The longest airport hold-up

It sparked the longest planning inquiry in history and has been one of the most bitterly contested issues in London for years. Almost a decade after the £2.25 billion project was proposed, and eight years after the planning application was made, "T5" was expected to be approved by Transport Secretary Stephen Byers today.

The ruling on a fifth terminal at Heathrow has polarised Londoners into green campaigners and business groups, anti-aircraft protesters under the flight path and executives who want the best air links possible.

Such was the level of public interest that the inquiry, which began in 1995, saw some 35,000 people register their support for the project and 21,000 oppose it. The inquiry lasted 525 days, heard 30 million words from 700 witnesses and produced 80,000 transcript pages of evidence. It cost £80 million and lawyers were paid up to £2,000 a day, with half the cost met by the taxpayer. After it ended in March, 1999, planning inspector Roy Vandermeer QC spent almost two years writing a 600-page report that Department of Transport officials have been examining since December.

Despite all the time and money involved, today's decision has been regarded as a foregone conclusion.

David Learmount, the respected operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, said the Government would have " ridden roughshod" over the report even if it had gone against the terminal. He believes ministers had no option but to accept that airport capacity in the South-East will run out in eight years and that Heathrow is just too important to the national economy. The length of the ruling reflects what happens when the opposing forces of environmental and business interests meet a cumbersome and inflexible planning procedure.

What London is getting in Terminal Five is a 600-acre terminal with two satellites, parking and hotel accommodation. It will be accessed by a spur road off the M25 and a planned extension of the Heathrow Express.

Some 63 million people pass through Heathrow's existing four terminals, originally designed to handle 55 million. Terminal Five would raise the capacity to 80-85 million. Building the massive glass and steel edifice will take 10 years with the first phase, the main terminal and first satellite, due to be completed by 2007. Some 6,000 construction workers will be involved in building a scheme that BAA says will safeguard 10,000 jobs and create a further 6,500.

Heathrow is already London's biggest single centre of work, employing 68,000 people directly and creating another 40,000 jobs in the surrounding area.

However, if opponents get their way there is still a chance the scheme will be blocked. Local residents and environmentalists argue they still have a case.

They claim that projected increases in air traffic and passenger numbers presented to the four-year hearing have already been shown to be far too low, rendering the findings meaningless. With a £100,000 fighting fund they plan to mount a High Court challenge.

Planes fly into Heathrow every 90 seconds of the day. John Stewart, chairman of campaign group Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise, said: "The prospect of yet more misery from Heathrow is just too much to contemplate.

"We'd be looking at more planes in already overcrowded skies, more noise, more pollution, and more traffic jams."

Such a drawn-out, time-wasting public inquiry should, in theory, never be seen again.

Housing Minister Lord Falconer announced plans last month to speed up the planning system and avoid a repeat of the T5 debacle. He argues the current "obscure, slow and inconsistent" process will be ended by taking the decision-making on major road and airports out of the hands of local councillors and handing it to MPs.