The UK government launched a formal consultation on the draft Heathrow Expansion National Policy Statement (HENPS) on 18 June 2026, opening the statutory planning process that will set the policy framework for any third runway at the airport.

The HENPS is the designated national policy statement under the Planning Act 2008 — the document against which any Development Consent Order application by Heathrow Airport Limited would ultimately be assessed by the Planning Inspectorate. Getting it onto a statutory footing is a prerequisite for the project advancing through the development consent regime. The consultation is therefore not a preliminary expression of intent; it is the process by which government tests and refines the policy basis on which a DCO could legally be decided.

The government's stated conditions for expansion have been consistent since the scheme selection announced in November 2025. Ministers confirmed that any expansion must be cost-effective, minimise the burden on passengers, and come at no cost to the exchequer — a formulation that places the commercial and financial risk squarely with the airport and its investors rather than the public purse.

The consultation documentation also specifies that expansion proposals must include a clear strategy for job creation and economic benefit realisation. That requirement is partly a political hedge — Heathrow's economic case has historically leaned on aggregate GDP and connectivity arguments, and ministers are now signalling that distributional and labour-market outcomes need to be visible in the evidence base, not implied.

The history here is long and, for those who have tracked the dossier, wearying. Government first announced support for a third runway at Heathrow in October 2016. What followed was a decade of legal challenges, a pandemic that hollowed out the traffic forecasts, and successive iterations of the policy framework. The HENPS consultation is, in that sense, a resumption rather than a beginning — but it carries more procedural weight than anything that preceded it, because it is the gateway to a statutory DCO process.

Expansion documents and consultation resources are available via heathrow.com/expansion. The consultation period gives stakeholders — local authorities, airlines, freight operators, environmental groups, and affected communities — the opportunity to submit representations on the draft NPS before it is designated. Designation requires a parliamentary vote, which means the government will also need to manage its own backbenches, particularly among MPs in constituencies under the flightpath.

The no-cost-to-the-exchequer condition is worth examining carefully. It constrains the financing architecture: no public equity, no government-backed debt, and implicitly no regulatory model that socialises construction risk across the regulated asset base in a way that would load costs onto passengers before the infrastructure exists. Whether the project can be financed on that basis — and at what cost of capital — is now a live question for investors and for the Civil Aviation Authority as economic regulator.

The job-creation requirement adds a further layer. Heathrow will need to demonstrate not only that aggregate employment grows but that there is a credible, monitored pathway to delivering it. That is a harder evidential standard than the project has faced before, and it will shape how the airport structures its planning obligations and its Section 106 negotiations with the London Borough of Hillingdon and other affected local authorities.

What the consultation does not yet resolve is timing. The designation of the NPS, the submission of a DCO application, and the examination and decision process each carry their own timetables, and none of them is short. Those working in the planning and aviation policy space will be calibrating their engagement strategies now. The window for shaping the NPS — before it is designated — is finite, and the representations made in this consultation will form part of the formal record that the Planning Inspectorate considers when any DCO application is examined.