Operators not tax payers should pay for airport policing

03/07
16 January 2007

Airport operators should pay the full cost of policing the UK’s major airports, whether or not they are required to do so under current legislation.

This was the unanimous view of police authorities and police forces responsible for providing police services at the nine ‘designated’ airports in England and Scotland, which met together for the first time today to look at ways to recover more fully airport policing costs.

Under the Civil Aviation Act 1982, nine designated airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Glasgow, are required to contribute to policing costs.

But the lack of a national agreement has meant it has been increasingly difficult to recover what police consider to be a fair proportion of the costs from airport operators, the biggest being BAA which owns six of the nine designated airports.

BAA is currently in negotiations with the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Metropolitan Police Service over the recovery of a greater proportion of the costs of policing Heathrow, which has a working population of 48,000 and caters for 63 million passengers a year.

Richard Barnes, MPA member who chaired the meeting, said:

“We are still operating under a funding arrangement worked out back in the early 1970s. We are now living in a completely different world with far greater threat levels, and we need to come up with a national strategy for policing our airports and recovering in full the costs involved. Shareholders and operators should pay the costs, not tax payers.

“Only nine airports are currently required to contribute to policing costs, but there are now 16 airports that have more than two million passengers a year, and a number of non-designated airports are now larger and busier than several which are designated. This is totally unsatisfactory and needs to be challenged.

“It is now time for commercial operators, who in some cases are making huge profits, to pay their fair chare of the cost of policing airports.”

A further meeting will be held later in the year to devise a common approach to formulate local police/airport operating agreements.

Notes to editors

1. Nine airports are currently designated: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Birmingham, Manchester, Prestwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Police authorities and police boards from all of these areas were represented at the meeting today, 16 January.

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