Heathrow’s third runway is a bottomless money pit. Stop it now | Simon Jenkins

Infrastructure sends politicians berserk. Propose more money for the health service or reopening youth clubs and frowns break out all round. Can we afford it? But shout infrastructure and cheers go up. The word suggests glamour, chest-beating and “growth”. Reason flies out of the window.

The saga of Heathrow’s third runway beggars belief. A foreign-owned private company wants to make more money out of its cramped west London investment. The airlines are sceptical and passengers will have to pay surcharges higher than any in Europe. Meanwhile fields lie empty round its rival, Gatwick, and capacity at London’s third airport, Stansted, is underused.

The third runway is a nightmare. The official price tag is now a staggering £49bn but the overall budget for Heathrow’s expansion and operating expenditure could soar beyond £100bn. An unknown proportion of this will fall on the taxpayer. The proposal has been debated for 20 years and the opening constantly postponed. A date of 2035 has now become 2039. I would not take bets on 2045.

Sixty years ago, the British government agreed it was totally inappropriate for crowded and polluted Heathrow to expand in densely populated west London. Nor could an expanded Gatwick meet demand. The debate was over where to locate a new third airport. Sites in the Thames estuary and at Cublington and Stansted were researched. Stansted won. It already had an RAF base and it would service the expected growth in demand from London’s growing eastern reaches. Stansted opened in 1991.

The Tories privatised London’s airports. This turned what should have been a planned expansion into a battleground of feuding rivals. Each airport became a matter not of orderly growth but of quick profits, self-serving airline slots and a shifting army of amateur officials. Commissions came and went, in the grip of overpaid lobbyists. A Heathrow runway proposed by businessman Surinder Arora within the existing airport curtilage was brushed aside as insufficiently bold. As for Stansted, it was taken over by Manchester airport and is now hardly mentioned as an alternative to a third runway.

Airport public relations endlessly suggests it is about “business” and therefore relevant to “growth”, as if it were part of Andy Burnham’s re-industrialisation of Britain. Heathrow claims its new runway will create 100,000 jobs. But fewer than 15% of air travellers claim to be “on business”, and whatever happened to video conferencing reducing the need for intensive business air travel? As for Heathrow’s claim to be Britain’s leading cargo airport – “a quarter of all UK trade by value” – that is based, ludicrously, on the value of the gold ingots that form roughly 60% of the goods it transports. What banks shifting bullion has to do with growth is unclear.

Heathrow now has eerie echoes of HS2. Even its upper cost limit of £100bn is much the same. Both are plagued by extravagant planning horizons and consultancy-driven budgets in which each contractor has a vested interest in cost inflation. A third similar project is Hinkley Point nuclear power station, its cost currently rising through £50bn. Both the railway and the power station have been savaged by the National Audit Office. These projects are widely considered political white elephants and years from completion. Few dare say so. Meanwhile we should note that a new general hospital costs £1bn, as would rebuilding 50 secondary schools.

Stupefying sums are here being channelled into London and the south of England. That they have been born of the age of Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” and Burnham’s tilt to the north is bizarre. This week, conference politicians have cited budgets with endless savings: half a million off student exchanges here, a billion off quangos there. Yet no one mentioned that every year for the next decade John Healey’s Treasury will blow about £7bn just to relieve overcrowding on trains from London to Birmingham. This is almost 70% of his total rail investment.

The fact is that big infrastructure is monumental and sexy. No one boasts about building a care home, rather a fancy train or a nuclear power plant. One of Parkinson’s laws states that, while tiny items of corporate spending are debated for hours, big ones go through on the nod. They are too big to check and easy to promote.

It is absurd for the government to spend the next two decades upheaving Heathrow and tearing apart the M4 corridor for the profit of a band of foreign investors, when a simple alternative lies in growing Gatwick and Stansted. This whole debate is about tourism, and tourists can surely suffer the mild inconvenience of using the other two venues, as was intended half a century ago.

The rest of us – politicians not least – should realise that this is serious money. There are serious uses to which it should be put.