Heathrow's Priority: A Third Runway or Better Management?

Every few years, the same argument returns to Heathrow: build a third runway, and Britain will be reconnected to the world; delay it, and we’ll keep losing routes, jobs and prestige to Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Istanbul. The Chancellor has made expansion a signature growth policy. Heathrow’s owners are ready to spend. Airlines are broadly supportive.

But if you have flown through Terminal 2 or Terminal 5 recently — or, worse, tried to on the day the airport lost power in March 2025 and shut for almost 24 hours — a different question suggests itself. Is the biggest problem at Heathrow really that it doesn’t have enough runway? Or is it that the runways, terminals, security lines, baggage systems and back-up power it already has aren’t being run well enough?

Both problems are real. But they aren’t equally urgent, and they don’t deserve equal political attention.

The case for the third runway

The numbers on the “build it” side of the ledger are genuinely striking. Heathrow was designed decades ago for a fraction of the traffic it now handles. Its two runways operate at close to 99% capacity, higher than almost any other major hub in the world. That leaves no slack for weather, incidents or growth. A single delayed inbound in the morning can ripple through the whole day.

Meanwhile, competitors have moved on. Charles de Gaulle has four runways. Amsterdam Schiphol has six. Istanbul’s new airport was built with five and room for more. When airlines want to add a new intercontinental route from Europe, they increasingly don’t even ask Heathrow — there are no slots to give them. Regional UK airports have lost direct feeder flights, forcing more passengers through congested M4 traffic instead of a 45-minute domestic hop.

The economic case, in short, is not made up. The country’s only hub airport is running out of room, and doing nothing has costs of its own.

The case for fixing management first

And yet: Heathrow already has the highest per-passenger charges of any major airport on earth. It already collects fees that other hubs would blush at. What passengers get in return is a facility that is world-class in parts and startlingly fragile in others.

Consider the recent scorecard:

• A March 2025 fire at a single nearby substation shut the airport for almost a full day, cancelling 1,300+ flights and stranding 200,000+ passengers. The National Energy System Operator’s review afterwards was scathing about the lack of redundancy and the muddled response.
• The 2024 global IT outage hit Heathrow harder than most peers, exposing brittle systems and a slow recovery playbook.
• Border Force queues at peak times routinely stretch past an hour, an issue the airport blames on the Home Office and the Home Office blames on the airport.
• The baggage and security-training failures of 2022–23 — which ultimately cost the previous CEO his job — were pure operational meltdown, not a capacity problem.

You can build a third runway. You cannot build your way out of a management culture that keeps getting caught off-guard by predictable things.

Critics of expansion make a straightforward point: an airport that cannot keep the lights on for one bad afternoon should not be entrusted with the largest infrastructure programme in modern British aviation. If Heathrow spends the next 10 years distracted by planning inquiries, land purchases, M25 tunnels and legal challenges, the day-to-day passenger experience will not improve — it may well get worse.

Where the two arguments meet

It is tempting to treat this as an either/or, but honestly, it isn’t. Even if the third runway got planning consent tomorrow, it would not carry a single passenger before the mid-2030s. That is at least a decade in which the airport has to work with what it already has.

That is the crux of the priority question. In the near term — the next three to five years — a new runway does nothing for anyone. In that same window, better management could deliver measurable wins:

None of that requires an act of Parliament. It requires a management team, and a regulator, willing to be judged on operational KPIs rather than on capital-project milestones.

So what should the priority actually be?

Our view is unambiguous: better management first, expansion second — and the two must be sequenced, not merged.

That is not a “no” to the third runway. The long-term capacity case is credible, and blocking it forever would be a serious policy error. But there is a real risk that green-lighting expansion becomes a substitute for fixing the airport that exists today. Political attention is finite. If ministers, Heathrow’s board and the CAA spend the next five years arguing about DCOs, noise contours and carbon budgets, the operational problems will get less oxygen, not more.

None of those tests are punitive. They are the minimum a serious infrastructure country should ask before doubling down on its most complex airport. Get them right, and a third runway becomes an upgrade to an airport that already works. Skip them, and it becomes an expensive extension of the same problems, just spread over more concrete.

Taxi On The Go is a UK private-hire operator specialising in airport transfers to and from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City. We write on transport policy because our passengers live with the consequences of it every day. Views expressed here are the editorial team’s.