Airport chief: Heathrow risked the fate of mining towns in the 1980s UK News

President Heathrow Airport She warned that her West London home of Hounslow risked becoming like a “mining town in the 1980s” with the collapse of air traffic, putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk.

Heathrow City CEO John Holland Kay urged the government to approve the Covid-19 testing system to enable more travel, as the airport reported 1.4 million passengers in August, less than a fifth of normal traffic at the height of the summer month.

“She was already killed before Quarantine And he said … what we’ve seen is that when people can fly, they do. “Other countries – even Jersey – have introduced the test with great success. We don’t understand why the government isn’t doing similar things, not just to support aviation but all the companies that rely on it.”

Holland Kay said that while Heathrow was “as safe as any aviation company can be,” it was “agonizing”, with losses of £ 1.1 billion in the first half of 2020. “The government needs us to be able to do so.” Fighting. From this crisis and the start of the economy. But we did not see any support whatsoever from the government. “

He defended the issuance of Article 188 notices to unions threatening Putting thousands of long-serving employees on low contractsAfter four months of talks, they failed to produce any results.

“Due to the small number of passengers we have to do something and this is the least bad option … we are a big part of the local economy, if we have Repetition at scale That will have a similar effect to what we saw in the mining towns in the 1980s, Holland Kaye said, and we want to do everything we can to avoid it.

An independent report by Oxford Economics for the Hounslow Board found that the drop in traffic at Heathrow threatened up to 43,000 jobs in the borough, and warned that the £ 200 million economy could be damaged causing “severe hardships for families and communities”.

Holland Cay suggested that British Airways might fail and that “no one is immune,” warning: “Alitalia has gone bankrupt, and now if you want to get to Italy on a long-haul road, you have to travel mainly through Germany. It could happen in the kingdom.” And will destroy any hope of a global Britain. “

“We don’t need bailouts, we just need a reasonable testing system. If we don’t take steps to start testing, we’ll see UK airports and airlines go bankrupt – and once we lose that capacity, we’ll never take it back.”

Heathrow has it Established facility with Swissport in Terminal 2 It can test up to 15,000 travelers a day with standard Covid PCR tests, and it has also tried three rapid tests. Holland Kay said one one that relied on microcomputed analysis of saliva took less than 20 seconds to yield a result and cost less than £ 10 per test.

He added: “The government can only decide that the test is good enough to allow people to enter the country, but this is a British company with technology that is potentially a world leader … If it can succeed, we must follow it quickly.”