Airports UK - Autumn
06 October 2025
Birmingham Airport’s Chief Executive, Nick Barton, has told The Airport Operator that the airport has committed to its biggest ever investment plans to meet the challenge of steady growth in passenger numbers.
Commenting on the airport’s approach to growth, he said “the biggest challenge for us is managing growth effectively because we have every reason to believe we are going to grow strongly over the next five to ten years. HS2 will be a significant benefit to this airport and the wider region. That sort of infrastructure connectivity turbocharges our business.
The challenge for us now is to integrate the growth that we forecast into a site that has got the ability to grow from its current 14m passengers a year”
Barton said “the constraints will be the obvious ones of where do you park aeroplanes, terminal capacity and the processing of baggage, but we are already committing to the early stages of addressing those challenges by unveiling investment plans that are around £76m a year. This is record investment at levels that we have never seen before”.
He said that the investment has been planned to deal with three core areas: capacity growth “to remove the leading constraints”, asset replacement and meeting the airport’s carbon commitments. The capacity element will include having bigger baggage carousels and more of them, more check-in facilities, increased security and immigration capacity and more aircraft stands. Updating ageing infrastructure assets will encompass replacing air conditioning, building fabrics, decoration and floor finishes...
