Heathrow could be forced to allow other companies to design and build its third runway and new terminal after the UK aviation regulator argued that rival bids could keep construction costs down.

A long-awaited review by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) proposes changes to the regulatory model that governs how Heathrow runs and covers its costs.

These include making the operator seek bids from other businesses to design, build and operate parts of the long-delayed expansion project at Europe’s busiest airport, which it said “would allow for direct competition between Heathrow and an alternative developer … [that] could encourage competition and efficiency”.

The CAA’s most radical suggestion, which would require special approval from the government, would allow another developer to tender to build and run their own terminals at Heathrow, similar to a scheme at JFK airport in New York.

Last November ministers backed Heathrow’s plan for the runway to be up and running by 2035, over the rival proposal submitted by Arora Group, although the airport operator is still seeking formal planning approval to start construction by 2029.

Earlier this month it emerged that Philip Jansen, Heathrow’s new chair, had moved to open talks with airlines and Arora Group’s chair, Surinder Arora, to attempt to progress plans to expand the airport amid a row over how much the scheme would end up costing carriers, retailers and, ultimately, passengers.

British Airways dominates Heathrow, accounting for more than 50% of slots, and Luis Gallego, the chief executive of BA’s owner, International Airlines Group, has said the cost of the third runway and associated works must be capped at £30bn.

Heathrow is considered to be Europe’s most expensive airport, and in March the UK aviation regulator rejected its plans to significantly raise its landing fees to fund a multibillion-pound upgrade.

Arora has been promoting his own £25bn expansion scheme and is part of Heathrow Reimagined, which also includes BA and Virgin, which is campaigning to drastically reduce the costs of operating at the airport.

“Two years ago competition at Heathrow wasn’t on the cards and now is very much alive and kicking because the case for change is so strong,” said Arora, the founder of Arora Group. “We welcome this consultation from the CAA.”

The CAA said there could be difficulties in implementing a model allowing rival bidders. “This model could encourage competition and efficiency,” the regulator said. “Nonetheless, there would also be some complications in implementing such a model.

“It would be important to ensure that an approach involving the build, operation, ownership of assets and direct competition with Heathrow worked in a way to further the interests of consumers across the whole airport.”

Heathrow, however, warned that the proposals could “undermine efforts” to expand the airport and produce growth.

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Economic growth is key to tackling the cost of living crisis. We have a clear plan to invest billions of pounds of private capital to upgrade and expand the UK’s hub airport – creating jobs and growth across the country.“We support reform that boosts efficiency, cuts red tape and keeps investment flowing, but not proposals which will undermine our efforts to improve the airport for consumers or delay the economic growth the country needs. We look forward to working with government and the regulator to turn these proposals into positive outcomes.”

Heathrow is owned by a consortium of investors led by the French company Ardian and includes the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, Singapore and Saudi Arabia.

There aren’t many jobs that often involve jumping out of the path of speeding cars – but for the lollipop people of Britain today, this is the sad reality. And it doesn’t stop there: aggression, swearing and middle fingers are just a few examples of the intimidation and abuse they face on our roads.

“Oh my God, I mean, abuse of lollipop people? What has the world come to?” says Lynne Gorrara. It’s a crisp, sunny afternoon in Ipswich and the 61-year-old is holding a towering stop sign above her head, clearing a crossing for a stream of schoolchildren. This spot – on a narrow residential road, with a hospital in one direction and shops in the other – is notorious for abusive drivers.

It’s hard to miss Gorrara and her colleagues, because, as she says, they are “lit up like a Christmas tree” in their neon jackets. Unfortunately, this makes no difference. Motorists have, on occasion, hurtled towards them at 50mph, some even waving as they pass. Of course, the lollipop people are not the only ones in danger. “It’s really scary, because you’re constantly watching the children – that’s my priority,” says Gorrara. “When you know they’re not going to stop, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got everybody else out of the way, too.”

To combat the epidemic of abuse, Suffolk county council has given lollipop people body-worn cameras to record drivers behaving badly. “We know that it’s a national problem. It’s not just happening in Ipswich,” says Mike Brooks, the council’s safer active travel manager. According to the most recent Home Office data available, for 2024, more than 3.5m motoring offences were recorded by police in England and Wales – the highest figure since records began. Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported in 2024 that, based on freedom of information requests, the number of crimes committed in the UK that mentioned “road rage” or “aggressive driving” in police logs had shot up by 34% in three years.

Some times of the year are worse than others. On a sunny day like today, drivers are in a chipper mood. But Gorrara and her colleagues dread what should be one of the happiest seasons: Christmas. “The volume of traffic is even higher and people get impatient,” she says. Despite the abuse, she loves the job, which she has been doing for 10 years. “It’s not for the money or the uniform,” but for the joy of serving her community and seeing the schoolchildren grow up. “You’ll see them in high school jumpers and think: oh my goodness!”

Alongside Gorrara is Michelle Whinney, who has been a lollipop person in the county for 12 years. The 57-year-old says things have got worse “in the last four to five years” and she has seen drivers “punching their steering wheels and sticking their fingers up” at her. She, too, has had to dodge oncoming cars. “They can be quite rude at times and there’s no need at all. We only stop you for a second.” As well as what seems to be a rising tide of anger in society, Whinney blames “more cars on the road” (there were 42m vehicles on Britain’s roads in 2025, a rise of more than 5m in a decade).

There is also a problem with drivers not understanding the role of lollipop people. Suffolk county council has fitted the body-worn cameras as part of a campaign called Lollipops Aren’t Just for Children to make motorists aware that lollipop people “can legally stop traffic for anybody”, says Brooks. He says this lack of understanding is often the source of abuse. “It usually takes the form of a driver saying: ‘You shouldn’t be stopping me, because there are no children here – there’s only adults.’”

Among the adults being guided across the road today is Abby Hart, 40, who has just picked up her kids from the nearby primary school. “They’re phenomenal,” she says of Gorrara and Whinney. “So kind, friendly and good with the kids.” Hart says she has seen some “close encounters” first-hand where cars weren’t willing to stop. “It’s a bit sad. No one’s in that much of a rush, surely?” Her children are approaching the age where they will be able to walk to school alone. “Knowing there’s someone here to help the kids safely cross just makes sense.”

Suffolk isn’t the only council trialling body-worn cameras for lollipop people: they are also being used in Greater Manchester, as well as Clacton and Basildon in Essex. Brooks says several other councils are looking to Suffolk for inspiration, including some in London, where low-traffic neighbourhoods, which close residential roads to cars, have provoked vicious rows between motorists and local authorities.

Some of the footage captured by the body-worn cameras has led to action by the police, with officers having a stern word with abusive drivers or handing out fines. “Nobody should go to work and receive abuse. Unfortunately, our patrols have got into the frame of mind that it is normal, and that’s wrong,” says Brooks.

Gorrara and Whinney work with a crossing patrol manager, Andy Patmore. The 58-year-old says lollipop people bring joy to pedestrians, especially when they embrace their crossing as “an extension of their personality”, but he warns they are in the same boat as other people policing our roads, including parking wardens, who report enduring physical violence, verbal threats and sexual assault. During one shift with Gorrara, lasting about 30 or 40 minutes, he says that seven cars tried to drive though them.

He has a message for drivers taking out their frustrations on his team: “Please don’t. We’re human beings as well. You’re not going to shout at a traffic light, but you can shout at one of us. It hurts our feelings and gets us down.”

The stream of schoolchildren peters out and the team lower their stop signs. Their shift is over. Despite the threats, Gorrara is excited to return tomorrow. “I just love it, because it gives me a reason to get up in the morning and get out of the house. I recently lost my husband, so it’s given me even more of a purpose to serve my community.”

Lollipop people have helped pedestrians across Britain’s roads for almost 90 years. In 1937, Mary Hunt, a school caretaker, became the country’s first lollipop person, guiding schoolchildren to safety in Bath. “She absolutely loved it,” says her grandson, Colin Hunt. His grandmother was “not much more than 5ft tall”, he says; she told him the first sign they gave her was so big that “she would go sailing off down the road” when hit by a gust of wind.

Hunt’s appointment was announced in the Bath Chronicle in September 1937 with the warning that drivers who “flash by when she is seeing her youthful charges across the road will have their numbers taken, and if an offence has been committed, will be summoned”. She patrolled the roads of Bath for nearly 25 years. Colin Hunt says abuse occured even then, including from “speeding vehicles that just wouldn’t stop”.

After the second world war, several councils in east London followed Bath’s lead and appointed their own “able-bodied pensioners” as lollipop people. The idea soon spread across the country. But, at the turn of the millennium, things changed. With the passage of the Transport Act 2000, councils were no longer legally obliged to appoint lollipop people. This – and later the government’s austerity policies – resulted in their numbers decreasing. The Mirror reported last year that councils were employing half as many lollipop people as in 2014, and many local authorities are axing them entirely. Durham county council, which has been controlled by Reform UK since May 2025, has proposed a hiring freeze on lollipop people as part of an Elon-Musk-inspired “Department of Government Efficiency” audit to eliminate “wasteful spending”.

And yet, while the number of lollipop people has fallen, the risks to children on the roads have increased. The number of under-16s killed or seriously injured has risen by 17% in England, jumping from an average of 1,884 between 2017 and 2019 to an average of 2,204 between 2022 and 2024, according to the Department for Transport. “Children are important and lollipop people take their lives into their hands to make sure they’re kept safe,” says Hunt. While bad behaviour has always been an issue, including in his grandmother’s day, he says it is an “absolute tragedy” that lollipop people have had to resort to wearing cameras.

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and the author of All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, says anger on the roads is “about the link between rage and humiliation”, with road rage incidents marking “mini, momentary power struggles … where people use the road to try to exert power over the other person”.

Social media can help fuel this, he says, by “feeding us a constant stream of provocations”, and creating scapegoats. “It’s quite easy to imagine a scenario where lollipop people become public enemies on social media by impeding the flow of traffic.”

For anyone in doubt, Gorrara emphasises that lollipop people are nothing to fear. “We’re not out to get anyone,” she says. “We just want you to slow down.”

Your article (Vienna’s public transport is the envy of the world – so why can’t it ditch cars?, 6 May) is a real challenge for UK politicians and policymakers.

In March, Create Streets, Freewheeling and the Campaign for Better Transport, supported by the RAC Foundation, published the report Towns and Trams, advocating the use of trams to unblock city congestion, as in Vienna. Sadly, the tram scheme for Leeds is on ice until the late 2030s.

Trams give 90% of the benefits of metros at 10% of the cost. For the cost of the Elizabeth line, London could have a world-class tramway over 1,000km long, more than twice the length of the tube network.

Even in London, bus use has been declining by about 1.5% a year, despite efforts to attract more trips. Department for Transport data shows that 25% of tram passengers have left a car at home.

A team in Southwark is trying to promote an initial tram line between London Bridge and Denmark Hill, serving three major hospitals, but there are still legal and institutional hurdles to overcome.
Prof Lewis Lesley
Liverpool