Bristol Airport expansion plans sees battle lines drawn again as second phase revealed

Everything you need to know about Bristol Airport expansion – round 2

05:00, 08 Jul 2025Updated 06:56, 08 Jul 2025

Images of previous protests against the expansion of Bristol Airport(Image: Bristol Airport Action Network)

The battle lines are being drawn, protests planned at City Hall and the same arguments about economic boosts, the environment, climate change, transport, parking, noise and late-night activity. Bristol Airport wants to expand – again – and is again being opposed by a long list of people and organisations, from residents’ groups worried about traffic in their villages to environmentalists worried about climate change and the future of humankind.

For many, it feels like a restart of the huge battle over whether Bristol Airport should expand the first time around, which took place between 2017 and 2023. But this time, there could be key differences which may well mean the battle does not last as long, and also that those campaigning against the idea have an even tougher job this time in stopping it.

Bristol Airport has now published a ‘masterplan’ for this next phase of its expansion. It involves a longer runway, flights to North America and the Middle East, and significantly more flights and passengers through the terminal every day. Launching that masterplan, Dave Lees, the CEO of Bristol Airport, said: “We’re enormously pleased with the level of response to our draft master plan consultation and grateful for everyone who took the time to share their views.

“We’re continuing to see strong demand to travel to and from our region, with business travel surprisingly holding up since the pandemic and people wanting to connect with friends and family across Europe. More than 10 million people from our catchment continue to travel to fly from Heathrow and London airports every year.

“We’re confident we can capture a section of that demand and boost the economy of our region by providing direct connections to North America and the Middle East.,” he added.

Bristol Airport wants to expand again?

Anyone who has turned off the A38 towards the site in the past 18 months or so will know it feels like entering a building site rather than an airport. Most of the north side of the road to the terminal building is behind construction fences, as a new multi-storey car park and transport hub is created.

The work is still a fair distance off being finished, but back in November last year, bosses at Bristol Airport announced that they still didn’t think the airport would be big enough, or have enough flights, even when all the work is finished. With the backdrop of the building site showing the expansion it had finally secured permission for in 2023, the airport bosses launched plans to expand again.

When Bristol Airport talks about expansion, it is really focussing on the number of planes that are allowed to take off and land in any given calendar year. That’s measured in passenger numbers.

Until 2023, Bristol Airport had permission to have a maximum of nine million passengers every year, but after a lengthy battle, the airport won permission to increase that to 12 million. As the first expansion develops, that’s now up to more than ten million. Now, this latest expansion would take the number of passengers every year to 15 million.

That works out at an average of more than 41,000 every day – but the seasonal nature of air travel means it would be considerably higher than that during the summer, and less than that in the winter.

Expanding the airport to take 12 million passengers a year raised huge questions over the number of flights, the number of those flights landing late at night, and the noise those flights create – as well as the broader questions about the contribution of air travel towards greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, global warming and the climate emergency.

As well as the debate over what happens in the sky, there’s also the question of the impact of those extra millions of people getting to and from Bristol Airport. As part of being allowed to expand from nine to 12 million, the airport is creating a ‘transport hub’, but it still relies on traditional buses.

The vast majority of people drive to Bristol Airport, and the airport makes more money from car parking charges than any other single income stream.

What do campaigners say?

On Tuesday this week (July 8), Bristol City Council will hold a full council meeting and the ruling Green Party have put forward a motion which asks the council to formally oppose the expansion of Bristol Airport.

The Greens are just short of a majority in the council chamber, but it’s likely the motion will be approved, although it could be a close vote.

The motion has been put forward by Cllr Izzy Russell (Green, Ashley). Cllr Russell is Bristol’s youngest elected councillor, and knows the issue well. She grew up in a village in the Chew Valley just the other side of Bristol Airport, before coming to Bristol itself as a student.

“Last time the airport applied to expand there was widespread opposition, both politically and from residents, and this time is no different,” she said. “Bath and North East Somerset Council recently passed a motion to oppose expansion, and we hope to join them by passing this motion.

“Limiting airport expansion is not about penalising people who fly once or even twice a year. 63 per cent of the new passenger traffic seen over the past two decades has been caused by frequent and even ultra frequent flyers. This is the 3 per cent of the UK population that take nearly 30 per cent of all flights, while the number of UK residents not flying at all each year has increased in the same period,” she added.

Cllr Izzy Russell (Green, Ashley)(Image: Bristol Green Party)

“This simply isn’t fair. A few rich frequent flyers are emitting more and more emissions while the rest of us are here directly feeling the results of the climate crisis. What’s worse is that the Government is not making polluters pay their fair share. Anyone with a car has paid more in fuel duty the last time they filled up than the entire aviation industry ever has.

“And guilt-free flying is pie in the sky thinking. So-called sustainable aviation fuel makes up less than 3 per cent of total aviation fuel, and electric and hydrogen planes are not feasible anytime soon.

“So as well as opposing the expansion of Bristol Airport, this motion calls for air transport to be managed in an equitable way that is compatible with the wider social and environmental objectives of this Council and the Government’s legally binding net-zero targets,” she added.

Outside City Hall as councillors arrive, a demonstration is planned organised by BAAN – the Bristol Airport Action Network – a coalition of Bristol environmentalists and North Somerset local residents. Just a couple of years after ultimately losing the long battle to stop the first expansion, BAAN is starting a new one.

Their demonstrations were highly visual, but ultimately unsuccessful. They often involved dozens of protesters staging flash mobs and ‘die-ins’ within Bristol Airport’s terminal, or outside council offices and courts.

Protestors against Bristol Airport expansion outside the court where the case is being held (Image: John Wimperis)

This often involved the ‘Red Rebels’ – a group of women dressed all in red moving hauntingly around a protest space – the ‘Landing Crew’, a group of protesters dressed like airport ground marshalls, and the Bristol Climate Choir.

These creative protest groups are all set to return again on Tuesday for this second battle, and demonstrate like it’s 2022 all over again.

BAAN are fighting on all fronts – from publishing reports into the carbon emissions from the airport expansion, to surveys on noise pollution and the impact of what it says will be 65,000 extra cars travelling to or from the airport every day.

“The airport is showing that they wilfully ignore the local residents and the climate crisis with their plan to submit yet another crazy proposal to expand,” said Stephen Clarke from BAAN.

“It is paramount that the views and concerns of local people are prioritised. Once again, many Town and Parish Councils are in the process of discussing the expansion plans.

“Bath & North East Somerset have already unanimously opposed the idea of a bigger airport and Bristol City’s Full Council are due to vote on the matter on Tuesday,” he added.

Who decides?

Ultimately, and frustratingly for local campaigners and politicians, what they think about the idea matters little when it comes to decision-making.

The decision in the first instance lies with North Somerset Council ’s planning committee. The airport – as people who’ve tried to reach it in rush hour know – lies a good eight miles south of Bristol itself, and in the unitary authority of North Somerset, a council based in Weston-super-Mare.

So what Bristol City Council, or indeed the people of Bristol, say, matters even less than you’d think, given the name of the airport.

But major expansions to airports are very often not decided by any local resident or politician. In the early 2020s, North Somerset Council refused the first expansion of Bristol Airport. The airport appealed, and thus began a long back and forth of public inquiries, judicial reviews and legal challenges, that ultimately ended with a judge dismissing the last legal attempt by campaigners to stop the expansion in the courts in 2023.

What has changed this time?

This time around, the arguments may well be the familiar, but it will be a different cast of characters playing them out.

Last month, Bristol Airport was sold to new owners. Much of the attention over the past eight years was on the airport’s previous owners, the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, which threw up the bizarre situation which saw anti-expansion activists contacting schools in a Canadian province to lobby for villages thousands of miles away.

Ultimately, the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund was a financial organisation looking to earn the most money for its retired teachers, and its decision to sell its stakes in British airports was a financial one. The new owners, Australian investment company Macquarie, will take add the three British airports, including Bristol, to its portfolio of assets.

This time around, there’s a new Government at Westminster. The new Labour Government has been bullish about prioritising growth and investment over environmental concerns on everything from major infrastructure projects to housing developments, so Bristol Airport are confident they will get the backing from London.

Bristol sent mixed messages last time around. The council voted to oppose expansion but the city’s Labour mayor at the time, Marvin Rees, controversially backed the expansion while pointing out that it wasn’t his decision.

Other local Labour MPs, most prominently South Bristol’s Karin Smyth, were in favour. But there were political voices opposing the first expansion.

Last time around, the then Tory MP North Somerset MP Liam Fox described it as ‘hard to justify’ and then said he was ‘hugely disappointed’ when a court ruled it should go ahead. The then West of England metro mayor Dan Norris was also opposed to the expansion, as was North Somerset Council – who refused it.

West of England Metro Mayor Helen Godwin on a Tier/Dott e-scooter at Lyde Green, June 2025(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach PLC)

In 2025, North Somerset’s first-ever Labour MP Sadik Al-Hassan has so far been in listening mode – holding a series of public meetings in the villages around his constituency to ask people what they think.

At the same time, however, he has been publicly closer to the airport than Liam Fox ever was, visiting the terminal and runways and even being photographed as an air marshall.

And there’s a new metro mayor too. Labour’s Helen Godwin was elected in May and has spoken pointedly of how she is building a much closer relationship between the West of England Combined Authority and Bristol Airport.

She will ultimately be the person who has to get the ball rolling on a mass transit system from the airport to Bristol, and said she wants it to benefit communities in South Bristol too and be created alongside major new housing developments to the south of the city.

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Bristol Airport expansion plans sees battle lines drawn again as second phase revealed

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