused the airport of keeping people “as prisoner” in its “ghastly shopping mall”. Even the level-headed Kitty Ussher, the government minister responsible for promoting the City of London, gave warning that the “Heathrow hassle” could harm competitiveness. Heathrow seems to stumble from one disaster to another.

Strikes, inclement weather and security scares have all added to the frustrations of navigating its jammed corridors. Yet even when things are ostensibly running smoothly, it is, of all Europe's airports, the one most prone to delay: almost a third of its flights to European destinations leave late. Nor, despite acres of overpriced shops and slow-food joints, does Heathrow keep people happy while they wait, so it consistently ranks near the bottom in passenger surveys.

Although the Heathrow experience has never been particularly good, mainly because the airport crams 67m passengers a year through facilities designed for 45m, the crescendo of complaints suggests that it is going from bad to worse. That may not be right: security queues (which are meant to last no more than ten minutes at least 95% of the time) jumped in August of last year after the government tightened security in response to an alleged plot to blow up passenger jets over the Atlantic. They have fallen since then, the Civil Aviation Authority maintains, as staff have been added and extra security lanes opened. Terminal 3, the worst offender, now meets its target 94% of the time, from 78% in January—though some travellers will find this hard to believe.

So why, if Heathrow is improving, is it being rounded on now? Apart from the fact that August is a slow month for news, one reason is that it was bought last year by Grupo Ferrovial, a Spanish firm that borrowed to do the deal. Jingoists fuss that a key piece of national infrastructure was sold to a foreign firm. Those with a financial bent fret that badly needed investment in new runways and terminals may be further delayed if Heathrow's new owners, hit by rising interest rates, have to pinch pennies to repay their loans.

Another reason is that the airport's future is up for grabs right now. The Competition Commission is looking at whether's ownership of all three of London's main airports (in addition to Heathrow it owns Stansted, Gatwick and four others farther afield) has stifled competition. David Starkie, an economist and a longstanding critic of's market dominance, reckons that some of the denigration of Heathrow may be the result of “an orchestrated campaign to influence the commission's outcome” by those who want to see the firm broken up.

Airlines have an added reason to talk down Heathrow: another regulator, the CAA, is deciding the maximum landing fees that BAA can charge at Heathrow and Gatwick for the five years from 2008. Airport users have a clear incentive to lambast for misdirected investing, profiteering and managing its airports badly, for they want regulators to keep landing fees low. It seems increasingly likely that next summer the Competition Commission will propose breaking up and ending its stranglehold on London. But still more radical proposals are also being aired. The Town and Country Planning Association calls building Heathrow on the edge of London “one of the country's truly great planning catastrophes” and pleads for a new airport somewhere with more space. Yet this may be asking too much. If Britain's politicians were capable of such foresight, Heathrow, one imagines, would today be “fit for purpose”.