Oxford will have its own direct link to Heathrow airport's new Terminal 5 when it opens next month.

The Oxford Bus Company will serve the new terminal from its opening day, on Thursday, March 27, and is spending more than £3m on a fleet of new low-emission coaches for its X70 Airline service to London's main airport.

Oxford will be one of the first cities to have a direct link to the new £4.3bn terminal, which is expected to be used by 30 million passengers a year and will be the home base for British Airways.

Louisa Weeks, the company's general manager, said: "We will be running a service up to every 20 minutes to and from Oxford - that's the frequency of services we usually only run during the summer months.

"We won't be able to finalise the exact details until the access roads are completed and open for trials from the end of this month, but we will be taking a completely different route into Heathrow, serving the new Terminal 5 and the airport's central bus station.

"We hope it will be more reliable than the congested link road from the M4, which we have to use at the moment.

"The new vehicles will be the greenest coaches using the new airport, meeting the latest European environmental specifications, and they will have wheelchair access."

Once Terminal 5 opens, the X70 will no longer serve Terminal 4. Passengers will have to travel to the Heathrow central bus station, then catch a shuttle train to reach Terminal 4.