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.