As some of you may remember I attended the RiverOak
consultations related to turning the closed Manston airport in to an airfreight
hub.
For anyone not up to speed on this one Manston Airport is
situated on The Isle of Thanet which lies in the southeast most corner of the
UK, it started out as a WW1 airbase, was used as RAF airbase during WW2 and
later both by the RAF and the Americans during the cold war.
From the mid 1960s it has been used as a civilian airport,
first under RAF ownership i.e. shared military and commercial use and later as
just a civilian airport.
Manston’s main snags as an airport are first that it is
mainly surrounded by water meaning that it has a limited catchment area and
secondly that the town of Ramsgate is very close to the end of the runway, with
the flight path going over the town.
Various civilian operators have tried to make a go of
Manston since the mid 1960s, all have failed with the majority going bankrupt.
I think the main reason has been Manston’s isolated location
compared to the main UK airports in southern England, where the main transport
conduit is the M25, with Gatwick and Heathrow airports both situated on the
M25.
In recent years Manston has some foreign investment the last
being the major Austrailian and New Zealand transport company Infratil. My own
take is that they couldn’t believe that Manston’s 75 miles from London was seen
in the UK as a long way, my guess is that they based their reasoning on 75 miles
being just around the corner.
Anyway the last airport operator was too big to go bankrupt
and put Manston Airport on the market where it failed to sell for several for
several years, eventually like many loss making operations it was finally sold
as a going concern with liabilities for a nominal figure.
The new owner who has a considerable interest in UK
transport gave Manston a go for a bit but couldn’t find enough airlines,
passenger or freight that were prepared to fly from Manston.
Manston was put back on the market as a going concern.
One of the companies that tried to buy the site was the
American real estate hedge fund operator RiverOak, for one reason or another
their offers were rejected, my own guess is that this was because the are a
fund management company that thry would have to get external investors to come
up with the money.
I think had a major company with the funds available to by
the airport come forward at this point the airport would have survived as an
airport.
Manston was closed, most of the assets were sold, the staff
made redundant and the site was sold for a non-aviation use, light industry and
housing.
RiverOak then tried to get the local council to buy the site
using compulsory purchase powers, the idea was the council would try to by it
and that RiverOak would try to fund the purchase.
In the end the council failed to accept RiverOak, probably
for much the same reasons the previous owner wouldn’t sell to them, a bird in
the hand.
Now we have a situation where plans for the housing and
light industry have been submitted and RiverOak are still trying to acquire the
site for an airfreight hub.
This time they are trying to get the UK government to
acquire the site with RiverOak putting up the money, this is basically another
compulsory purchase, using the governments Development Consent Order
legislation, which is what the government uses to acquire land for major
infrastructure projects, like roads, railways and airports.
The absolute minimum size for a Development Consent Order is
10,000 airfreight movements a year, here is the published remit for RiverOak’s
palans:-
“The upgrade and reopening of Manston Airport primarily as a
cargo airport, with some passenger services, with a capacity of at least 12,000
air cargo movements per year.”
I have simplified the summery above as much as I can and I
expect there are some errors because of this, so any corrections either as
comments or by email are welcome.
Now we come to recent events, I went to RiverOaks presentation
in Canterbury and came away with mixed feelings, here are the two blog posts I
did about this.
Now to be honest all of the messing around trying to make
sure we don’t get involved in another Thanet disaster like Pleasurama, where a
company registered in a tax haven, that doesn’t have to publish regulated
accounts or who actually owns the company, gets hold of a major local asset and
fails to develop it. Well it’s time consuming and I would rather not bother if
the company involved don’t have the resources to proceed.
So after going to the consultation and coming away with the
feeling that something was not quite right because of what the RiverOak
representative said I wrote to the DFT and asked them the position.
The main things that the RiverOak rep said that worried me
were:-
That RiverOak are a private company and don’t have to
publish company details.
That any compensation paid by RiverOak would be minimal,
either for the 700 acre Manston site or to those suffering blight because of
their proximity to an airfreight hub with 12,000 aircraft movements a year and
no fuel pipeline. So all of the associated fright lorry movements freight and
fuel, generating the associated air and noise pollution.
That the Manston Green planning approval, both wasn’t near
the runway and wouldn’t affect the running of an airfreight hub at Manston.
That the discrepancies between the US and UK RiverOak
websites and the removal of the information about their substantial involvement
with aviation from their US website was due to a website update.
As I said in my previous posts, I went to the consultation
interested in the balance between the economic upside and the environmental
downside coming out in a positive way for Thanet. I left the consultation
because it became clear that the RiverOak rep was trying to take me into a
fantasy world. I have a background as a scientist and engineer as do a lot of
my friends and family, so I am used to lively and technical debate, however I
have a considerable weakness, which is that I find it very difficult to
converse with people who think the earth is flat or that the sun rotates around
the earth.
I guess what I should have done after the consultation was
to write to RiverOak asking them to confirm or deny what I had been told at the
consultation, I do have considerable difficulty with this sort of thing. How do
I start? So you don’t think Manston Green is next to the end of the runway. So
you think the earth is the centre of the universe with the sun and all of the
stars rotating around it.
My problem here is I think I know I am right, so the issues
are not open to debate, so how do I start this debate.
Anyway I shied away from this and put my concerns to the DFT
instead, below is their reply.
“Dear Mr Child
Apologies for the delay in responding to your emails of 29 July
and 22 July 2016.
In your email of 22 July 2016 you raise some queries in respect of
access to information about RiverOak, what checks are carried out by The
Planning Inspectorate during the Pre-Application stage into applicants and
noted an outline planning application in the vicinity of the Manston Airport
site.
In respect of the first point, The Inspectorate do not hold any
undisclosed information about this company or its financial dealings.
There is no legal requirement for an applicant to share such information with
The Inspectorate at the Pre-Application stage. However, where an application
involves any compulsory acquisition of land, which RiverOak would do as part of
their proposals for Manston Airport, the applicant would need to submit a
Funding Statement with the application documents.
A Funding Statement should provide
as much information as possible about the resource implications of both
acquiring the land and implementing the project for which the land is
required. Applicants should
be able to demonstrate that adequate funding is likely to be available to
enable them to carry out the compulsory acquisition within a statutory period
following a Development Consent Order being made, and that the resource
implications of a possible acquisition resulting from a blight notice has also
been taken into account. Unless an Examining Authority is satisfied that
funding will be available both for the carrying out of the project within the
statutory period and for the payment of compensation claims the compelling case
in the public interest test required by section 122(3) of the Planning Act will
not be met and the compulsory acquisition powers cannot be granted.
From your email it appears that you have verbally discussed these
matters with RiverOak. If you have not done so already, and noting your
point about limited acknowledgement or feedback to queries, I would strongly
encourage you to put your queries in writing to the company itself.
In respect of the “Manston Green” proposals, Thanet District
Council have been aware of the situation at Manston Airport in coming to their
decision to grant outline planning permission for this scheme. Now the
scheme has outline permission, RiverOak must consider any future development on
that site as part of their environmental assessment.
In your later email you make some further observations about a
recent consultation event held by RiverOak. I would encourage you to make
these comments known to RiverOak if you have not done so already to enable them
to consider the points in advance of any statutory consultation. Before
that statutory consultation occurs, the relevant authorities (Thanet District
Council and Kent County Council) must be consulted by RiverOak on the content of their Statement of Community Consultation.
The role of the local authority at this stage is to provide expertise about the
make-up of its area, including whether people in the area might have particular
needs or requirements, whether the authority has identified any groups as
difficult to reach and what techniques might be appropriate to overcome
barriers to communication. The
local authority may also provide advice on the appropriateness of the
developer’s suggested consultation techniques and methods. The local
authority’s aim in such discussions should be to ensure that the people
affected by the development can take part in a thorough, accessible and
effective consultation exercise about the proposed project. You may also
wish to send any observations to Thanet District Council in respect of
consultation activity.
Kind regards
Susannah”
On to the sketching, sitting
upstairs in Canterbury’s Chocolate CafĂ© today it occurred to me that there must
be a way of drawing people so it looks like you are looking down on them.
In the first instance the face is
roughly egg shaped, so assuming for an initial practice perfectly round would
be good enough I decided that looking down from an angle of 45 degrees the face
would become flattened so that it would be twice as wide as it is long.
After a bit I realised that the
whole head is spherical and so what you see would remain spherical, but the
features particularly the hair would move around the sphere.
In practice nothing works properly,
the problems associated with drawing heads is a complex one as the mind has a
very strong priori concept of what a head and particularly what a face should
look like. As you see moving the hair round, even putting a large crow on the
head doesn’t work, the rest of the face i.e the bit under the hair sort of
straightens itself out.
You can put large heads on small
bodies and vice versa and the brain makes this look normal, even a squiggle
that looks like a person soon becomes a person.
You can push the Debenhamsness of
Debenhams a pretty long way and it still looks like Debenhams, a bit more
practice and I should be able to accept that the sun goes round the earth.
