Campaigners lost their fight against a second runway at Gatwick on Tuesday. Within hours, the government was talking about Heathrow.
The Court of Appeal refused them permission to appeal against a High Court ruling in June that had already dismissed the case. Gatwick can now bring its spare runway into full use from 2030.
Gatwick is thirty miles away and none of its planes come over Putney. What matters here is a sentence the Department for Transport added to its own announcement: any expansion project, and it named a third runway at Heathrow, will still have to meet strict conditions on air quality, carbon emissions and noise.
Nobody had to mention Heathrow in a press release about Gatwick. The department did it anyway, four weeks before its own Heathrow consultation closes.
The government is consulting on the rules a third runway at Heathrow would be judged against. Anyone can respond, and you do not have to answer every question.
Takes about five minutes. You pick the points you care about; the tool writes them up against the consultation’s own questions.
If your instinct is that all this is settled and there is no point saying anything, the government has quietly told you otherwise.
In its own consultation papers it says it will give greater weight to responses built on argument and evidence than to simple statements of support or opposition, and greater weight again to responses that point at particular sections of the draft. It also says artificial intelligence may be used to analyse what comes in.
A thousand identical objections is one objection. A hundred different ones, each naming a different problem, is a hundred.
Responses close at 11.59pm on 1 September. That is four weeks away.
What actually happened at Gatwick
Gatwick has had two strips of tarmac for decades, and has only ever used one for normal flying. The other sits about 200 metres away as a standby, used when the main runway closes for repairs or after an incident. It is too close to be used at the same time, because international safety rules set a minimum gap of 210 metres between two runways in simultaneous use, and the gap at Gatwick is 198.
The project moves that standby runway 12 metres north. That is enough to clear the safety threshold, so both can work at once. Smaller single-aisle planes, the ones that fly to Europe, take off from the repositioned runway, and everything else uses the main one.
This is why people argue about whether it counts as a second runway. It is not new tarmac in a field. It is an existing runway promoted from spare to full time. The effect is the same either way: around 100,000 more flights a year, and passenger numbers forecast to rise from roughly 45 million to 75 million by the late 2030s. The airport is paying the £2.2bn itself.
The Transport Secretary approved the scheme last September. Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions, and Peter Barclay, a local resident who chairs the Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign, took the decision to court, arguing chiefly that ministers had not properly assessed what the extra flights would do to carbon emissions. Barclay said afterwards that they were "very disappointed with the Court's decision" and had taken it as far as they could.
Two things follow from that, and only one of them is about aeroplanes.
The first is the argument. Those fighting Gatwick ran the climate case, with lawyers, in front of judges, and lost. That case is also central to the opposition to Heathrow. It does not follow that it would lose again, because it is a different scheme with different evidence, and the Heathrow fight is at an earlier stage, where the policy is still being written rather than applied. But the courts have just declined to stop an airport expanding on climate grounds, and everyone involved knows it.
The second is the timetable. The government wants its Heathrow planning rules signed off by the end of this year. An application would follow by the end of 2027, and a final decision in the first half of 2029. The consultation running now is not a vote on whether the runway gets built. It is the last chance to shape the rules the runway will be judged against, and those rules are being written to be hard to argue with later.
You have four weeks. The consultation on the Heathrow rules closes at 11.59pm on 1 September. Build a response in about five minutes ↓
What Putney stands to lose
At the moment Heathrow's two runways take turns, switching at 3pm, so anyone under the flight path gets a predictable break of around nine hours a day from planes directly overhead. Paragraph 5.46 of the draft accepts that this will shrink. The Putney Society, which has read the document closely, puts the loss at roughly half.
The draft also accepts that while some areas will get quieter, others will get louder, without saying which. That is because the flight paths have not been drawn. They will not be settled until around 2028, after the rules have been signed off. Southfields, West Hill and Roehampton, which get comparatively little aircraft noise today, could find themselves under a regular approach for the first time, and nobody can currently tell them whether they will.
Two other changes matter more than they sound. The draft labels Heathrow expansion Critical National Growth Infrastructure, and states that a presumption in favour will apply and that residual impacts are unlikely to outweigh the need. That settles the balance in advance of the argument.
And the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 removed the right communities previously had to be consulted before Heathrow submits a planning application. In its place is an expectation of engagement that carries no legal force.
So what counts, in a response? Not length, and not anger. The government has said what it weighs: argument, evidence, and pointing at the specific parts of the draft you disagree with.
The rest is your own experience, and it is the part nobody else can write. What time the planes wake you. What you cannot do in the garden when the landings switch. Which park has been spoiled. That is evidence, and it is the kind the department has not got.
Putney's MP and the No 3rd Runway Coalition have both published guides to responding, and both argue for objecting. The tool below does something different. It lets you pick the points you actually care about, including agreeing with the government, and turns them into a response written against the consultation's own questions, ready to paste in. It takes about five minutes, and nothing you type reaches us.
Build your response to the Heathrow consultation
Tick the things that actually concern you. We'll turn them into a response written against the consultation's own numbered questions, ready to paste in, each section headed with the question it answers. Nothing you type here reaches us or anyone else — it stays in your browser.
You do not need to answer every question for your response to count. Pick the ones that matter most to you — the government has said it gives more weight to argument and evidence than to expressions of support or opposition, so three well-made points beat fifteen ticked boxes.
One or two sentences about your own experience carries more weight than anything we can write for you. What time do the planes wake you? What can't you do in your garden? Which park has it spoiled? What has changed?
Tick at least one concern above and your response will appear here.
How the form works. Each question sits on its own page. You pick an option from Strongly agree to Don’t know, and then a following page gives you a box headed “Explain your answer”. The scale is yours to answer as you see fit; the text below is for the explain box. Each section of your response is headed with the page it belongs to.
How to send it. The easiest route is the government's online form — each section of your response is headed with the page it belongs to. You can also email the whole thing to henpsconsultation@dft.gov.uk, or post it to the Airports National Policy Statement Review Team, Great Minster House, 33 Horseferry Road, London SW1P 4DR. Responses must arrive by 11:59pm on Tuesday 1 September 2026. Email responses get an acknowledgement within about 15 minutes — check your spam folder if one doesn't arrive.
We are not the only guide. Putney's MP and the No 3rd Runway Coalition have both published their own response guides, and both argue for objecting. This tool lets you say what you actually think, including agreeing with the government. Every word above is editable, and you should edit it — it exists to save you the blank page, not to write your response for you.
Responded? We'd like to know how many people in SW15 did — drop us a line at postbox@putney.news. Something not working?
