Alex Rooney: How Cardiff Airport became Welsh Labour’s vanity project – and an ever growing money pit

The Welsh Labour Government has agreed to hand over another £20 million to keep the struggling Cardiff Airport afloat. This is the next tranche in a staggering £200 million pipeline of support earmarked for the next decade.

Once delivered, this will put total taxpayer support for the airport over £400 million. Let that sink in: £400 million of public money is propping up a facility that only serves a fraction of the Welsh population while essential services are crumbling.

Back in March 2021, the Welsh Government quietly wrote off £42.6 million in airport debt, replacing it with an equivalent “rescue and recovery grant”. What could £42.6 million have done instead? It could have paid the annual salaries of roughly 1,075 nurses or about 1,250 teachers. In a country where over 20,000 people are waiting more than two years for NHS treatment compared to just around 100 in England. That figure is both shocking and shameful.

Cardiff Airport has been a failed investment from day one. Bought in 2013 for £52 million, it has burned through cash ever since. The current total support from the Welsh Government stands at £181 million already spent, with more coming. This includes equity injections (£67.9m), loans (£69.8m), and grants (£43.3m). In 2022/23, the airport lost £4.5 million, despite receiving £5.3 million in government grants. It is not commercially viable. It is, bluntly, a black hole.

And who exactly is overseeing this money pit? Between 2018 and 2024, the airport sat under the portfolio of Lee Waters MS, the then Deputy Minister for Climate Change. Yes, you read that correctly: the man in charge of reducing fossil fuel emissions was also responsible for overseeing a taxpayer-funded aviation facility.

A former cycling charity director and journalist, Waters is best known for pushing through the widely unpopular blanket 20mph speed limit across Welsh towns and villages. He has no experience in aviation, commercial infrastructure, or enterprise. There was noone with airport management expertise to guide strategy or challenge decisions. It was a textbook example of poor governance: unqualified political appointees spending public money in an industry they don’t understand.

Today, the oversight of Cardiff Airport has shifted to Ken Skates MS, reinstated to cabinet in the most recent reshuffle by Eluned Morgan. Unfortunately, this change brings no improvement. Skates, who previously served as Minister for Economy, Transport and North Wales, presided over a raft of missed opportunities, including stagnation in regional transport and infrastructure delivery.

His political career has largely been spent within the Cardiff Bay bubble, having started as a researcher for Labour MP Mark Tami before entering the Senedd. He has no private sector experience, no aviation expertise, and no track record of turning around loss-making enterprises. His appointment to oversee Cardiff Airport simply continues a worrying trend: assigning major commercial portfolios to career politicians with no grounding in the industries they’re meant to manage.

From a practical perspective, Cardiff Airport isn’t even fit for purpose for the majority of Wales. It is located in the far south of the country, a four-hour forty-five-minute drive, nearly 200 miles from Llandudno, and over three hours twenty minutes and 150 miles from Wrexham, Wales’s newest city. Travelling by public transport? It takes six to seven hours with multiple changes. It’s no wonder residents of North Wales head to Liverpool or Manchester, which are significantly closer and better served.

Even for those in mid and South Wales, Bristol and Birmingham offer more compelling options. Bristol Airport is just over an hour’s drive from Cardiff and serves 118 destinations with 13 airlines. Birmingham, about two hours away, offers 130 destinations served by 28 airlines. Cardiff, by contrast, offers barely a dozen routes and is served by just a handful of carriers. These alternatives are more convenient, better connected, and don’t rely on endless bailouts from the public purse.

This is the crux of the issue. Cardiff Airport is a vanity project that has consistently failed to deliver a return. Worse, it’s symbolic of a government addicted to spending for appearance’s sake while real needs go unmet. Welsh Labour is asking taxpayers to subsidise a cash-hungry facility that doesn’t serve the nation, isn’t commercially successful, and is run by people without the relevant experience, while patients wait years for treatment and classrooms go underfunded.

It’s time to stop the charade. The Welsh public deserves better than a half-empty airport masquerading as national infrastructure. If it cannot operate without public subsidy and only truly serves one region, then the solution is clear: cut our losses, stop pouring in good money after bad, and redirect funds to where they’re urgently needed: into our schools, our NHS, and the communities across Wales that have been sidelined for far too long.