When Doncaster Council signed a 125-year lease to take over the Doncaster Sheffield Airport site in March 2024, it was celebrated as a key step in the journey on bringing the site back to life.

But despite the document remaining confidential until a dramatic leak to The Yorkshire Post this week, it was already apparent that the terms of the council’s agreement with Peel were proving problematic.

When the deal was signed, Mayor of Doncaster Ros Jones hailed the agreement as a “major step in the reopening process” and thanked “council officers who have worked tirelessly with great dedication, insight, determination and skill to get us to where we are today” after more than a year of negotiations.

She said the next step would would be appointing an operator and investor to take on the running of the airport – a point echoed by Mayor of South Yorkshire Oliver Coppard who said he was “very pleased” a lease had been agreed and that attention could now turn to finding a private sector operator.

placeholder image — Plans to reopen Doncaster Sheffield Airport under public sector control have progressed after attempts to sign up a private operator did not come to fruition. Photograph by Tony Johnson. 9th September 2025.

But by the end of the same year, no private operator had been secured – leading to a revised plan for the council to reopen it themselves through a council-owned company called FlyDoncaster.

The mayor’s office would not initially sign-off on funding for the plan and said in early 2025 that the “complex lease structure” was one of the factors that had “restricted private investor appetite” in the project. It described conditions within the lease as “a limiting factor in the ability to generate the long-term stability needed to attract private investment”.

It delayed a decision on releasing funding until September 2025 – only after “requesting” that the council renegotiated the lease with Peel and expressing particular alarm about the break clauses around passenger numbers.

While the decision on the funding was done with a great deal of fanfare, with the vote taken in front of an invited audience at the DSA site, among the conditions for actually releasing the cash was the need to change the lease.

As things stand, that is yet to happen and it is unclear when the issue will be resolved – and what the price of making such changes will be.