The government’s Airports Commission has been branded “biased” in an attack by London mayor Boris Johnson.
Johnson, who supports the creation of runways for the southeast at a new hub in in the Thames estuary, claims the commission’s interim report favours expansion of Heathrow and Gatwick.
The commission, led by Sir Howard Davies, last month shortlisted two options for building a third runway at Heathrow and proposals for a second runway at Gatwick.
The mayor’s ‘Boris Island’ proposal – a four-runway airport on the Isle of Grain in Kent – will be investigated further before the commission decides whether to add it to the shortlist in the autumn ahead of a final decision in 2015.
But Johnson, quoted by the Sunday Times, claimed the interim report is “biased” towards the two existing London airports.
He said: “We’ve valiantly attempted to follow the gloopy, tangled and quite labyrinthine path to the conclusions contained within the interim report; but we’ve yet to locate the logic behind a set of recommendations that are to some extent severed from the evidence compiled by the commission.”
The commission defended its work as “thorough, comprehensive and transparent”.