Birmingham International Airport

When Birmingham Airport published its Master Plan it proposed to almost treble the number of passengers, from 9.2 million per year in 2006 to 27.2 million by 2030.

The Master Plan included proposals to extend the existing runway into the Green Belt south of the A45 and a planning application has been submitted to Solihull Council. You can download a copy of CPRE’s response.

We remain unconvinced that the case for an extension of the existing runway outweighs the environmental drawbacks of the proposal and web remain concerned about the proposal’s impact on the Green Belt, the countryside and the environment generally.

In December 2009 Solihull Council finally granted permission with a large number of planning conditions and agreements. No work has started and it remains to be seen if a scaled-down version of a runway extension, revealed in Sept 2010, is able to be financed. This will still require Solihull and Birmingham Councils to find a road diversion costing £32 million.

On the other hand we welcome the fact that the Master Plan has delayed the proposal to build a new second runway until after 2030, although it has not abandoned it completely which means that blight continues on nearby residential and other property.

While CPRE accepts that Birmingham Airport should remain the main airport for the region we are not convinced that a second runway will ever be needed or is desirable given the impact of aviation on carbon emissions. Anyway, the existing runway still has a great deal of spare capacity.

We are also concerned that far too few people come to the airport by public transport, increasing congestion on our roads. We welcome a commitment by the airport to increase the share of people reaching the airport by public transport to 30% by 2020, although we are concerned that the achievement of this figure would include people using courtesy buses from off-site car parks close the airport who will have actually travelled mostly by car.

Even with public transport improvements, the scale of the proposed expansion means that a much larger number of people would be travelling by car to and from the airport than do so now. This is exacerbated by the volume of parking likely to be proposed, and its location close to the airport.

The airport’s proposals for improving access to the M42 are unclear and we remain concerned about increased road and rail congestion resulting from airport expansion.

23.09.10