Gatwick expansion green light: a disaster for communities

22nd September, 2025

On 21 September 2025, Rt Hon Heidi Alexander MP, Secretary of State for Transport, approved expansion at Gatwick Airport. AEF says that the decision puts the Government’s legally binding climate goals at risk and will bring more noise and misery to local communities.

The Government’s stance on airport capacity is at odds with the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendation to refuse permission on environmental grounds, and the recommendations of its statutory climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC). In its Seventh Carbon Budget advice, published in February, the CCC painted a clear picture for the future direction of air travel: demand for UK air travel will need to stay at around today’s level for the next decade to allow decarbonising technologies to develop and scale. 

The CCC argues that passenger numbers should grow no more than 2% by 2035. Today’s approved expansion vastly exceeds that growth, equalling an extra 29m passengers – or another 100,000 flights – a year. Taken together with April’s announcement that Luton will also increase by 14m passengers a year, this represents roughly a 14% growth on 2024 passenger levels. 

This expansion will lead to a 14% growth in passenger numbers, against the advice of the Climate Change Committee

Instead of adhering to the CCC’s advice, the Government seems to be sleep-walking into the irresponsible and unjustifiable decision to let UK airports expand beyond what is environmentally safe. 

Furthermore, the decision to expand Gatwick goes against the current planning system, with the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS), published in 2018, supposedly the foundational guiding document on airport capacity across the UK. This document endorsed a 3rd runway at Heathrow Airport, and therefore, the “demonstration of need” case for Gatwick under the current ANPS planning system does not seem to have been established. An FOI request filed by AEF in 2024 revealed that if Heathrow Airport expansion goes ahead, the demand case for Gatwick would collapse. 

The news comes as the results of an Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) cross-party investigation into whether airport expansion is compatible with the UK’s environmental goals are expected imminently. This includes looking at the failure to scale sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) to a level that effectively offsets aviation emissions. There is currently no credible pathway to decarbonise flying in the near-term.

Allowing further expansion before we have an answer on how to reduce the sector’s climate impacts is an unacceptable gamble.

Tim Johnson, director of AEF says,

“This decision to allow Gatwick expansion to go ahead will bring misery to communities living around the airport through increased noise and air pollution. It goes against the environmental recommendations of the government’s own planning inspector. With just a few weeks to go ahead of the government’s expected response on how to deliver our legally binding sixth carbon budget, there is no guarantee at all that adding almost another 200 flights a day to our congested skies will do anything other than increase emissions – 2024 saw the highest ever level of international aviation emissions in the UK and it really is magical thinking to argue that Gatwick expansion will not hugely exacerbate this trend.”