Doncaster Sheffield Airport

Debate between Clive Betts and Alexander Stafford

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for securing this important debate and for his tireless work over the past 105 days to save our airport. And it really is our airport across South Yorkshire, with Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield—we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney), near Huddersfield and West Yorkshire, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith) is here to show support and how important the airport is for Nottinghamshire. The airport is a community asset and something close to our hearts. My hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley mentioned Concorde and the Vulcan, and it is an iconic and important part of our history and culture.

This is also about jobs, and the economic and social value that the airport brings to our region. There will be many things we disagree on—there already are—but we all agree on one thing: we want to save the airport and try to make it work. No one wants to play the blame game and we all, including Labour Members, want to pull levers to put on Peel the pressure that my hon. Friend for Don Valley was talking about. Let us be honest: Peel is ultimately at fault, as we have seen in Sheffield, Manchester and the Tees Valley, where it wants to close airports and build housing or industrial estates in order to get the rent. Let us be honest about what it is trying to do, and say that we as elected Members want to try to stop it doing that.

In some places Peel has been successful, as we have seen in Sheffield, but in other places it has not been. That is crucial, it is not a partisan point, and we should look at a case study. I was a geographer at school, and we would write case studies and give an example of something. We have the case study of Teesside and the Mayor of Tees Valley, when Peel was in a pretty similar situation—obviously we have more money in South Yorkshire than they do there—and Peel wanted to sell the land for its airport and build houses and an industrial park.

I looked intensely at why Ben Houchen has been so successful. I do not believe it is just because he said, “I want to save an airport,” which he clearly did and has done. That was not his game. His game was, “I want to make the Tees Valley a better place, with better jobs, a better community and better society, and the airport is part of that.” We do not have the same approach. We talk too much about the airport in isolation—of course an airport is important—but we should be talking about how the airport in South Yorkshire is integral to the prosperity of South Yorkshire, and how it fits in with wider plans, whether those are freeports, industrial zones, or bus franchising—Members will know I am a big advocate of that. How does the airport fit in with the wider communication plan? We cannot see the airport in isolation, because ultimately that might fail. We need to see how it combines the whole of our region together.

[Mr Betts]

I am interested in what the hon. Gentleman is asking for. He must accept that the airport in Teesside is costing an awful lot of public money. Presumably he is happy for the Mayor of South Yorkshire, if Peel agreed, to put in just as much money, perhaps £20 million out of the £30 million a year. He then argues for franchising. Does he accept that choices have to be made? The Government have not given the Mayor an unlimited budget. Presumably he wants everything to be spent out of that £30 million, when that clearly is not possible. Is he saying we should give Peel an open cheque and it can have what it wants? That is what he seems to be saying.

[Alexander Stafford]

The hon. Gentleman has brought my speech on a bit, because what I am asking for is vision. I am asking the South Yorkshire Mayor for a vision of South Yorkshire. I want to know where South Yorkshire will be in five, 10 or 20 years’ time, and what my children will experience when they grow up in South Yorkshire. I do not want them to have bus franchising here or an airport there. I want to hear,

“South Yorkshire is going to be a better place, and this is how we’re getting there.”

We are talking about money and bus franchising, but ultimately we need that to feed into a wider vision. The whole point of the South Yorkshire Mayor, or any Mayor—I still have great reservations about the mayoralty, because I do not see that vision coming.

We speak about being unpartisan, and I will pay credit to what happened in Manchester, as well as in Tees Valley and the west midlands, where the Mayors have visions of what they want their regions to look like. I do not know what vision our Mayor has for our region. He probably wants to save the airport, and we have talked about bus franchising, but that is not a vision. In order for the airport to work, it needs to be part of a wider vision of prosperity. It is about how Sheffield is linked to Doncaster, and from Barnsley down to Rotherham, and how each part of it fits that vision. When the Mayor has set out the vision—I hope that it will be a good vision—he should use the levers of power available to him to make it a reality. He should say to the people of South Yorkshire, “I have my vision and this is where the airport fits into it. These are the levers—the powers and the £900 million given to me by the Government—that I will use to make that vision happen.” He may or may not say, “We need to save the airport,” but I want to see how that fits into the vision and how it all goes together.

We have already heard about the Civil Contingencies Act, the £20 million loan and lots of things. That is too piecemeal. The failure here is not necessarily the failure of the airport. The failure is of vision and of the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority. The success in the Tees Valley is because its Mayor has a vision, knows what he wants to do and is combining those. We do not have that in South Yorkshire. That is the ultimate failure.