Doncaster Sheffield Airport: 'Huge opportunity' to bring defence sector jobs to South Yorkshire
There is a “massive opportunity” to attract organisations in the defence sector to South Yorkshire through the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield Airport, Oliver Coppard has said.
At an event in Leeds last week, Mr Coppard was asked about the potential of attracting the defence sector to Doncaster’s Gateway East, a 1,700 acre site with the airport at its heart which is set for major development work in the coming years.
In addition to reopening the airport, the Gateway East plans include the creation of 1,400 homes, a ‘Central Plaza’ town centre including new offices, shops and restaurants, an ‘Innovation Quarter’ home to advanced manufacturing and sustainable aviation businesses and space for logistics, aviation and aerospace company facilities.
Mr Coppard was in attendance at an event at the UK Real Estate and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) discussing the investment opportunities around Gateway East.
An audience member said: “Gateway East has two advantages to the defence sector; one is the runway and the proud history of RAF Finningley, the second is the proximity to the corporate leviathan that is Sheffield Forgemasters, one of the UK’s most important pieces of strategic infrastructure.”
When asked what parts of the defence sector it would be appropriate to try and attract to the area, Mr Coppard said: “I probably don’t want to speak in too much detail about the defence opportunities because there’s some technical stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be best in the public domain.
"But absolutely you are right about the opportunity. There’s a huge opportunity at Gateway East because of the size and scale of the runway.
"The runway we have is both wide enough and long enough to accept essentially any aircraft. What we know is more money is going to be going into the defence sector from this government and from other European governments and our allies.
"South Yorkshire and the North are very well-placed.
"There is a massive opportunity for us to work with the RAF, the aviation sector more broadly, about all sorts of opportunities that we could put in place.
"An obvious one is maintenance [and] how could use the airport to undertake maintenance for some of the aircraft in the RAF fleet in order to support the RAF in their increasing mission to keep Europe safe. There’s loads of things we could do; we have massive expertise and huge sites to be able to develop some of those ideas.”
The same session heard landowner Peel is “very close” to signing a deal with a national housebuilder for the first phase of housing on Gateway East, with work continuing on finding an anchor tenant for for the Innovation Quarter.
Last year, US giant Holtec downsized and delayed plans for Gateway East to be the site of a £1.5bn factory making nuclear reactors after the Government chose rival firm Rolls-Royce as its preferred bidder to build the country’s first small modular nuclear reactor.