The UK Government has approved plans to develop Manston Airport in Kent as an air cargo hub.
Owners of the site, RiverOak Strategic Partners (RSP) said it has received a redetermined Development Consent Order (DCO) from the Department for Transport, for its plans to invest up to £500m at the airport.
The company said: “The DCO will make it possible for RSP to provide much needed airfreight capacity in the South East, help alleviate long term overcrowding in the London airport system and ease road congestion caused by lorries carrying freight through the channel tunnel to European airports.”
RSP has planned for the building project to be carbon net zero, in line with the Government’s decarbonisation goals.
Surveys, detailed master planning and design work will commence in the next few weeks. Construction will begin later next year, with the airport operating its first cargo services in early 2025.
Manston Airport in Kent, some 60 miles from London, could by now have been an integral part of London’s air transport network, specifically serving the freight market and relieving pressure on Heathrow Airport in particular. That prospect (one of many such alternatives) was rejected by the Airports Commission in favour of a third runway at Heathrow, the construction of which has not yet even got under way.
Manston Airport closed in May-2014. Not long after, a US investment firm, RiverOak Strategic Partners, drew up plans to reopen the airport principally to handle freight and, latterly, as a ‘net zero carbon’ facility from ‘Day One’. A five-year battle against other developers, one of which wanted to turn the airport into a housing estate, has been won, with the award of a development consent order by the government.
But that decision, for what is by implication regarded as a piece of national strategic infrastructure, was made against the advice of planning authorities.
The exercise portends an escalation of the conflict between the supporters of such infrastructure – especially in what is going to be a harsh economic environment – and those for whom the only environment of concern is the natural one.
