Tim Leunig: The best solution for business and for Londoners is a quieter Heathrow with more western runways

Tim Leunig is the Chief Economist of CentreForum. Follow Tim on Twitter.

All parties get themselves into tangles at one time or another, and the Conservative party has got itself in a tangle over aviation. Most Conservatives instinctively favour airport expansion. The market supports it, business supports it, and most people expect the Conservatives to support it at the next election.

But Zac, Justine and Boris have a point. Heathrow has a noise problem. That is why Boris – helped along by Foster + Partners – has come up with a new plan for an airport in Cliffe. It would be quieter, no doubt about that.

But it is also in the wrong place for business. A quarter of business travellers using Heathrow get to the airport within 30 minutes. That would be impossible at Fosters’ proposed airport, unless you live at St Pancras station, or the Medway towns. An inaccessible airport just doesn’t work – as Montreal Mirabel so clearly demonstrates. That is why Willie Walsh and other airlines prefer to stay at Heathrow. It is an airport that works for business.

So what we need is a bigger, quieter Heathrow. Bigger means four runways. Every major city has a four runway airport: Paris, New York, Madrid. Boris is right: that is what London needs.

Thankfully it proves to be easier to design a quieter, four runway airport than perhaps we first thought. The simplest way to reduce noise is to land planes further to the west. Put simply, more people live east of Heathrow than west of Heathrow. That is why HACAN, the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise, have campaigned for planes to land a little further west for years. A larger, quieter Heathrow is based around replacing the current two runways with four new ones, located to the west of the current runways, over the M25 and Wraysbury reservoir.

Tim Leunig: How to cut the cost of railways and keep fares down

Tim Montgomerie: "Yesterday evening on Twitter I asked what Tory MPs who were against train fare increases wanted instead. Did they prefer higher taxes, more borrowing or reduced investment in the railways? Tim Leunig, chief economist at CentreForum and a reader in economic history at LSE, got in touch to answer my question. He proposes a massive rail rationalisation programme. You can follow Tim on Twitter."

Too many decisions about trains are made by engineers or people who like trains (e.g. Andrew Adonis). Trains get you from A to B, nothing more. They are well-suited to dense linear journeys, such as commuting or journeys between large cities. They are ill-suited to heterogeneous journeys, for which cars are more appropriate.

The vast majority of well-used rail journeys are London commuter or airport journeys. These account for all of the top 20 journeys by passenger numbers (Source: ATOC data, derived from LENNON). Policy should concentrate on these journeys – particularly as some are slower than in the 1950s.

Tim Leunig: The real losers of Cameron's housing benefit plans are the middle aged

Tim Leunig is chief economist at CentreForum, the liberal think tank, and a reader in economic history at LSE.

The Conservative Party did not win a majority of the vote or a majority of the seats at the last election. Despite the meltdown of support for the Liberal Democrats, and despite Ed Miliband’s low personal standing, the polls suggest that the Conservatives are not on course to win a majority at the next election. That simply isn’t good enough for a party that is ambitious for power.
 
Winning power means getting enthusiastic support from some, while not alienating too many others. As Tim Montgomerie has argued, Mrs Thatcher was successful in part because she picked her battles carefully and tolerated some things, such as the NHS, that did not match her ideals.
 
Cameron’s welfare speech is worth reading in full. It isn’t as brutal as his Mail on Sunday interview suggested yesterday, but it does suggest ending the right of young adults to claim housing benefits, unless they have been abused. Thankfully for young people, that loss of the right to benefits is matched by a new right: the right to live at home until you are 25, whatever your parents think about the idea. Cameron speech may look like an attack on the young, but the real losers are the middle aged.
 
Telling parents that they have a legal obligation to house their children until they are 25 does not look like a vote-winning strategy to me. The situation gets even murkier if the child gets married, and murkier still if they have children. Cameron does not appear to intend that parents would be obliged to house their son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws, let alone their offspring’s offspring. But he does talk in his speech about making parents financially responsible if their children leave home and claim benefits. I take this to mean that parents will be financially responsible not only for their children, but also for their grandchildren. That is a big ask.