Bircham Dyson Bell, solicitors for RiverOak, have today sent a letter to Madeline Homer, Chief Executive of Thanet Council, highlighting the RiverOak professional team’s concerns both with the methodology and findings of Avia Solutions report and the manner in which it is being considered by the council in connection with the Local Plan process.
RiverOak is working on a comprehensive rebuttal of the Avia Solutions report, which it plans to release early next week, highlighting how basic factual errors and questionable methodology, together with a decision to ignore six respected and publicly available air freight studies, has led to a set of conclusions about Manston Airport that are unsafe for Thanet Council to rely on and therefore render the report unusable.
RiverOak will be continuing to develop its exciting plans for Manston Airport given that Avia Solutions “does not offer any opinion about the reasonableness or otherwise of RiverOak’s commercial plans for the airport” making their report irrelevant.
RiverOak Investments is disappointed by the inaccurate and misleading comments made yesterday (21 September) by a Stone Hill Park spokesperson on our exciting plans for Manston airport project. We felt we had no option but to respond to their deliberate misinterpretation of our approach to community engagement, which is one of the largest and most comprehensive seen in this part of the country.
90% of local people who took part in the recent informal consultation by RiverOak Investments support proposals for reviving Manston Airport as an airfreight hub with complementary passenger and engineering services. A further 8% of respondents said they opposed the plans and 2% are not yet sure.
The Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, has confirmed ongoing support for Manston Airport.