Bristol Airport expansion back on after successful planning appeal

Bristol Airport’s expansion plans have been given the green light following a planning appeal.Plans to expand the airport to cater for an additional 2M passengers a year were knocked back by North Somerset Council in February 2020. The airport then appealed to the Planning Inspectorate to overturn the decision, with the inquiry drawing to a close in October last year.The Planning Inspectorate has now said it will allow the expansion to proceed.This will lift the cap on Bristol Airport’s capacity from 10M to 12M passengers a year and enables additional investment, including new upgrades to the terminal building, parking facilities, and public transport links.Bristol Airport chief executive Dave Lees said the airport welcomes the decision.Expanded capacity will add 800 jobs at Bristol Airport and up to a further 5,000 regionally. The airport has an existing plan in place to ensure that local residents are offered future job opportunities and a fund will be created to help support those facing barriers to employment, transitioning people in low paid work into careers at Bristol Airport.The expansion will allow the airport to explore new direct links to Europe and further afield, including the Middle East and North America. As well as providing economic links for the region, new routes will remove some of the 8M car journeys made from the South West to London airports that were made each year before the pandemic.Bristol Airport put sustainability at the heart of its expansion proposals and will now push ahead with its multi-million-pound plans for net zero operations by 2030.Davies said the council is considering whether there are any ground for challenge.The council’s barrister Reuben Taylor has also previously described the plans as unacceptable and unlawful.Legal battles have marred expansion plans at Heathrow, Leeds Bradford, Southampton and Stansted Airport in the last year alone.Last month research from the New Economics Foundation revealed that emission clean up costs from departing flights at the eight airport expansions underway across the UK have more than doubled to £73.6bn.It comes after the government committed itself to achieving net zero within the aviation sector in its recently-published Transport Decarbonisation Plan.While the majority of pledges around aviation centre on developments in hydrogen planes and cleaner fuels, the Jet Zero document published alongside the Transport Decarbonisation Plan does make mention of airport expansions.In fact, in the appendix it states that “expansion of any airport must meet its climate change obligations to be able to proceed”.However, it stops short of committing to the CCC’s advice that any airport expansion should be offset by reducing flights elsewhere.