Crunch meeting held before key airport loan vote

A last-minute meeting between senior officials and city councillors has been held ahead of a critical vote affecting the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield Airport.

City of Doncaster Council chief executive Damian Allen requested councillors attend the meeting on Wednesday to explain the importance of a £57m loan agreed in November 2025.

After details of the council's lease with the landowners the Peel Group were leaked in January, Reform UK, the majority party on the council, announced its intention to rescind its approval for the loan.

A vote on whether to withdraw the loan will take place at an extraordinary meeting of the council on Monday.

Councillor Jason Charity, deputy leader of Reform UK, said in April that his party had not been given the appropriate information to make the original approval on the loan.

One senior opposition councillor told the Local Democracy Reporting Service their main takeaway from Wednesday's meeting was that Doncaster Council "still has no lease" that is workable for the airport as talks with Peel are on hold.

A Labour Party councillor, who did not want to be named, said they did not believe the meeting would change opposition councillors' plans.

"I think Reform will still continue with their proposal on Monday, though anything can change between now and then," they said.

Council papers for next week's meeting state the renegotiation of the lease, which is required for the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) to release £160m in funding for the reopening, had stalled amid the uncertainty over the loan and on a controversial "turnover rent" clause.

The same report revealed a significant risk to the airport reopening if the loan was rescinded.

It stated that without alternative funding the site "would have no future as an airport" and added that if the reopening did not go ahead, the council would need to pay the £50m cost of closing the project.

That does not include the cost of redundancies for the staff already employed by Fly Doncaster Ltd, the arms-length company established by the council to run the airport.

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