Lee Baker Street. So who is making slanderous statements? I don’t think anyone here is anti-airport but there are a few of us here that can smell a rat and can see what is going on.
Recently the Council spent £3.2m on buying the Eden Farm factory next to the Holiday Inn, as the lorry loading bay area is required for a viaduct for the Terminal 2 access road. This despite the planning application coming from the airport owner London Luton Airport Ltd but then LLAL has no money and no income. Not content with spending £3.2m, the sitting long term tenant moves out at the same time (or were they forced), leaving the council with an annual bill of £513,000 in rental costs as they don’t own the freehold plus security costs of £140,000 for a road that might not be built for years or never built if the DCO is not approved. This from a Council that was bailed out by the government to the tune of £38m, as they claimed they didn’t have enough money to pay for social services.
The T2 access road has a history of its own, which was disguised in a planning application for Century Park. The business case was rubbished by the Council's Finance Scrutiny Group in 2019 and the Scrutiny Group's damning verdict was confirmed by the Executive Committee when they considered it a month later.
On September 23rd this year the Finance Scrutiny meeting went into secret session and this time approved the £100m spending, which will be funded by the Council. They offered no explanation why they thought the Council should be spending millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on a project their own Executive Committee had agreed was not supported by a financially sound business case but then we all know this has nothing to do with Century Park and everything to do with T2.
Next month the airport owner decides on a planning application by the airport operator to expand capacity to 19m without making any alterations to the terminal to alleviate overcrowding that is set to get worse. Unlike most airport related meetings it will be held in public with the charade being held over 2 nights. The Council advised the airport operator to cancel and then resubmit the planning application, which looks identical, thus removing 450 objections at a stroke. So why was this? No one knows, as that meeting was held in secret. I will tell you the result. The application will be approved with every Labour Councillor on the planning committee voting in favour while the Lib Dems will vote against. How Stansted, Gatwick and other airports would love to approve their own expansion plans with no Council interference or objections, as this is part of LLAL’s master plan. What we don't know is whether LLAL are paying the airport operator to put in the application.
While all this is going own on I am seeing evidence that the Council is not paying all of its bills despite court judgements so will they go bust first?