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The Welsh Government could have considered selling struggling Cardiff airport had the coronavirus pandemic not happened, Wales former economy minister has claimed. The government bought the airport in 2013 for £52m, but a decade on and it is struggling with falling passenger numbers and unable to retain airlines.
Last year the airport was valued at just £15m, less than a third of what the Welsh Government paid for it. Ministers have also written off £42.6m of debt and pumped an additional £158m into the airport. Despite this, figures show its recovery still lags behind other major UK airports as they recover from Coronavirus.
So much so that earlier this year it’s own CEO admitted it was a “long way” from being profitable. Despite the influx of people looking to travel abroad last year after the easing of covid restrictions, the airport carried just over 122,000 passengers in July.
Read more: ‘A bottomless pit for taxpayers’ cash’ Where did it all go so wrong for Cardiff Airport?
But before coronavirus caused havoc for the travel industry, the airport had been making positive gains. Passenger numbers grew to 1.7m a year after falling to one million in 2012, just before the government’s take over.
Now, 10 years after the takeover and Wales’ former economy minister Ken Skates has said that the government could have considered selling the airport after making the positive strides to retain passenger numbers had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic. Now a backbench Labour MS, Mr Skates was the minister in charge of the airport from 2016 – 2021.
“I’m in no doubt had Covid not happened we would have passed two million passengers per year by now and be very competitive with other airports,” he told the BBC’s Politics Wales programme.
Asked if that meant the government would have been able to consider selling the airport to recoup money for the taxpayer, he said: “Yes, I do believe that’s the case.”
However he added that in those circumstances he “would have been arguing for the retention of the airport in public ownership”. “If you have such an asset making money for the public then it stands to reason that you would not want to sell it off,” he said.
Cardiff Airport was one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic after an 93% drop in passenger numbers, figures by the Civil Aviation Authority in 2021 showed . The data showed that UK airports lost 223 million passengers in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to figures by the Civil Aviation Authority. Of this, travel numbers for Cardiff Airport dropped from 1,656,085 in 2019 to 219,984 in 2020.
In 2021, Cardiff served just 123,000 passengers. That compares to 2.08m for Bristol, 6.2m for Gatwick and 19.3m for Heathrow. The Welsh-Government-owned airport was also smaller than Exeter, Norwich and Bournemouth – and was less than half the size of Southampton. Cardiff served just 0.2% of UK air travellers.
The most recently available figures show that in the year to October 2022, the Welsh airport had recovered to handle 811,000 passengers. But this compares to 7.5m for Bristol, 30m for Gatwick and 56m for Heathrow. Cardiff, in the autumn, had recovered to be larger than Bournemouth and Exeter, but whether this will be sustained without budget airline Wizz Air who left the airport in January just nine months after joining is not clear.
Spencer Birns, the airport’s chief executive, told the BBC that the “communities owning the airport is critically important”. He said “over 90% of airports in the world are actually owned by their communities”.
Mr Birns told BBC Politics Wales programme, that the airport is working towards “sustainability and viability” following a big dip in passenger numbers following the pandemic.
“Prior to Covid we were generating significant economic value – it was over £240m a year in economic value,” he said. “The demand for travel is there, our flights are full, the aircraft operating out of Cardiff – it’s very rare we’ve got a flight that’s not full.
“I would argue that we’re on this rescue and restructuring plan with the Welsh government, which is a five-year plan, to get ourselves back to where we need to be for sustainability and viability.”
The geographic location of the airport has long been one of the reasons some have claimed why the airport has been unable to keep up with other airports. It is difficult to get to via public transport and is not accessed immediately by any major roads, read more about that here.
Speaking on the same BBC programme, travel journalist Simon Calder argued that moving the airport would “absolutely transform” Welsh aviation.
Mr Calder told Politics Wales it had been a “heck of a struggle” to find a viable business plan for Cardiff Airport, adding: “As a nation Wales needs an international airport and Cardiff is the obvious place to put it. But I’m very sorry that the current location is not sustainable at all and something with good rail and road links, maybe between Cardiff and Newport, would be the solution. That would absolutely transform aviation in the nation.”
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