Justine Greening: Sham consultation is deeply reckless

When I first tabled Parliamentary Questions in May last year on the environmental impact of Heathrow expansion, I could never have guessed I would uncover quite such an unhealthily close relationship between the Department for Transport and BAA.

Rarely has an issue galvanised my constituents so much: a recent public meeting attracted 700 people. For my part of London, the expansion will mean all-day flights, every day.

Answers to questions I tabled told me that no environmental data was available. But BAA was reported as saying that environmental modelling for the proposed third runway was "very encouraging". I put in a Freedom of Information request. I have still not been able to get that detailed environmental modelling that led BAA and the aviation minister to tell us that we can somehow add the equivalent of Gatwick on to Heathrow without making it noisier or the air quality worse.

But I have been given emails and minutes of various meetings showing how BAA and DfT officials worked hand-inhand. Much of the content has been carefully blacked out. It does, however, give a clear hint of the spirit in which they worked. One meeting minute from November 2006 says "(Blanked name) raised the question of how certain we needed to be by the time of consultation that AQ (air quality) limits could be met." What was the answer? That's blanked out too. But that this question was even raised is worrying: the Government insisted, when it launched its Air Transport White Paper, that Heathrow expansion could only go ahead if "stringent" environmental conditions were met.

The documents I have seen show a team working to find a way of getting around the environmental issues. One official involved reportedly called it "reverse engineering". They knew exactly what results they wanted and fixed the inputs to get there. In practice, that seems to have meant changing assumptions about how noisy or polluting planes would be in order to meet environmental conditions. Meanwhile "surface access" - how the extra 40 million passengers getting to and from Heathrow might affect congestion - has been set aside.

These environmental problems got no mention in the consultation document that the public was asked to respond to. Similarly, residents would never have guessed that the C02 emissions estimates excluded nearly half the extra 200,000 flights because they would be international arrivals.

The cost of getting these calculations wrong is serious: the Environment Agency's submission to the consultation warned of increased mortality rates around the airport. Yet remarkably, there has been no assessment of the likely public health impact by the DfT. This is deeply reckless.

We cannot make an objective assessment of Heathrow expansion with fiddled figures. It is not just about the environment and quality of life: it is also about our trust in government. The Government's approach to this whole process has been deeply dishonest. If, after this sham of a consultation, ministers push ahead, they should not be surprised if residents ask just who this government is there to serve - because it doesn' t seem to be Londoners.