A former owner of Cardiff Airport has said he warned Welsh Government ministers that he saw "danger in the future" of the airport back in the early 2000s and that it was in the "wrong place".
Sir Stanley Thomas owned Cardiff Airport until 2004 through his business TBI and sold it to Barcelona-based Abertis, before it was bought by the Welsh Government in 2013. He said the Welsh Government's determination to keep the facility afloat was "throwing good money after bad money" and he could see the airport ceasing to exist in five years time.
Sir Stanley echoed the words of David Bryon, an ex-director of BMI Baby, who earlier this week said Cardiff Airport was built in the wrong place to attract enough passengers to make it viable and that no-one in their "right mind" would invest in the airport.
TBI owned the airport between 1995 and 2004 and during that period annual passenger numbers almost doubled from one to two million. Following Abertis’s takeover of TBI, passenger numbers continued to rise and reached a peak of 2.09 million in 2007, but rapidly declined soon after. The Welsh Government acquired the airport for £52 million in 2013 when the then First Minister Carwyn Jones declared it a "good example of value for money" and said his priority was to increase passenger numbers. You can get more Cardiff news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
Read more: 'A bottomless pit for taxpayers' cash' Where did it all go so wrong for Cardiff Airport?
In 2021, Cardiff served just 123,000 passengers. That compares to 2.08m for Bristol, 6.2m for Gatwick and 19.3m for Heathrow. But even since coronavirus restrictions have been lifted, the most recently available figures show that in the year to October, 2022, the Welsh airport had recovered to handle just 811,000 passengers. Sir Stanley said: "It's throwing good money after bad money and it will continue that way because it's not going anywhere. Cardiff Airport cannot be enhanced in any way at all."
Sir Stanley said his company was making £8million a year when he sold up, but he'd already realised that the future of the airport was constrained by a chronic lack of infrastructure. He said he talked to Mr Jones' predecessor, Rhodri Morgan, and told him that until infrastructure was put in place then Cardiff was going nowhere.
"I told him I saw danger in the future for the airport not succeeding because it was in the wrong place," he said. "When the Welsh Government bought it I was concerned about numbers dropping. I loved the way we had developed it and how profitable it was. But I felt that something needed to be done."
If no new junction off the M4 to Rhoose was possible, Sir Stanley believed the only solution was to mothball the site and develop a new airport east of Cardiff, near Magor.
He said: "I approached Carwyn Jones and said this airport is never going to succeed in the position that it's in." He said he told Mr Jones to consider an amalgamation with Bristol Airport, another airport constrained by its location. Bristol - owned by the Canadian-based Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan - is unable to expand further due to planning constraints. Sir Stanley thinks, "together with Bristol they could do something truly great".
He admitted that such an idea would need buy-in from the Canadian investors and estimated it would cost around £2 billion to build, but he thought that in the long term benefits would be worth it. "It could look after all of south Wales, all of the Westcountry and up to Reading and Gloucester," he said. It could take 20 million passengers every year and the infrastructure is already in place to service it. Unlike Cardiff, which is too difficult to get to, somewhere east of the capital already has access to London Paddington thanks to the railway and a ready pool of passengers.
But his proposition was met by indifference and he dropped it. Sir Stanley added: "That was my thought at the time and I haven't changed those thoughts. Sooner or later this airport [Cardiff] is going to go into liquidation. If it wasn't for the Welsh Government keeping it afloat then that's what would happen." Anyone with any "common sense and business sense" would see that he said. "They cannot afford to keep taking taxpayer's money and throwing it away," he continued.
"These are politicians. Businessmen have a different vision. That airport isn't going to exist in five years."
Cardiff Airport has faced huge challenges to keep carriers - before it fell into administration at the start of the pandemic in March, 2020, Flybe was Cardiff Airport’s largest airline, providing 27% of its passenger numbers in 2018. And, just nine months after launching routes from Cardiff Airport, budget airline Wizz Air officially withdrew from the Barry base this month.
"Airlines don't see Cardiff as the ideal airport to fly from," Sir Stanley added. "Its been like that ever since the low cost carrier came into play. They didn't feel that Cardiff was a good position. First it was BMI Baby and now Wizz Air; the infrastructure is wrong."
A spokesman for the Welsh Government said: "Since the pandemic, demand for air travel across the world has fallen. Despite this, and the downturn in the UK economy, we are committed to maintaining an airport in Wales and have put in place a recovery package designed to make Cardiff Airport self-sustainable and profitable for the future.”
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