On Wednesday the 29th of July, we attended the monthly Moor Park business networking breakfast. This breakfast meeting is a great opportunity for local businesses to network with and get to hear about other local businesses; this meeting also gives each business an opportunity to speak on what each business has been up to and what the other businesses can do to help them which can be a great advantage for these businesses. It is hosted in the most beautiful 18th-century Palladian mansion with grand decorative art lining the walls of the main hall.

This meeting had guest speaker Parmjit Dhanda, who is the executive director of BackHeathrow, who spoke on the building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport.

Lots of information about the project was shared with us, for example, it will be privately funded by Heathrow Airport using private shareholder investments. However the money from that (£49 billion) will need to be paid 100% by the users of Heathrow Airport. In the short term, this could likely lead to an increase in price of tickets since they would be charging each airline more and the airlines will put that increase of price onto their customers, which will increase the price of package holidays from Heathrow and shipping via Heathrow. However whether the prices drop or not depends on if the runway can trigger competitive ticket price wars.

There are both positives and negatives of this project going ahead, it has a lot of economic benefits and a lot of environmental concerns, but Heathrow does have plans to solve most of the objections they’re facing with offers of 125% of each house’s current sale price to each home they need and 850 homes in the area are predicted to be affected. Many subjects are under consideration including net zero, wildlife sustainablity and potential revenue opportunities.

To learn more about BackHeathrow go to https://www.backheathrow.org/

To learn more about the third runway in general go to https://www.heathrow.com/expansion/about-expansion

Overall, the Moor Park breakfast meetings are a great opportunity for local businesses to meet with and get help from other local businesses and is a great place to learn from various guest speakers.