Mr T Cartner & Mr C Musgrave

Discovery Park Limited

Innovation House
Ramsgate Road
Sandwich CT13 9FF 10
th
October 2014

Dear Mr Cartner and Mr Musgrave,
A mixed use site at Manston

We are two local community groups No Night Flights and Manston Pickle that represent
residents who were affected by the operation of the former airport at Manston. We are
writing this letter because we were appalled by the antagonistic letter sent to you by Dr Beau
Webber, who is a joint leader of the campaign to open an airport on your site. He does not
speak for us, nor does he speak for the local residents who support us.
We want you to know that many, many local people are open to the idea of developing the
Manston site as a mixed use site. Many residents recognise the wisdom of having a site
which supports a number of employers rather than having a site that is dependent on just
one failing employer. Many residents were delighted to hear that you were taking over the
site and hope that you will be successful in creating sustainable employment here.
Wherever you go, the issue of housing is a sensitive one. However, many local people
recognise that Thanet District Council (TDC) is under an obligation to build a certain number
of new homes, and that, if no brownfield sites can be found, significant housing development
will have to take place on greenfield sites. Given that choice, local residents tell us that
sensitive redevelopment of the Manston site in a way that genuinely balances job creation,
local services and house building is preferable to the loss of agricultural and other greenfield
land to housing development.
We summarise below a different view to the one that Dr Webber has given you of the
Manston site and the likelihood of it ever being developed as a successful airport. We hope
you find it useful.
We have been involved with the airport as an issue for years. We have a wealth of
documented facts behind what we say. In the interests of keeping this letter short, we have
not set out exhaustive references for each point that we have made. However, we do have
the hard evidence to support our points its all available on request.

There is no widespread local support for an airport
Claims are made that the community wants the Manston site to return to being an airport.
This is not what local people tell us. Heres what we know about the origin of these claims:
On 10
th
July 2014 two petitions were submitted to Thanet District Council. One was an e-
petition organised by Oscar Maynard (Save Manston Airport Group) who lives in Holland.
This was signed by 3,361 people. The petition prayer reads:
We the undersigned petition the council to make a compulsory purchase of Manston,
Kents International Airport. We would also like Thanet District Council to look into the
possibility of members of the public to buy bonds into this purchase."
There were also 4,330 signatures on a paper petition which had the same petition prayer
as the e-petition. Our FoIA requests revealed that neither petition was checked for
duplications. We know from reading Save Manston Associations Facebook page that
some people did sign the petition more than once and that a surprisingly large number of
signatories live a long way from Thanet and from Kent. Indeed, a number live abroad. No
check was done to see if the signatures were those of real people. The Council reported
that some signatories gave neither a full name nor an address. It is clear from this that
the petition cannot be taken as an indicator of what people in Thanet and East Kent
want.

Other petitions are now being put together in a bid to develop an airport on your site.
One petitioner is working his way around Kent, telling people that, if they sign the petition
to reopen the airport, 6,500 jobs will be created and a massive, overspill housing estate
of 60,000 houses, filled with out-of-towners will be avoided. Clearly, his claims have no
basis in fact, but people are signing the petition because they want to avoid a sink
estate (their term) being built on the Manston site.
Many of the key people who are shaping the campaign for an airport at Manston do not live
in Thanet:
Sir Roger Gale MP lives in Preston a quiet little village to the West of Thanet
Keith Churcher lives in Wouldham a quiet little village to the South of Rochester. He is
opposed to an Estuary Airport being built near him
Beau Webber lives in Littlebourne a quiet little village to the East of Canterbury
Mike Barker lives in Dunton Green a quiet little village to the North of Sevenoaks
Nicholas Reed lives in Folkestone
Oscar Maynard comes from Deal and is a university student, living in Holland.
It is clear that unverified petitions, set up by people who do not live here and signed by many
people who live nowhere near the airport, have panicked the Council into believing that they
must pursue the idea of carrying out a CPO of the site and reopening it as an airport.

Are people speaking out against the idea of an airport on your site? Yes. However, a number
of people who have spoken out against the idea of opening an airport on your site have
been subjected to aggressive and intimidatory behaviour from airport fans. This discourages
local residents from speaking out publicly for fear of being targeted in the same way. The
impact of this is that the voices of many of those who want to see real progress on and a
new future for your site are not being heard.
On the upside, the general nastiness of a number of the Save Manston and Support
Manston people has prompted some Councillors to rethink their position there is a sea
change. Some Councillors who were formerly in the an airport at any cost camp are now
questioning the likelihood of a CPO ever being successfully completed and the likelihood of
a new airport at Manston ever successfully generating more than a handful of jobs. Some
Councillors see your acquisition and your announcement of plans for a mixed use site as a
game-changer. Others have been put off by the behaviour of some of the Save/Support
Manston supporters and are distancing themselves from these groups. The time is ripe for
an alternative positive use for the site to be discussed constructively with the Council.
Manston failed as an airport and will fail again
All the evidence, past experience, and recent commentary by aviation sector experts points
to the clear conclusion that, were the CPO to be successful, a new airport at Manston has no
chance of success.
After 15 years in private hands, the former RAF base at Manston has not been the
hoped-for engine of regeneration for Thanet. It has never made a profit, despite
benefitting from hand-outs of public money from Kent County Council and from Visit Kent
As you know, after 18 months on the market, the entire operation was bought by Ms
Gloag for a nominal 1. This is a clear indicator that the aviation sector knows that
Manston is not viable as an airport
All attempts at running passenger operations at Manston airport have failed. In the fifteen
years of the airports commercial life, several airlines (EUJet, Flybe, and KLM) have each
tried to introduce passenger operations. All of them have failed to attract enough
passengers to make the routes viable. The most recent, KLM, withdrew from Manston in
April this year having achieved an average load factor for the year of less than 44.4%
The much-vaunted freight operations at Manston accounted for just 1.29% of the
national total
The employment and economic potential of the airport have always been greatly
exaggerated, and have not materialised. Manstons third owners, Infratil, consistently
promised large numbers of jobs and just as consistently failed to deliver. In October
2008, Infratil produced an Airport Master Plan that said that Manston would have
1,200,000 passengers by 2010. On the strength of this, Infratil said it would create 1,200
jobs
Despite the grandiose claims, after 15 years of operating as an airport in private hands,
this 720 acre site has generated just 144 mostly part-time jobs. The average salary of
these workers was below the level of the average salary for Thanet.
This summer, TDC commissioned Falcon Consultants to assess the viability of opening an
airport on the Manston site. Their report concluded that:
No business plan with a credible investment plan of less than 20 years is likely to define
the commitment necessary to rebuild confidence. Phase 1 investment required could be
in the order of 100m with no guarantees of success. Political support will be required to
attract investors and PR work will be needed to convince the airlines. There is no
guarantee of success in anything that is suggested as a possible future for the site, even
if local and national government were to give the site all possible support and back it all
the way.
Despite this, the suggestion put forward to TDC by RiverOak, who hope to acquire the site if
TDC can take it from you via a CPO, is that a cargo airport could successfully be developed
at Manston. No account seems to have been taken of the fact that fifteen years of past
attempts failed to develop a successful cargo operation at Manston. Not only is Manston out
on a limb geographically, which is the antithesis of what cargo operators need, but, as the
Falcon report acknowledged this summer:
The climate for cargo-only aircraft operations could not be much worse.
There is no evidence-based business plan that demonstrates that a new airport at Manston
would succeed where the old airport consistently failed. There is certainly no evidence to
suggest that the American real estate investors, RiverOak, could operate their first ever
airport at Manston and somehow succeed where experienced airport operators before them
have failed.
The night flight constraint
The airports third owners, Infratil, insisted that the airport could only be successful if
scheduled night flights were allowed. The airport has never had planning permission to be
an airport. It operated under two Certificates of Lawful Development and a S.106
Agreement. The S.106 agreement did not prohibit unscheduled night flights. Residents were
frequently woken by the arrival and departure during the night of 747-400 planes carrying
perishable goods. Mobile noise monitors on Ramsgate house roofs regularly recorded noise
levels of Lmax (dB) 92.6, SEL (dB) 100 and Leq (dB) 86.0 in the small hours of the morning.
Infratil made two separate applications to be allowed to have scheduled night flights. The
Council commissioned independent experts to look at the potential impact of night flights.
The experts calculated that a 747 taking off at night over Ramsgate (which was what was
being suggested) would create a noise footprint that would affect 30,903 people.
The issue was live during the local government election of 2011. Labour stood in Thanet on
a No Night Flights manifesto. Bucking the national swing to the right, Labour took control of
the Council, putting their success down to their No Night Flights stance. This is an indication
of the strength of opposition to night flights being introduced at the airport. A later public
consultation about whether scheduled night flights should be allowed resulted in an emphatic
no result. This suggests that any plan to reopen a cargo airport at Manston will be
constrained by strong local opposition to night flights being introduced.

The Environmental Impact Assessment constraint
As the former airport has never gone through the planning process, no Environmental
Impact Assessment has ever been done. Correspondence between the Environment Agency
and the airport makes it very clear that the Environment Agency had grave concerns about
the former airport and that it wanted Infratil to do some significant remedial work. Were the
idea of a new airport on the Manston site to be pursued, a full Environmental Impact
Assessment would need to be done and significant changes would need to be made to the
airports infrastructure.
The Public Safety Zone constraint
In addition to the foregoing obstacles, were the airport to reopen and were it ever to be
developed successfully, there would be a constraint put on Ramsgates future development
by the need to introduce an appropriate Public Safety Zone to the west of the town. This
would prevent domestic development in the blighted area.
Job creation
We are heartened by the fact that you have a track record of job creation. More importantly,
we are heartened by the fact that you have been able to create jobs locally.
We have already set out above the airports miserable track record of job creation. Despite
this, rumours are circulating that you are open to the idea of adapting your plan for the site to
include an airport alongside your new employment and housing development. Our
experience suggests that this is a non-starter. Manston airport and its proximity to the town
of Ramsgate has acted as a deterrent to employers seeking to move jobs away from
London. We worked with an experienced relocation consultant, who told us of two different
technology companies who came to Ramsgate with a view to taking advantage of the new
High Speed rail link to London and moving their growing companies here. Having visited
Ramsgate, both companies rejected it, citing as their reason their view that their London
employees would not want to move to a town that is so close to the end of a runway.
We cannot see how a mixed use development of the kind that you are suggesting can
operate successfully alongside a cargo airport. In addition, the development of a cargo hub
at Manston would impact negatively on Ramsgate, which is an attractive coastal town with
strong potential as a tourist destination.
The way forward
Many people fear that a vast sink estate (their words) with no employment opportunities will
be built on the Manston site. They believe that an airport on the site is a good way of
preventing that from happening. What Thanet really needs is job creation. If you can
demonstrate that your plans have a good chance of delivering more jobs than the airport
ever delivered, you will find that many people will support you. Even better, if you can
demonstrate that you can quickly create more jobs than the airport supported at its peak of
employment, you will win support from many Councillors. A credible prospect of 150 jobs
created in the short term will help local decision-makers to get comfortable with the idea that
creating thousands of jobs will take longer.
TDCs search for an indemnity partner who will fund a CPO seems to us to be fundamentally
flawed. We cannot see how a partner can possibly be chosen when nobody has valued the
Manston site, and therefore nobody knows how deep that partners pockets will need to be if
it is to be able to see the process through. We have been given advice that suggests that the
site is worth a lot more than the numbers that have been made public to date. Perhaps it
would help to shape the debate if a proper valuation were done? If we are right and your site
is worth much more than the (ever-increasing) numbers that RiverOak has talked about so
far, then the Councils proposed indemnity partners will have no choice but to withdraw.
In summary, please dont believe that Save Manston and Support Manston are the voice of
the local majority. There is no evidence to suggest that they are. Please dont compromise
this opportunity to develop the site in a way that will deliver jobs and a sustainable
community environment. Thanet has lived with fifteen years of being told that Manston
airport is the answer to all regeneration dreams and has been badly let down by successive
Council administrations leaning heavily on the airport in their economic strategy for Thanet.
There are many local people who are very supportive of your outline vision and who would
love to see you deliver it. Please do not be deterred!