In a closing letter to the Development Consent Order (DCO) Examination, the Head of the Luton Rising (LR) DCO Team made the following statements:
“This application is not, as it appears at face value, to be about growing our airport. Whilst of course there are commercial benefits to growth, the real driving force behind our application is to optimise the social and economic benefits for the people of Luton and the surrounding area.
The airport is the town’s largest and most economically powerful asset, and it is incumbent upon Luton Rising, as the custodian of that asset, to ensure that it is used to deliver maximum social and economic benefit in the most sustainable way possible.”
The full letter can be found under reference REP10-001:
As we have referenced in the past, the mantra of LR has always been “everything we do, we do it for you”, and this Statement above again attempts to enforce this gossamer flimsy illusion.
LR is all about social benefits for Luton, yet it has never attempted to create any job opportunity for the residents of Luton except for the DART transit link, and its own continually swelling staff numbers of course. Rather than really delivering the social improvement of Luton residents by providing a wider gambit of employment opportunity, such as the thousands of forward-looking green jobs being created elsewhere, it has focused millions of pounds on just one employment site, the airport.
LR has a duty to ensure that the airport delivers the maximum social and economic benefit to Luton in the most sustainable way possible.
Time now to revisit the “game changing” DART project.
This as you are aware, is the transit link between Luton Parkway and the central terminal area. This is a project that has no social impact on the quality of life for any Luton resident, apart from a few low paid jobs in customer service.
This is a project that LR state has not been built as part of their plans to increase airport capacity. The fact that its path appears to have been designed to extend to the new terminal site in Wigmore Valley Park, is purely coincidental. This is a project which appears to have been started with no viable business case to actually make money. This is a project that replaced a system paid for by the train operators, and had tickets that were significantly less expensive than DART. This is a project that appears to have been built to give airlines at Luton the signal that LR is serious about future airport expansion, and to persuade them not to transfer services to other airports.
This decision shines another searchlight on the ethics of LR, because they have spent the last six months of the DCO Examination vehemently denying that DART had nothing to do with future expansion plans.
This is the project that cost £361 million to build, which with interest of around 10%, gives an actual cost of £397 million. This is the project that now will only recover £100 million of those costs.
So, the question is, what could £297 million have achieved in social and economic benefits to the residents of Luton?
Luton Borough Council, the parent company of LR, continually reports a lack of housing in Luton. Using the services of Mr Google, we came up with the following costings for building a house in 2024:-
2 bedroom house £50,000-£100,000
3 bedroom house £126,000-£300,000
If we use the median of the figures above, one of each of the above could be provided for a total of £288,000.
Based on these figures, and from the unrecoverable spend on DART, there could have been 1,031 new houses built for Luton.
1,031 new Council houses, never mind socially affordable, all could have become Council house stock, built to use far less energy than existing homes.
“The airport is the town’s largest and most economically powerful asset, and it is incumbent upon Luton Rising, as the custodian of that asset, to ensure that it is used to deliver maximum social and economic benefit in the most sustainable way possible.”
Social and economic impact ….. a train set that will never turn a profit, or a roof over 1,031 families’ heads?
Luton Rising – Guardians of the Luton Universe?
OR the financial black hole swallowing Luton in a quagmire of debt?