Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of airfields in the UK.

The majority of airfields in the UK are privately run and owned.

The Government takes the matter of airport capacity seriously. In March 2015 the Government published research that the Department for Transport commissioned from York Aviation entitled “The Economic Value of General Aviation in the UK”.

That research contained an estimate of the jobs linked to the general aviation sector in the UK being 38,000.

We are commissioning research on what a strategic network of general aviation airfields might look like and this research may review that calculation.