PLANE CRAZY PART * 4!
Now you have to pay £177k compensation for airport you built where airliners can’t land And if you still want to fly to St Helena, you’ll have to hitch a ride on a military plane
IT IS one of the most farcical episodes in the row over Britain’s £12 billion foreign aid budget – a £285 million airport built on a remote island that cannot be used because it is too windy for large planes to land there.
Now The Mail on Sunday can reveal yet more UK aid has been spent on a scheme to compensate desperate business owners who expanded hotels and bars in the hope that tourists would flock to the South Atlantic island of St Helena.
According to documents seen by The Mail on Sunday, the Department for International Development (DFID) has given £177,200 to the British overseas territory’s government to hand to tourist businesses. But islanders say they haven’t received any compensation and face financial ruin. The MoS can also reveal that: DFID paid for an RAF plane to test the airport last month in an attempt to prove its viability;
British taxpayers may have to fork out again to upgrade another island’s airport to be used as a stopping off point for tourists headed to St Helena;
The St Helena runway was shorter than originally planned – protecting the habitat of a rare flightless bird.
Furious business owners on St Helena demanded recompense for being left with vacant hotels and empty bars because DFID built the airport without noticing the strong winds that constantly buffet that part of the island.
The documents seen by MoS state the new cash, bringing the total for the three-year project to £5million, is to ‘allow an additional three months for Enterprise St Helena [the body responsible for tourism] to adapt to the new circumstances of a delay in the provision of regular air services’.
DFID Minister Lord Bates told the House of Lords that the St Helena government was trying to help ‘businesses to manage the implications of the commencement of a scheduled service in slower time than they planned for’.
Businesswoman Hazel Wilmot spent more than £2million renovating the 18th Century Consulate Hotel and adjoining farmland ahead of the expected tourist boom. She said the airport farce had robbed her of her life savings and she now faces more debts totalling £150,000. ‘With no commercial flights, I cannot see how I will be able to generate an income with which to repay the debt,’ she said.
‘The hotel is financially broke. Not a word is being said about compensation as the game of pass the parcel between DFID and the St Helena government continues.’ Labour peer Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, who is meeting Lord Bates this week to demand answers, said: ‘Islanders are right to be furious. I have been pressing on compensation but all I get in answer is this scheme which doesn’t address the issue of compensation for losses.’ Last year this newspaper exposed the waste of UK money on St Helena’s airport and then reported how the runway was now being used for gokart races. Two weeks ago, the civil servant who presided over the scandalous misuse of public money, Mark Lowcock, was given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours. DFID now hopes to bring tourists to St Helena by using an RAF base on Ascension Island, 700 miles north of St Helena. The new plan is to utilise an existing twice-weekly military service, known as the Airbridge, that flies from the UK to the Falklands but stops on the way on Ascension.
Passengers from Britain would then board a smaller plane to make the two-hour flight to St Helena.
A British airline called Atlantic Star has an aircraft said to be ideal for landing on short runways in challenging conditions. It has already successfully tested it at St Helena in recent months.
However, it can carry only about 100 passengers – 60 fewer than the aircraft that operator Comair originally hoped to use.
Just before Christmas, DFID commissioned an RAF Hercules aircraft to land on the runway at St Helena, which it achieved successfully. It is awaiting final reports on tests of the wind levels.
An internal review is also under way into identifying who was responsible for giving the go-ahead for the airport despite the problems caused by strong winds.
A DFID spokesman said discussions were ongoing over using a plane from Ascension.