Greenfield Airports - who's idea?
Someting I've been wondering about for a while, especially as the anti-CVT nimbys still keep trying to take the credit for defeating it:
Just exactly who came up with the idea of Rugby Airport?
As I understand it, the consultation document had to look at all options for the next 30 years. They looked at various other sites before putting Rugby in.
But why did they have to consider greenfield sites at all? Proposals for Cliffe & the Thames Estuary had been seen before, but suggestions for sites such as Rugby, Plymouth, Central Scotland etc came from nowhere.
IF there was ever an intention (or market conditions) to build these airport, THEN it would have been fair game to put them in. The white paper says the policy is now "to reject new airports on greenfield sites". All the consultation did was get hundreds of thousands of predictable responses saying "we don't want our country lanes turned into runways".
So why include them in the first place? There must have been someone in some government office wanting to push them. Conspiracy theorists would suggest:
a) The consultants for the report (Arups?) were paid on the volume of documents distributed, not on the quality of the document (which seemed to think Dubai was in India, according to the maps).
b) Some novice civil servant who's daddy ran lots of local papers.
c) It was simply a deliberate ploy to make approval of new runways at STN & LHR seem like a benign option compared to new mega-airports.
(c) Just seems to blatant. Could anyone else shed any more light on it?