Far from it. You’ve only got to look at airports that have the kind of passenger business that Manston hopes for to see the truth:
Bristol – 439 jobs per million passengers.
Bournemouth – 408 jobs per million passengers now, and expected to fall to 247 by 2015
Prestwick (another Infratil airport) – 248 jobs per million passengers, and that was before the last two rounds of redundancies.
The rise of the low cost, no-frills airlines and fiercer competition mean that regional airports expect to employ fewer people per million passengers. They’re predicting more passengers in the next few years, but fewer jobs.
When Infratil asked the Government for a £600k sweetener to tempt a passenger airline to use Manston, it said that it could handle ¾ million extra passengers with just 23 extra staff. That’s about 30 jobs per million passengers - a very long way from the 1,000 jobs per million that they’re promising us now.
Infratil tells the press now that 2.4 million passengers will create 2,070 direct jobs. However, Infratil’s Master Plan says that 2.4 million passengers will deliver just 600 jobs.
It’s time they got their numbers straight.