Sir Howard Davies must have breathed a huge sigh of relief last week when he finally took over as chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, having finally delivered his long-awaited but controversial report into airports expansion.
He is taking on one of the City’s most important and most challenging jobs – trying to engineer the rescue of one of Britain’s largest high street lenders from a decade of disaster mired in massive losses and huge misconduct fines.
Ultimately he will be expected to sell off the taxpayer’s stake and return it to public ownership as a healthy, profitable entity. It’s a mammoth undertaking but one that could be seen as less daunting than being the government-appointed airports tsar tasked with solving Britain’s long-standing aviation capacity crisis.
Davies’ Airports Commission was set up in 2012. It took a year to compile a shortlist of options: a third runway at Heathrow; a second at Gatwick; or a new airport in the South-east called the Heathrow Hub; and a further two before the Commission finally published its 342-page dossier in June. Having racked up £20m of costs, the Commission ruled that Heathrow was the “best answer”.
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