Time to cut losses on airport land

HERE is a quote on Gloucestershire Airport from Flight Magazine, February 1957: “The flourishing industrial estate – which in fact subsidizes the flying activities – has room for several more tenants.”

More than 60 years later, the airport remains unviable and survives on these public handouts. Even now, the business park at Staverton is planning to expand to further fund the airport.

Despite the hardships facing Gloucester City and Cheltenham Borough Councils, they allow the airport to take 90 per cent of the rent from their Staverton business park. In 2019, the airport received £632,000 and in 2018 the figure was £548,000.

As well as decades of these subsidies, the airport has also received six-figure payments from major new leases, has had similar large loans from the councils and has used several millions worth of grants.

Yet still the airport needs more public funds. A refurbishment of its main runway is required, so it will be out with its begging bowl again. Over recent years, Gloucester City and Cheltenham Borough have shed staff, closed museums and cut front-line services, but they still subsidise flying at the airport – what an appalling sense of priorities.

The land could be a far greater value to the councils if sold for much-needed housing, as pointed out by countless letters in recent years to your newspapers. The business park units are mostly unconnected to aviation, so they could continue.

A garden village scheme could include cafes, shops, walkways and cycle hire in a parkland setting, and the sale would yield an estimated £350 million for the councils, on land with immediate transport links.

Spending millions more to prolong an unviable airport, which would then keep hogging council funds, and sterilise the land’s true worth to the councils, should not be entertained. Don’t give the airport more rope.