MINISTERS are poised to accelerate controversial plans for a new runway at London’s Heathrow airport with a consultation document on the multi-billion pound project expected in the autumn.

Stephen Nelson, chief executive of BAA, the airports group that owns Heathrow and other UK airports, said it was looking at “twin-tracking” the proposed runways at Heathrow and Stansted — contrary to previous government and BAA policy, which put Stansted first, with Heathrow to follow only after 2015.

Debate over the development of Heathrow, and the tension between the government’s aviation and climate-change policies, will be reignited by the consultation document, which insiders expect to be published by the Department for Transport (DfT) in late summer or autumn.

Some had thought the consultation would deal only with “mixed-mode”, a technique to squeeze more take-offs and landings through the current runways.

But senior BAA and British Airways executives said they now expect it also to set out the options for a new runway at Heathrow, to the north of the current airport boundary, and shorter than the existing two runways.

It would require construction of a new terminal — the airport’s sixth — and could eventually take Heathrow’s capacity to about 120m passengers a year, nearly double the current 68m.

BAA is already well advanced with its plans for a new runway at Stansted. It is expected to submit a planning application for the project later this year.

The “Stansted-first” policy was set by the government in 2003 when it published a white paper on aviation. It said development at Heathrow would have to wait until air-quality problems — caused mainly by traffic on nearby motorways — could be solved.

Since then, however, a team at the DfT has been at work on the plan. The Project for the Sustainable Development of Heathrow has looked at how to mitigate noise and air-quality problems, “including steps to manage traffic on the surrounding road network”, Stephen Twigg, transport minister, told parliament last month.

At Heathrow, executives have done extensive work on how a three-runway airport would operate to cause the least pollution. The new strip would be used for both take-offs and landings, the central runway would be used for arrivals and the southerly one for departures.

As revealed in The Sunday Times last week, BAA was on Friday hit by two referrals to the Competition Commission.

One will examine whether its ownership of all the main UK airports is anticompetitive. The other will investigate the charges it is able to make on airlines at Heathrow and Gatwick.

Harry Bush, director of economic regulation at the Civil Aviation Authority, said it was prepared to claw back any shortfalls in investment by BAA caused by “financial distress”.

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