I had a long conversation with an aviation business owner based there yesterday. Apparently the situation is thus:
What’s nice here from an aviation point of view (you may take a different view on how local government should work) is that the council have clearly taken a position that they’ll simply not allow the owners to make a killing from change of use to housing. When the owners decided to adopt a tactic of letting it rot in the hope of later gaining planning permission, they dived in and did what they needed to do to prevent the demolition of the buildings (and thus the effective closure of the airfield). So it seems they’re not just sitting back and performing their functions, they’re actively pursing an agenda of protecting the airfield and preventing housing development – to the point of trying to head off whatever tactics the owners adopt.
As a small add on, I understood also that the lawyers acting for the owners took a stake in the proposed development, which in everyones view skewed the fight. This rightly annoyed certain members of the council.
Appears to be a classic case of asset stripping to the detriment of the local area. Owners sound a right charming bunch….
That sounds like taking a stake in lieu of payment…. because I’d imagine the legal bill, on a time and materials basis, would be pretty big by now.
The owners are the Littler family – they own the airfield through Littler Investments Ltd. The ‘developers’ are a firm called Gladman, who presumably the Littlers don’t have to pay up front but who take a significant cut if and when planning permission is gained. No reason that a firm of lawyers might not choose to engage in the same way, although the legal profession is not renowned for flexible payment arrangements.
It would be wrong to pillory the owners. The family owned the land historically, handed it over during the war, bought it back again afterwards and have every right to seek to maximise it’s potential, as countless others have done. Members of the family work at the airfield and farm the land. Employees of their businesses have taken an active part in the ‘Wellesbourne matters’ support group.
Ask yourself; If it was your land, what would you do? One difference might be to seek a better quality of advice than that apparently chosen in this case.
It remains to be seen if the businesses achieve the long term leases that they are seeking. If they do, we may see a significant increase in investment at the site since the airfield itself has an enduring popularity with the GA community. I for one hope that Wellesbourne prospers and that some of that prosperity flows back to the owners in the form of rents and business interests. Whatever you may think of their handling of the situation, they do own the land and they are entitled to get a return from it.
That’s true but if I was the landowner I would not chuck out a tenant who has a reasonable business on the land unless I found him an alternative accommodation. Or unless I paid suitable compensation, but that’s difficult because while money can enable a relocation of e.g. a warehouse or a factory, it won’t replace the amenity of a runway. Money probably will replace a runway for many people, because at any point in time many are looking to hang up their headsets / shut their businesses, anyway.
What this ultimately shows is that the future of any UK airport is tied to the policy of the local council. If the council wants the airport to be an airport, the developers can basically p1ss in the wind. The moment the council no longer wants the airport to be an airport, it is game over and you better all either chuck it in or start looking for 800×20m patches of grass in the vicinity 
Exactly the same at Shoreham…
Aveling wrote:
Whatever you may think of their handling of the situation, they do own the land and they are entitled to get a return from it.
Hmmmm. They own the land and are entitled to do what they like with it, within the constraints of the planning system. I would dispute that they are ‘entitled to get a return from it’ – no-one is has a fundamental right to succeed in business/make a profit.
Of course you’re right in that if it was my land I would probably seek maximum return, i.e. sale for housing. But I don’t think I’d ever suggest that it was my right to build houses on it: building houses is subject to planning permission, which is subject to local government approval, and those are the rules we all play by.
For what it’s worth I believe it’s a failure of housing policy and population-management policy (or lack thereof) that the holy grail for pretty much any landowner in the country is getting planning permission for a large housing development. If these things were properly managed and the residential property market wasn’t so grossly distorted then the merits of a housing development as a business plan would be much the same as any other business plan – in that it could make money or could lose money depending on how good a job you do of it. The fact that it’s a nailed-on goldmine with essentially no risk whatsoever so long as you can get planning permission shows that things are horribly distorted.
Graham wrote:
They own the land and are entitled to do what they like with it, within the constraints of the planning system
Some very good points there Graham. I looked at purchasing an active airfield ten years ago. Owner wanted 5 times what the actual land was worth because a surveyor, obviously with an eye on a big fee, valued the business and land asset wrongly. Whether we like it or not an airfield valuation is brown field value unless planning for development is in place. We were going to utilise some of the land for housebuilding, which in turn would fund a runway extension, and a GPS approach, blah blah. We offered the owner a million cash upfront, and a stake in the house development which would return an additional 1.5m. Nope, I want 4.5m. Naturally we walked away. He is still there, with a similar want on his price tag, with the square root of zero interest because in a good day the land is still brown field and worth 800k.
The problem is that developers have so many projects on the go, they can take a long term view, and when Planning is finally obtained somewhere, the profit is massive, and pays for a lot of stagnant projects elsewhere. Farmers do the same thing: they hold onto land for as long as possible.
In the long run, we are all doomed… the only way forward will be to create an airfield somewhere, preceeded by a lot of aircraft owners sticking their hands deeply in their pockets – like they do in some other countries but never in the UK.
The only futureproof way to own an airfield is to have a board of trustees so that when one person dies, others remain, so you avoid the typical scenario of a GA-keen owner dying and his non-GA-keen wife taking an offer from a developer. Obviously this scenario is a caricature but it is a common one. The other great benefit of trustees is that when (not if) somebody divorces, the place doesn’t form a part of the matromonial assets.
With Wellesbourne, the owner wants to kick GA out and he can’t, which is a fairly unusual role reversal. But didn’t the same happen with Dunsfold (so far)?
That’s atrocious…
