Frights of fancy
Airport expansion , Issue 1645 A GOVERNMENT committed to "bringing real change for working people and families", as deputy PM Angela Rayner put it last week, seems surprisingly keen to divert vast resources from essential local services into regional airports that few people will use.

At the Convention of the North in Preston last month, the housing, communities and local government secretary set out her support for reopening Doncaster-Sheffield airport (which closed as unviable in 2022). Remarkably, this new vote of confidence was on the grounds that: "Teesside has shown that regional airports can prosper, and now it's time to back South Yorkshire too."

Perhaps Rayner had swallowed Tees Valley regional mayor Lord Houchen's porkies about the airport that he "rescued" in 2019, returning it to profitability (Eyes passim).

Last week, immediately after the last Eye had revealed it was running out of cash, the airport's holding company belatedly filed accounts showing the airport group is losing £13m a year and has borrowed more than £150m of public funds that it shows little sign of paying back. (Meanwhile, the Eye understands its chair Kate Willard has just resigned).

City lights
The plan for Doncaster-Sheffield, which struggled against the larger Manchester and Leeds-Bradford airports (both less than 70 miles from the South Yorkshire conurbation), involves reimagining it as South Yorkshire Airport City. This, so the hopeful projections go, will bring new "employment, retail and leisure activities" to the dormant site.

A company owned by the City of Doncaster Council, Fly Doncaster Ltd, will lease the airport from the Peel Group that owns the land.

None of this comes cheap. At the end of January, the government's subsidy advice unit revealed that the council will be lending £105m of council taxpayers' money at subsidised interest rates and, considering this to be akin to a grant, valued the subsidy at £89.7m.

Last month, the council then announced it was handing over £10m from its "revenue priorities" budget, to be matched by the same amount from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, led by Labour regional mayor Oliver Coppard.

Self-exposure
The amounts are starting to rival Teesside's bet on its failed airport. When the scale of Doncaster council's commitments became clear to its auditor Grant Thornton in November, it warned that "changes to the council's commercial approach to the project and the level of the council's financial exposure... in our view together significantly increase risk and present a major concern" over "economy, efficiency and effectiveness".

Doncaster will subcontract the job of getting the airport up and operating to FP Aviation Ltd and Munich Airport International GmbH. The former company is owned by Raoul Witherall, whose other ventures include Fly Plymouth Ltd, a vehicle intended to reopen that city's closed airport, with its last flight taking off 13 years ago.

Neither South Yorkshire nor Teesside have cash to burn. Doncaster council's cabinet member for finance has described a "difficult and volatile" financial situation; and both regions desperately need improvements to local transport.

Vote-winner
But airports are aspirational and win votes. Elected Labour Doncaster mayor Ros Jones, who's held the position since 2013 and is standing again in May, declared: "Re-opening our airport is my number one priority... and despite the challenging timeline, our plan is to see our airport open in spring 2026".

Judging from experience on Teesside – where Houchen won power by promising to save the airport – that could be when problems really start.