Prestwick airport set to be nationalised
Its not often you hear the term “nationalisation” these days. In relation to market failure it seems to me that the decision to protect rural jobs by securing a key piece of transport infrastructure as the Scottish Government propose to do here sets an interesting precedent. Still I have form, having previously sought when at Lincolnshire CC to buy Boston Docks to safeguard 2000 jobs. Dare the love of nationalisation speak its name as a valid approach where extreme and important challenges to local rural economies arise? and have bigger rural local authorities the stomach for such interventions?
This article tells us:
Scottish ministers are to take Prestwick airport into public ownership in an attempt to rescue the ailing site after years of losses.
Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister, said her officials were in talks with Prestwick’s New Zealand-based owner, Infratil, to discuss a buyout. The site is a hub for the budget airline Ryanair and a strategic refuelling base for Nato aircraft.
One of Scotland‘s best known airports, Prestwick is where Elvis Presley is reputed to have touched UK soil for the first and only time, in 1960. But its relative isolation in south Ayrshire means it has struggled to compete against its close rival Glasgow international airport.
Once kept afloat by the budget airlines Go and Ryanair, it was put up for sale in March last year after running annual losses of £2m, but none of the prospective bidders were able to strike a deal with Infratil.
Passenger numbers peaked at 2.4 million in 2007 but have since slumped to just over one million a year, leaving Prestwick trailing behind Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.
Sturgeon told the Scottish parliament that Infratil had been considering several options including the airport’s closure. That would be a “serious and unwelcome development” for Ayrshire and the wider Scottish economy, with 300 jobs at the airport and another 1,100 jobs indirectly linked to it.