The head of the Confederation of British Industry has identified UK airport expansion as one of the big policy battlegrounds of 2012.
Britain will be left behind the “premier league of nations” if the issue of extra runways is not addressed by the coalition government, he warned.
Speaking to The Times ahead of next week’s annual CBI conference, director general John Cridland said: “We desperately need a bold vision for the UK to have a world leading airport.
“The coalition agreement says no more runway capacity in the South East of England. I can’t cope with that.
“Surely if we want to stay in the premier league of the world economy, if we are going to access export markets of the world’s emerging economies, we have got to have a world-leading airport.”
He said the coalition had come up with a bold vision, thinking a generation ahead and committing tens of billions of pounds for a high speed railway from London to Birmingham and beyond.
But for ministers, airport expansion “is the issue that dare not speak its name,” Cridland said.
“People in the industry think it should be built on Heathrow because there is so much sunk capital and connectivity already there. That is why it would be quite radical to start somewhere else.
“There is a lot of thinking to do on this but there is no point doing that thinking if we are going to be banging our head against a brick wall. There is no point doing that detailed work if we haven’t won the battle on the principle. At the moment [the government] doesn’t even have the vision.”