Doncaster Sheffield Airport: when Reform's flagship pledge met its lease
What changed in v2. Three substantial pieces of new public-record material have surfaced since v1. The Mayor of Doncaster's four-page open letter of 1 May 2026, reproduced in full by the Doncaster Free Press, responds to a public letter from Councillor Jason Charity and addresses what the letter describes as Reform UK's mischaracterisation of the borrowing decision. A Yorkshire Post article of 2 May 2026 sets out the Easter 2028 target date for commercial flights, the £36m revenue cost of a 12-month delay, and the equipment-contract deadline that lands within the next month. The contents of Reform UK's own February 2026 budget motion, which added governance conditions to the £57m borrowing rather than removing it, were voted through full council on 26 February 2026 by Reform's own group. Each of these expands what was already in v1 rather than replacing it. The new sections are clearly marked.
I am writing this as a Greater Lincolnshire constituent and the East Lindsey Green Party's named communications officer. The party's local communications is done as a three-person team; the named-officer title is procedural rather than hierarchical. The Greater Lincolnshire mayor and candidate vetting record is at /lincolnshire-mayor/. The wider Reform-in-power record across English councils is at /reform-in-power/. This piece touches on politically contested ground while the author has a disclosed political affiliation; the framing is deliberately narrow so readers can weigh primary sources themselves rather than rely on my characterisation of them.
The lease clause that changes the financial picture
The most consequential fact in this story is in the financial terms of the Doncaster Sheffield Airport Superior Lease, which the Yorkshire Post obtained and reported on in January 2026, and which the councillors who in November 2025 voted to approve a £57m borrowing facility to finance the airport's reopening had not been shown when they voted. The lease provides for a £5m annual base rent payable to airport freeholder Peel Group, a potential 20% turnover rent on top of the base rent, and break clauses favouring Peel if passenger targets are not met.
The combination matters because turnover rent and profit rent behave very differently. A profit-rent share gives the freeholder a stake in the operation's success without exposing the operator to a fixed cost during ramp-up. A turnover-rent share gives the freeholder revenue from gross income before costs, which means the freeholder takes its cut whether the operation is profitable or not, and the public borrowing that funds the operation in its early years is paying down debt while simultaneously funding the freeholder's revenue stream. The break clauses favouring Peel if passenger targets are not met then provide an exit for the freeholder if the targets prove unrealistic, while the council remains liable for the borrowing it has taken on.
This is the lease the council's £57m borrowing facility was approved to support, and it was approved without councillors having seen it.
How the situation arose
Doncaster Sheffield Airport closed in November 2022 after Peel Group, the freeholder, decided the airport operation was no longer commercially viable under the existing lease arrangements and chose not to renew. The closure removed an asset that employed several hundred people directly and several thousand more in supply chains across South Yorkshire and the East Midlands. The regional economic loss was substantial and visible.
Reopening the airport became a marquee local campaign through 2023 and 2024. Save DSA, a campaign group led by Mark Chadwick, kept the issue politically live. Reform UK adopted the reopening as a flagship policy commitment for the May 2025 local elections, alongside the Labour and Conservative parties. The May 2025 elections delivered a Reform majority on City of Doncaster Council while Labour retained the mayoralty under Mayor Ros Jones, creating a split-leadership council that has been placed under Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government active monitoring as of November 2025 following formal escalation by the Chief Executive.
In November 2025 the council approved the £57m borrowing facility to finance the airport's reopening. The vote was carried with Reform and Conservative support. A separate decision committed the council to the operating-company structure that would in turn enter into the Superior Lease with Peel Group. In January 2026 the Yorkshire Post reported on the leaked Superior Lease, revealing that councillors had not been shown the underlying financial clauses when they approved the borrowing.
Reform and Conservative councillors moved to rescind the £57m. The decision was scheduled for an extraordinary council meeting on 11 May 2026.
Reform UK's own February 2026 budget motion (new in v2)
This section was added in v2 because the contents of Reform's February 2026 budget motion materially change how the rescindment story reads. The Mayor's open letter of 1 May 2026 cites the motion directly. On 26 February 2026, three weeks after the Yorkshire Post had reported the lease leak, the Reform UK group leader on the council put an alternative budget to the full council. That motion is published on the council website and was voted on at the same full-council meeting.
The Reform alternative budget contained seven governance conditions on the £57m airport borrowing. The conditions, as the Mayor's letter quotes them, required four items to be published before any borrowing was drawn down for the airport project: the business case, the SiMCA grant conditions, a downside scenario, and a response to Grant Thornton's governance finding on the South Yorkshire Airport City project. The structure of the conditions is the structure of a transparency requirement on a borrowing the budget itself accepts. The motion does not remove the borrowing. It adds disclosure requirements to it.
The full council voted on the budget on 26 February 2026. The Reform motion failed but the budget that did pass, which Reform itself had reformulated as an alternative within the council's normal budget framework, retains the £57m airport borrowing. The Mayor's letter cites the council's own treasury management statement adopted on the same date, at paragraphs 38 and 39, recording that the £57m airport borrowing approved on 27 November 2025 is currently envisioned to start drawdown in 2026 to 2028, that the full financing cost is contained within the funding provided via SiMCA, and that it will not impact the council's own borrowing costs. The treasury management statement is the council's own published record.
The Mayor's characterisation in her open letter is that Reform "effectively ratified their own decision on the £57m loan" through the February 2026 budget process, and that arguing in May that they did not have sufficient information to vote on the borrowing in November is incompatible with having drafted a transparency-on-drawdown amendment to the same borrowing in February. That is a public-record point. Whether the rescindment motion can survive the contradiction is the question the council will answer on 11 May.
The political response
Reform UK's deputy leader on the council, Councillor Jason Charity, has publicly described the deal as "fundamentally flawed", citing the £5m base rent, the 20% turnover rent, and the Peel-favouring break clauses as the reasons. The framing has been consistent across his published comments: the financial fundamentals of the lease, not the principle of reopening the airport, are the basis for rescinding the borrowing. Councillor Charity also published an open letter of his own ahead of the May vote, calling for Mayor Ros Jones to resign and characterising the council's process as having withheld lease information from members ahead of the November 2025 vote.
Mayor Ros Jones (Labour) has publicly stated that rescinding the borrowing would "kill the airport project". She has also addressed the Compulsory Purchase Order route that Reform UK figures at national level have raised separately, stating that CPO was "already off the table" because the council itself had previously looked at it. Her published wording: "Once the lease was offered, CPO won't achieve it and it'd be five to seven years anyway." She has also stated that the lease agreement signed with Peel "effectively killed off any chance of a successful CPO", and that "Peel refused our offer to buy the freehold of the airport site, and any CPO would have been strongly challenged, taken years, with no guarantee of success and paying compensation costs in the eventuality of CPO being refused." Save DSA campaign leader Mark Chadwick has characterised the rescindment move as "reckless".
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North) has publicly criticised Reform's position. His direct quote on the record:
I think what's really bad about this is that Reform went into the mayoral election saying they supported it. They went into the election as supporters of the airport, and now they're trying to kill it.
That is a sitting Cabinet minister attacking the local Reform leadership on a campaign promise made twelve months earlier, with the public record now showing the gap between the campaign position (we will reopen the airport) and the in-power position (we will rescind the funding mechanism for reopening the airport). The political exposure for Reform on this is unusually direct because the same councillors who approved the borrowing in November are now leading the move to rescind it in May, against the same lease whose existence and financial terms have been public since January.
Mayor Jones's open letter of 1 May 2026 (new in v2)
The Mayor's open letter of 1 May 2026 was published in response to Councillor Charity's public letter and reproduced in full by the Doncaster Free Press. The letter is the most substantive primary-source document in the rescindment dispute so far. It runs to four pages and is organised around four claims that the Mayor places on the public record.
The first claim is that Reform UK's February 2026 budget motion already accepted the £57m borrowing in principle and added transparency-on-drawdown conditions to it. That argument is set out in the previous section of this piece. The Mayor cites the council's own treasury management statement and the published Reform alternative-budget document as the source.
The second claim concerns the attendance record of Councillor Charity, the chair of the council's audit committee, across the meetings in which the airport project was scrutinised. The full attendance audit is treated separately in the next section.
The third claim concerns Councillor Charity's specific allegation that the Mayor "kept the lease from the members before the vote". The Mayor states in the letter that she does not believe she has ever said or written this and that the open letter from Councillor Charity places the words in her mouth without a source. She invites Councillor Charity, by return and in public, to identify the source of the quoted words or to issue a public retraction. The standard the Mayor applies in her letter is the one she expects of herself when citing other elected representatives: produce the source in full or do not cite it.
The fourth claim is an offer to revisit the soft-market test process. The Mayor states that if Reform UK is willing to honour the previously agreed structure for testing private-sector investment within six months of gaining the necessary regulatory approvals, the soft-market test for private-sector investment can commence within the current calendar year. The condition the Mayor attaches is that this must run in parallel with the existing programme. Removing the borrowing certainty over the medium term will, on her stated reading, both delay the programme and impact its viability and continuation, and will impact council finances if the borrowing is rescinded.
The letter closes with the Mayor's statement that she has been mayor of Doncaster for 13 years, that she has not traded the truth for a headline, and that if the borrowing is rescinded the consequences will include the loss of jobs, freight, passenger flights, and economic benefits, alongside considerable liabilities for the council. The letter is signed and published as a personal public-record statement.
The attendance record (new in v2)
Councillor Jason Charity is the chair of the City of Doncaster Council's audit committee. The attendance record across the meetings in which the airport project was scrutinised is set out in the Mayor's letter and is publicly available via the council's published records.
In late August 2025, SiMCA (the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority) presented the results and implications of 27 separate due diligence reports on the airport project to a pre-scrutiny meeting attended by members of SiMCA and of the council's audit and scrutiny committees. Councillor Charity did not attend.
Ahead of the council's 5 November 2025 cabinet decisions, members of the audit committee were invited to a pre-scrutiny meeting on the financial detail of the project, including the SiMCA grant conditions, the lease renegotiation process, and the capital and borrowing projections. Councillor Charity did not attend.
SiMCA's director of finance subsequently presented the same material to all members of the council's scrutiny and audit committees in advance of the 5 November cabinet decision. Councillor Charity did not attend. The 5 November cabinet decision could have been called in for further scrutiny within the constitutional period that follows the decision. No Reform member exercised that facility.
At the November audit committee that discussed the airport, Councillor Charity was absent. He had at that point been removed from his committee positions by his then group leader. He was not present at the 27 November 2025 full council meeting at which the £57m borrowing was approved by a large majority of elected members.
The pattern continued across subsequent meetings. Councillor Charity did not attend the 22 January 2026 full council meeting. Reform UK called the 6 March 2026 extraordinary full council meeting at which the rescindment was first formally raised; that meeting concluded with the Reform motion failing. Reform was offered a confidential briefing on the lease and agreed to attend it, then cancelled. The recent extraordinary audit committee meeting that Councillor Charity himself called was first deferred and then cancelled by him; the rescheduled audit committee was rendered inquorate because Councillor Charity and two of his Reform colleagues did not attend, and was rescheduled again to a date the Mayor's letter describes as one that suits Reform.
The pattern has a single shape. The councillor who is leading the public argument that he was inadequately briefed on the airport project is the chair of the audit committee that exists to brief him, and is documented as having been absent from the meetings at which the briefings were given. The Mayor's framing in her letter is that the inadequate briefing is a consequence of Reform's chosen non-attendance rather than a consequence of council process.
Reform UK's meeting with Peel Group (new in v2)
Reform UK has publicly confirmed that members of its group visited Peel Group in Manchester. This is the freeholder of the airport site and the counterparty to the Superior Lease whose financial terms are the basis for Reform's rescindment argument.
The Mayor's open letter places several unanswered questions about that meeting on the public record. Reform UK has not said publicly what was asked of Peel, what Peel said in response, or why the substance of the discussion has not been disclosed. The questions matter because Councillor Charity's open letter treats the lease as the foundation of the case for rescindment, and the freeholder counterparty to that lease is the one party whose disposition toward renegotiation determines whether any alternative path to reopening is possible.
Mayor Jones's framing in her letter is that commercial negotiations in good faith require a sustainable counterparty. The implicit question is whether the Peel meeting was a renegotiation in good faith conducted in parallel with the council's existing process, or a separate channel through which the freeholder explored an exit. The public record cannot answer that question without disclosure from either Reform UK or Peel Group, and neither has so far made a substantive public statement on the content of the discussions.
Three Reform positions on the same airport
The political response from Reform UK across its different voices over the same period reveals a notable internal incoherence. Three distinct positions are publicly on the record from three different party figures, each addressed to a different audience and none of them deliverable on the 11 May vote timetable.
The local-council position, voiced by Councillor Jason Charity as Reform deputy leader on Doncaster Council, is to rescind the £57m borrowing facility because the underlying lease is "fundamentally flawed". This is the position with actual mechanism behind it: the 11 May vote can deliver the rescindment outcome.
The party-leader position, voiced by Nigel Farage on BBC Radio Leeds, is to keep the airport reopening on the table but to redo the deal so that the council acquires the freehold from Peel before any reopening proceeds. Farage's published wording: "We want this airport open but the deal that is currently proposed would be a disaster for taxpayers in Doncaster because the council, under this deal, is not getting the freehold." And separately, on the conditional path forward: "the council in the deal must get the freehold. If it gets the freehold then we can negotiate with other people to be providers." This position requires Peel Group to agree to a freehold transfer. Mayor Jones has stated on the public record that the council previously offered to buy the freehold and that Peel refused.
The deputy-leader position, voiced by Richard Tice (Reform UK deputy leader and MP for Boston and Skegness) to the Yorkshire Post, is that a future Reform UK government would acquire the freehold by Compulsory Purchase Order. Tice's published wording: "We're buying the freehold, one way or the other." This position requires both a Reform UK parliamentary majority that does not currently exist and a Reform UK national government willing to deploy CPO powers against Peel. Mayor Jones has already publicly stated that the CPO route is mechanically unavailable from the council's current position, as set out above.
The three positions are subtly different and they do not converge into a single deliverable plan. Charity's position has local mechanism behind it but ends the airport reopening project Reform campaigned on. Farage's position requires Peel to agree to a freehold transfer Peel has already refused. Tice's position requires a parliamentary majority Reform does not have and central-government powers the council cannot deploy. The 11 May vote will resolve only the first of these. The other two remain as rhetoric on a national-political surface that the local mechanism cannot reach.
The Knight conflict of interest
A separate but linked story involves Councillor David Knight (Reform UK), City of Doncaster Council. In autumn 2025, Councillor Knight and Councillor Rachel Reed (also Reform, then deputy leader of the council) registered a private company called Fly Doncaster (Auxiliary Services) Ltd via Companies House. The company name was substantially similar to a company the council itself was preparing to register for the operation of the planned reopened airport.
At the time, Councillor Knight sat on the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee (OSMC), the body responsible for scrutinising the airport reopening plans and the financing structure. He also chaired the Health and Adult Social Care Overview and Scrutiny Panel.
When the existence of Fly Doncaster (Auxiliary Services) Ltd became known, the Reform UK group on the council acted. Councillor Knight was removed from the OSMC and from his chairing role on the health and adult social care panel, and lost the Reform whip in October 2025. Councillor Reed resigned as deputy council leader but retained her status as a Reform councillor; she also resigned her directorship at Fly Doncaster.
Reform UK group leader Councillor Guy Aston issued a public statement that Councillor Knight's decision to establish the company without consultation had caused reputational damage and placed the group's work under unnecessary strain.
On 18 December 2025 Councillor Knight was reinstated to the Reform UK group on the City of Doncaster Council website "pending a formal review". At the time of writing, Fly Doncaster (Auxiliary Services) Ltd remains registered as active on Companies House.
Councillor Knight has been the subject of a separate controversy involving public comments about children with special educational needs and disabilities. He suggested in public comments that SEND children were "trained to comply" with assessment criteria by their parents. His private transport company, which had been contracted to provide school taxis, ended that contract following the comments.
The conflict-of-interest case sits underneath the wider DSA story because the body Councillor Knight was removed from (the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee) was the body responsible for scrutinising the airport plans and the financing structure his private company was registered to be in a position to benefit from. The £57m borrowing was approved while the OSMC was operating without his presence. The rescindment vote on 11 May will be debated in a council whose Reform group has already had to remove a member for an airport-related conflict, reinstate him pending review, and continue to govern alongside an unresolved Companies House registration.
The Easter 2028 target and the cost of delay (new in v2)
The Yorkshire Post reported on 2 May 2026, citing council documents published ahead of the 11 May vote, that commercial flights from Doncaster Sheffield Airport are targeted to resume at Easter 2028. This is the first documentary date for the reopening since the November 2025 borrowing approval, and it converges several earlier statements from Mayor Jones that had given a range of dates from 2026 through to early 2028.
The same documents set out the financial cost of a delay to that target. A 12-month slip in the start date for passenger flights would reduce projected income by £36m and could make the reopening financially unviable. The mechanism is direct: a delay does not push the start date by a single month, because the airport's commercial calendar is structured around two seasons, and missing the Easter 2028 target means slipping either to the next winter season or to the following summer, depending on the business case at the time. The result is an effective 12-month delay either way.
The document the Yorkshire Post quotes states that the programme is at a critical stage with essential equipment of long lead times requiring contract commitments to be agreed within the next month, and that the contract agreements have already become more time critical because they were delayed by various factors including the rescindment process itself. That is not a generic delay. It is a specific contract-signing window that the rescindment vote, if it succeeds, would force the council to abandon. The council's own framing of the financial implications is that the borrowing certainty over the medium term is the precondition for the contract commitments, and that removing the borrowing removes the contracting basis.
None of the airlines have been confirmed yet. Discussions have taken place with Tui and Wizz Air, the previous operators at Doncaster Sheffield Airport before its 2022 closure, and Jet2 has stated publicly that it wants to explore flights from Doncaster. The commercial counterparties are real and contingent on the timetable holding.
What is happening at the airport right now (new in v2)
Two operational developments worth recording sit alongside the rescindment dispute. They do not resolve the procedural question for 11 May, but they do change the picture of an airport site that some of the rescindment commentary has framed as effectively dead pending political action.
The first is a recent test landing at the airport by an aviation company that has subsequently asked the council about the availability of additional hangar space. The company has stated, on the public record, that it would consider relocating its fleet from a London base to Doncaster, on the basis that a substantial portion of its workforce already lives in the South Yorkshire and East Midlands catchment of the airport. This is not the same as a confirmed long-term tenant, but it is a working operation evaluating Doncaster as a working operating base.
The second is a freight operation in advanced discussions with the council and airport operating company about using Doncaster as a cargo hub. Doncaster Sheffield Airport's pre-closure freight role was substantial, and the case for a freight tenancy independent of passenger services has been part of the public discussion since the closure. The advanced talks are not contingent on the passenger-flight timetable in the same way that the airline negotiations are.
The Mayor's letter cites both developments. They sit underneath the wider discussion as a reminder that the airport site is not waiting passively for a political resolution. The decisions on 11 May will be taken in a context in which operational interest is already developing, and the cost of foreclosing that operational interest by removing the borrowing is one of the things the council will be asked to weigh.
The structural question for 11 May
The vote on 11 May 2026 is procedurally a vote on whether to rescind the £57m borrowing facility. Substantively it is a vote on whether City of Doncaster Council is able to govern itself in the configuration that emerged from the May 2025 elections.
The councillors who will vote on rescindment are facing a choice between three bad options. Voting against rescindment leaves in place a borrowing facility that backs a lease whose financial terms the same councillors had not seen when they approved the borrowing. Voting for rescindment ends the airport reopening that was a flagship campaign commitment for both Reform and Labour at the May 2025 elections, and which Reform's deputy leader on the council has publicly committed to delivering. Voting to defer pending a renegotiation of the underlying lease with Peel relies on Peel agreeing to renegotiate, which is not a position Peel has signalled.
The new material in v2 narrows that choice rather than widens it. Reform's own February 2026 budget motion accepted the borrowing and added drawdown-transparency conditions to it. The Easter 2028 target and the £36m cost of a 12-month delay convert the rescindment from a political question into a financial one with a specific number attached. The contract-signing window of the next month converts the rescindment into a question with a clock on it. The Mayor's offer of a soft-market test for private-sector investment running in parallel with the existing programme is on the table as the path that gives Reform the substantive concern they have publicly stated they want addressed without removing the borrowing certainty that the contract signings depend on.
The MHCLG active-monitoring status of the council is the institutional acknowledgement that governance has reached the point where central government is paying attention. Active monitoring is not formal intervention. It is the step before it. Whether the 11 May vote, and the political conduct around it, moves the council toward formal intervention or away from it is one of the things the meeting will reveal.
The pattern
Doncaster Sheffield Airport is a single high-profile case, but it sits within a wider pattern documented in /reform-in-power/. Across English councils since the May 2025 elections, Reform UK candidates won seats on campaign commitments their groups have not been able to deliver in office, with the gap between the campaign position and the in-power position becoming visible within twelve months of taking power. The DSA case has higher financial stakes than most because of the £57m public borrowing, more local visibility because of the airport's regional economic role, and a more direct named-individual conflict-of-interest story attached because of Councillor Knight. The structural pattern, though, is the same.
11 May is the next watch date. This piece will be updated after the vote with a reference to the outcome and the political response to it.