Heathrow airport's top official has urged the government to approve its Covid-19 testing regime to enable more travel, as the airport reported 1.4 million passengers in August, less than one-fifth of its normal traffic for the peak summer month. Heathrow's chief executive John Holland-Kaye said, “It has really been killed by the quarantine ... What we have seen is that when people can fly, they will. Other countries – even Jersey, have introduced testing, very successfully. We don't understand why the government doesn't do similar things, not just to support aviation but all the businesses that depend on it.”
He said while Heathrow was “as secure as any business in aviation can be”, it was “hurting”, with losses of £1.1bn in the first half of 2020. Holland-Kaye said, “The government needs us to be able to come out fighting from this crisis and get the economy kickstarted. But we've seen no support at all from the government.”
He defended issuing 188 notices to unions, threatening to put thousands of long-serving staff on inferior contracts, after four months of talks failed to reach any conclusion. “Given the lack of passengers, we have to do something and that is the least worst option. We are such a big part of the local economy, if we have large-scale redundancies that would have a similar impact to what we saw with mining towns back in the 1980s, and we want to do everything we can to avoid that.”
Holland-Kaye suggested British Airways could fail and that “no one was immune. Alitalia went bust, and now if you want to get to Italy on a long-haul route you mainly have to fly via Germany. That could happen in the UK, and would destroy any hope of a global Britain you may have.”
He added: “We don’t need bailouts, we just need a sensible testing regime. If we don’t take steps to open with testing we will see UK airports and airlines going bust – and once we’ve lost that capacity we will never get it back.”
