Doncaster Sheffield Airport: Council silent after further leak allows councillors to side-step “gag order”
The City of Doncaster Council has remained silent after dozens of pages from the confidential lease agreement with the Peel Group for Doncaster Sheffield Airport (DSA) was leaked on social media.
Screenshots of pages and, at one stage, a downloadable PDF were posted on local Facebook groups over the weekend and on Monday, February 23, 2026.
Not all pages in the DSA lease between Doncaster Council and Peel are contained within the screenshots or downloadable file, however, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) confirmed the pages were included in the documents leaked to the media in January 2026.
The LDRS approached Doncaster Council asking for the latest leak, but did not receive any response.
Following the leak to journalists in January, Doncaster Council offered city councillors copies of the lease, so long as they signed an agreement not to discuss the details openly.
The agreement was labelled a “gag order” by opposition councillors who refused to sign.
However, the LDRS understands that some councillors who did not sign the agreement to view the lease were able to download the PDF document leaked on social media.
One of those is the Advance UK group leader, Councillor Nicola Brown, who said she found the document “deeply concerning”.
“As a councillor representing one of the most deprived wards in the borough, I cannot stay silent when public money is being handled in this way,” Coun Brown, who was elected to represent Adwick & Carcroft in May 2025, said.
“This lease appears to hand significant financial advantage to Peel, the very company that closed our airport, while locking Doncaster taxpayers into escalating costs for generations,” she added.
Reporting by the LDRS and Yorkshire Post in January 2026 revealed a number of clauses in the lease agreement, including break clauses linked to planning approvals and passenger targets higher than the council’s own high-end projections.
The lease is actively being renegotiated, as required by the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) in September 2025.
In a recent statement to the LDRS, Mayor Ros Jones said the renegotiations were “progressing well” and “almost completed”.