SLAE (Stop Luton Airport Expansion) is writing this article on the 14th November 2024, the day when construction of a new skate park at Wigmore Valley Park is meant to be complete. The facility was delivered by Luton Rising (LR) as part of a Section 106 agreement, a part of the Planning Permission for Green Horizons Business Park/ New Century Park (GHP), for the skateboarders in the local community to enjoy.
Readers may be wondering what this project has to do with airport expansion? Wigmore Valley Park is the proposed site of Terminal 2 in expansion plans, and the planning permission for GHP was the key enabler for this airport expansion.
The picture at the head of this article was taken on the 13th November, and in the background you can see that physical evidence of the “artist’s impressions” of the skate park is nowhere to be seen.
And there is a Notice next to this banner, posted by the Health & Safety Executive, entitled a Notification of Construction Project, shown below, and this Notice was created on the 26th June 2024, and details how construction started on the 27th June and that LR had allocated 20 weeks for construction.
Here we are 20 weeks later, and we just have the site fencing, a few wooden stakes and a hole with the earth piled beside it. There was a site office cabin on site, but that disappeared on the 13th.
What’s wrong, you may ask Dear Reader, and why haven’t these facilities been delivered?
We suspect the works have stopped as LR awaits the outcome of its Development Consent Order (DCO) application. This in turn raises the question as to why this faux start on the project happened?
The Planning Application for GHP expired on the 28th June 2024, so if LR had not started any construction work the approval would lapse. The progress of this application was also requested by the Department for Transport (DfT) as part of their adjudication of LR’s DCO application. LR – desperate to keep that application alive – put up the fences and dug a random hole and told the DfT the project was now live. GHP passed planning approval by Luton Borough Council (LBC) in 2017, and again in 2019, on a project that was never about creating a business park and bringing employment to the town, but solely about delivering the four-lane access road to the site of Terminal 2 in their expansion plans.
The funding for this road was never viable for a business park; both LBC and LR tried their hardest to fund it, but luckily the financial institutions saw through the smoke and kept their money. The road is now part of the DCO application.
LR still isn’t paying the dividend due to LBC from the concession fee it collects each year from the airport operator. It must keep all that money to fund its debt stream repayments to LBC, fund the over budget DCO, and take on a regular stream of new highly paid staff. All these “essential” out goings are all obviously infinitely more important than actually paying for something you sign up for in “supposedly” legally binding planning conditions. They are all more important than building an asset for the residents of Luton, who after all, we are told are the true owners of Luton Airport.
Transfer this attitude to the DCO, and it simply reiterates what numerous objectors to the DCO pointed out, you simply can’t trust LR or LBC for that matter, to deliver the “Green Controlled Growth” strategy the DCO application is built on. LR says it will ensure that the quality of life of the public, and impacts on the environment, are now more important than the commercial interests of themselves, the Airport Operator and the airlines. None of these have paid more than the scantest lip service to any such obligations before, but we are meant to believe they are now at the core of their expansion plans.
However, LR can find £4 million to fund the development of restaurant facilities in the terminal building.
- LR can find funding to add well paid staff posts to its ranks, when only ten years ago, its employees numbered single figures.
- LR can find funding, and then write off circa £260 million, plus loan interest, of that funding, for DART
- LR can find funding for battalions of legal/environmental experts for its DCO application.
- But LR can’t find funding for a public facility, that they are legally obliged to provide.