08 Jun 2022
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
If recent media coverage is anything to go by, I must have been unusually lucky on the flight I took to London on Wednesday last week. From the front door at Glasgow Airport to the end of the security process took about 20 minutes. I had heeded the Airport’s advice not to turn up excessively early but I had been mentally prepared for a long and stressful queue. There was none.
There was an incident last Monday that kicked off the story that Glasgow Airport was under severe pressure and some reporting even went as far as to suggest travellers would be better looking elsewhere to plan their journeys. Glasgow Airport’s recovery is essential for the long-term health of Glasgow’s economy so I checked with the airport team whether I had indeed been fortunate.
The average waiting time through security is currently 15 minutes which is certainly up from the 10 minutes before the pandemic but hardly justification for avoiding the Airport. Even at its worst last Monday it was just under 40 minutes and nobody missed their flight.
The stories emerging from airports in other parts of the UK have been more alarming with frequent - and occasionally last-minute - cancellations, very extensive queuing and missed flights. Airports and airlines have been getting it in the neck for being under-prepared for the resurgence in travel demand. I suspect that if I were to be the victim of a similar experience I would have no hesitation joining the clamour.
Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps certainly couldn’t resist accusing the aviation industry of cutting too deep during the pandemic and demanding that ‘the airlines, the travel industry, need to make sure it’s sorted out’. Customers having a go at the industry for cancelling flights is fair enough but I draw the line at senior politicians. How quickly they forget.
It was only on 18 March that the UK government finally lifted the last of the Covid-19 travel restrictions and with plenty of reluctance expressed by the Scottish Government as case numbers at the time were still considered too high. That is not even three months for an industry that would normally be planning its summer resources during the previous winter. Mr Shapps appears a little too keen to join the chorus of criticism, ignoring the extent of the damage that two years of restrictions has caused to an industry that was at the very forefront of pandemic impact.
One can certainly debate the wisdom of responding to demand by planning flights that were dependent on optimistic staffing forecasts but accusing the industry of ‘cutting too deep’ when it was all but closed for months on end and with no means of estimating the future is harsh.
Support for Glasgow Airport’s recovery is one of the priorities agreed by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce’s governing body and there are good reasons for that. The EY 2022 report on Scotland’s investment attractiveness was a cheering reminder that Scotland has been a strong inward investment performer both in terms of projects secured and – more importantly – in jobs announced. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow were in the top five city destinations with Edinburgh bringing in 31 projects (down from 36 in 2020) and Glasgow securing 23 projects for the second year in a row.
Dig into the detail and you find that the United States provided by far the largest number of projects. That is not terribly surprising in Glasgow when you consider the significance of companies such as JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley in financial services or Thermo Fisher in the health and life sciences. That is why it is so concerning for the longer term supply of inward investment to Glasgow that there is currently no direct flight from Glasgow Airport to the United States.
It would be better if senior politicians put as much effort into helping our regional airports recover their routes as they have into criticising the industry’s shortcomings.
This article was first published in The Herald on Wednesday 8 June 2022
