Robin Hood Airport: robbin' workers to feed aviation bosses
Doncaster Robin Hood Airport has outlined its plans for continued expansion of passenger and freight through to 2030 in its Draft Airport Master Plan. How this fits into the recent UK commitment to reduce CO2 emissions is quite beyond us. Perhaps the passenger contribution towards tree planting, the £500 raised from cardboard recycling and the toilet fed by a grey water system somehow offset the global damage?
But sod climate change: these credit crunched times are all about job creation. Airport developers always dig up this old chestnut as a sure-fire vote winner, but is it actually true? Recent cost-cutting strategies within the aviation sector have resulted in hundreds of redundancies and measures such as automated check in are hardly going to help. Reports by John Whitelegg, Professor of Sustainable Transport at Liverpool John Moores University, and Wiz Baines of Groundswell show that airport expansion destroys more jobs than it creates through encouraging overseas tourism and investment, not to mention the economic impacts of environmental degradation, health damage and climate change.
However let's assume that a small number of low-paid, insecure, seasonal jobs with antisocial hours may indeed become available at Doncaster. Are these the kind of jobs we really need? And how would this compare to the opportunities created by transfering the large subsidies enjoyed by the aviation industry to more sustainable ventures: our rail network, for instance? Strangely, Peter Nears the Director of Strategic Planning at Doncaster Airport sums this up nicely himself: "Doncaster has always prospered in terms of connectivity - its railway linkages, for example, underpin the social and historic value of the town...and from that flows jobs".
The public consultation on the plans will commence on 3rd November and last for three months.