Political wrangles, Reform and the battle to reopen Doncaster's airport

On Friday, 37 Reform councillors will take their seats in the Doncaster Council chamber for the first time. Their new majority comes at a pivotal time for the city, where Labour mayor Ros Jones was re-elected on a ticket of promises to reopen Doncaster Sheffield Airport.

Reform came from nowhere to become the council's biggest party, yet they don't control the council because the city's mayoral system means Jones still wields considerable power.

The recent election, which saw Labour slump from 40 councillors to 12, leaves a lot of questions. Why did people vote differently for the mayor and their councillors? Will the authority grind to a 'bureaucratic halt'? Will the airport actually open again?

Reform's influence will be curtailed by the presence of the Labour mayor, who declined to invite their members to be part of her cabinet. She has instead extended a hand of friendship to the party through an Executive Group she has set up.

It will provide "opposition members with access, influence and opportunity to shape decisions".

What that actually means in practice remains to be seen, as does whether Reform and other parties take up her invitation.

Jones is going to need to bring other parties on board to an extent because although she can make a lot of decisions alone, there are some which need the approval of full council.

The authority's budget, the council's Corporate Plan, which sets out priorities, and any decision on the airport, which closed in 2022 when landowners and operators Peel Group said it was no longer viable, are chief among them.

That is where things will get interesting.

The future of the airport might be the biggest decision Doncaster has to make for a generation.

It is due to cost about £100m of public money to reopen the airport. It was the biggest talking point during the election.

It was, arguably, the only thing that got Jones across the line again – what had already been done to reopen the airport and her promises to make it happen.

It's clear many people in Doncaster were voting broadly for Reform as their councillors, but for a mayor they picked the person who had already been driving the airport campaign.

But the airport now becomes 'the big thing' for Jones – it got her elected and it will also be the thing that she will be held accountable for.

Doncaster has already gone so far down the runway, is there any real chance that they can change their minds about the project's value for money and decide not to take off after all?

She'll need to convince an unconvinced Reform – but also her Labour colleague and Mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard.

Coppard will ultimately decide whether the money can be spent because it would be coming from the county's devolution settlement, which his office controls.

Coppard says the deal "has to make sense" to be granted his sign-off.

It's not just politicians Jones needs to work on. Doncaster Council's own auditors also have "serious concerns" about the effective use of resources.

Professional services firm Grant Thornton told the council in November that not being able to secure outside investment for the airport "would be a significant escalation in the project's risk profile and the council's financial exposure".

Some businesses – as much as they want the airport to reopen – want to make sure it is done in the right way.

Paul Mason's office at Redline Assured Security looks out on to the empty terminal at what was once RAF Finningley, a key Cold War-era base before its conversion into a commercial airport 20 years ago.

His company helped train security staff there and hopes to do it again if it reopens.

But he says legislation on scanners has changed even since the airport closed. They'd need new 3D-scanners and training needs to happen now if locals want the jobs that could be created.

"We do run the risk, unless it's well managed, of bringing people in from outside of the region and that would be a huge travesty. We'd like to see those jobs returned to the local community," he explains.

"There is a huge lead time to opening up an airport, particularly one that's been closed for a while. There is a lot of skill that needs to be brought in. We really need to think about training people now rather than having to bring people from outside of the region and taking jobs away from people in Doncaster."

One person quietly putting his hand up in the corner of this debate is Richard Sulley from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield.

He told me there are plenty of promises being made by politicians – but not enough questions asked.

"It's hard to justify reopening an airport in a time of a climate emergency. There do seem to be very few voices politically against the reopening of the airport and you can see why.

"What's concerned us has there's not been much open conversation about the downsides of the airport.

"I think there are strong arguments that this is not a good use of public money even within the context of reopening an airport - let alone when you factor in the carbon emissions that will be generated by that airport."

Doncaster Council has established a wholly-owned subsidiary called Fly Doncaster and secured Munich Airport International as its strategic partner to support the re-establishment of operations there over a number of years. The site would be leased from Peel.

The region needs the jobs that the airport could provide but what would the cost be, both financially and environmentally?

That's a huge decision to take for Doncaster. And the city will be doing it at a time when the council is, perhaps, at its most unstable.

The mayoral system that Doncaster uses is meant to be getting scrapped by the government in the next few years. By then though, these decisions will be made.

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