I have just started to try to respond to the RSP
consultation, this is based on attending both the non statutory and statutory
consultations session in Canterbury and having read a lot of the information
provided on their website at http://rsp.co.uk/documents/consultation
I think the main difficulty with these documents is that
instead of being published on the internet as conventional websites containing
text and illustrations, the website is just a massive collection of pictures of
pages of text, making it very difficult to assimilate. Part of the problem is
that as such it is impossible to search for phrases you have already read, to find
them again.
Were this for instance a website selling me book stock for
my bookshop, this method of web publication would make it impossible to
generate a stock order economically.
The first question is.
Q 2 business case.
This appears on a printable form here http://rsp.co.uk/documents/consultation/02-feedback-form/
and as part of the online form here https://communityrelations.citizenspace.com/manston-airport/2017-consultation/consultation/intro/
As you can see there is no linkage between the question and
the related documents, the links to which are only published here http://rsp.co.uk/statutory-consultation/
and have titles like “04 – PEIR Volume 3 (Chapters 12 to 14)”
So very difficult to respond to, an absolute dog’s breakfast
in fact.
Anyway here is my first draft at a response to question 2,
which is basically. “What do you think of our business case?”
I think for Manston to work as an airport it would need to
be primarily operated as a heritage aviation tourist attraction perhaps based
on a HFL grant and funding from aviation enthusiasts and focused around the
expansion of the two existing museums.
It is possible that at times this could work in parallel with the
limited local aviation demands.
As was the case with many previous business cases for
aviation activity at Manston, the main issue is a misunderstanding of the words
“hub” and “southeast” hub in this instance should be close to the centre of the
area it serves and southeast in the context Southeast England is a roughly triangular
area the three corners, which are northwest Oxfordshire, southwest Hampshire
and northeast Kent. In terms of forming a hub for the southeast these corners
are the worst locations.
I think the main issue here may be thinking of a hub airport
as planes flying along the spokes of an imaginary wheel, when in reality it is
passengers and freight moving along the spokes to and from the airport by rail
and road.
The best, most central location, to the southeast is the
Greater London Surrey border, which has the two existing major airports, one at
either end of it. As very little of the commercial or industrial activity in
the southeast is located in the southeast corner of the southeast this means
that virtually none this activity is closer to Manston than the two existing
major and competitive airports.
Because of a combination of road layout (particularly the UK
motorway layout) and geography of the southeast regions of: - Oxfordshire,
Bucks. Berkshire, Hampshire, IOW, Greater London, Surry, Sussex and Kent,
travelling to Manston from almost any significant location outside Kent would
involve passing close to one or both of the existing major airports. So for
example a journey from Brighton to Manston isn’t done by travelling northeast
towards Manston, but either by road or rail, it is done by travelling north
past Gatwick and then east.
I think part of the most recent problem, which was the
failure of Infratil, a major NZ company to succeed with an airport at Manston,
was the tendency to think in distances considered negligible in NZ, without
properly understanding actual travel habits and infrastructure in the UK.
A further major disadvantage Manston has with its main
potential competitors, Gatwick and Heathrow, is that it isn’t, and isn’t likely
to be connected to the jet fuel pipeline. This would add both economic and
environmental costs of fuel there.
The first attempts to operate commercial flights from
Manston started in the late 1950s Silver City (Britavia) which moved to Gatwick
in 1962, Air Ferries the first proper airline started flying from Manston in
1963 this went bankrupt in 1968, this was followed by a 60 year history airport
operator failure on the Manston site.
This business case appears have been written by some members
of the same team that put together the last Manston business case for the
Infratil when the airport was still operational and appears to based on similar
very optimistic assertions. I think it has to be appreciated that Infratil are
a large experienced and profitable company which run Wellington Airport (5.5m
passengers a year) at a profit and not only did they reject this case but sold
the Manston site suffering a considerable financial loss, because they thought
it unviable, both in terms of the real business they were able to attract and
the potential business which was forecast.
I suppose the bottom line here is that local residents, like
myself are only aware of the applicants website, there doesn’t seem to be a
physical RiverOak or RSP company employing non executive staff at normal
business premises producing something tangible or some tangible service. When
RiverOak first appeared on the scene their website claimed they were
experienced airport operators and as their company has evolved during the DCO
pre-application stage, moving the Manston project from http://www.riveroakic.com/ where it
featured as the main project of an experienced aviation company to www.riveroakinvestments.co.uk
where it appeared to be the UK branch of an experienced company to http://rsp.co.uk/ which appears to have no
physical address and no history.
Obviously a project of this magnitude whether it succeeds or
fails would have a significant impact on this area and commenting on the
business case related to a business and related businesses without any defined
history, similar business assets is very difficult and quite different from a
case where I was commenting on say a business case produced by an existing
airport operator.
There is also a sense in which this is a choice between RSP
and the site owners Stonehill Park where the business owners have a good track
record of running a successful business locally that has resulted in a
substantial amount of jobs and economic regeneration in this area.
Update
Update
I have now discovered that if you download the page on a pc
you get a different version to the version you can see when you first open the
page and this version is searchable. I for instance have just downloaded: -
“PIER Volume 8 (Appendix 10.1 part2)” all 408 pages of it.
To be honest it isn’t easy to define just what’s wrong with
these documents, nearest I can get is, if you asked a firm to design you a new
kitchen and send you their plans, sounds reasonable doesn’t it?
However if they then sent you a description of your exiting
kitchen, which included the full text of all of the food labels and cookery
books in the old kitchen’ whilst omitting important information, like how much
your new kitchen would cost or what colour or shape it would be. Then you are
on the right lines.
Somehow they have managed to publish several of the maps
embedded in pdfs that open as web pages in a way that you only see the corner
of the map often omitting Manston.
These are not huge maps, I have just copied one and published
it on the internet using ordinary html http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/617/31ac4fc0.gif
This isn’t really a matter of how you send the thing but
trying to make some sense of it prior to submitting it
Anyway here is an interesting local picture to cheer me up after a near impossible task
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.