Gloucestershire Airport is the country’s leading general aviation Airport with up to 80,000 flight movements per annum ranging and is an important part of the County’s economy. McLoughlin Planning has been responsible for providing planning consultancy services to the airport across a number of issues, including:

• Strategic Planning regarding the long-term potential of the airport’s landholdings, maximising its development potential for a wide variety of airport related and wider aviation industry related uses.
• Masterplanning of the Airport Property portfolio,
• Exercising Permitted Development Rights for new hangar and road infrastructure. This has culminated in a new hangar building, supported by the GFirst Local Enterprise Partnership.
• Securing the use of hangar buildings for a new Airline Pilot Training Academy and accommodation block for students.

Contextually, the airport is situated between Cheltenham and Gloucester and sits in the green belt. Development in this area is sensitive by its very nature. We have worked extensively with the airport and its infrastructure advisory team and local members to build a strong support base for the various proposals to ensure that they are successful.

A tight timescale, a green belt site and important commercial drivers made this project as unusual as it was interesting. Triumph needed to relocate and had been searching for a new factory site for two years before it was offered land at Staverton.

We took the project from its earliest moments to an approved application at the first attempt in only six months – all in the prism of a General Election campaign. An adjacent site had already been turned down, so work with the local planning authority, LEP and an MP was vital to securing permission on the grounds of very special circumstances.

The result was a 2,000 sq m high-tech manufacturing facility which brought 200 skilled jobs to the UK from China to support an international business to export its products around the world.

McLoughlin Planning has been the Planning Consultant for Gloucestershire Airport for several years. As part of this, it has been involved in securing the necessary Consents for Skyborne’s operations allowing them to establish a Commercial Flight Training School at Gloucestershire Airport to meet a global demand for new Commercial Pilots.

Challenges faced by this project were:

• It was necessary to demonstrate that the use of a hangar as a Flight Training School fell within the definition of aviation related development in the Town & Country Planning General Permitted Development (Order 2015).
• The Flight Training School was to be supported by an accommodation block for students.

The site is situated within the Green Belt where there are stringent planning controls on new development. As part of the company’s activities working on behalf of the Airport in terms of looking after its wider property portfolio, we were able to engineer a suitably positively planning policy context to allow Skyborne’s proposals to come forward as part of non-operational but aviation related development.