Coventry City Council to spend £1 million on airport redevelopment plan

Coventry City Council has committed to investing up to £1 million towards new planning applications for GreenPower Park, the upcoming redevelopment of the former Coventry Airport site.

GreenPower Park is a joint venture between the site’s owner, Coventry City Council (CCC), and its leaseholder, Rigby Group. It was initially envisaged as a battery ‘Gigafactory’, comprised of seven manufacturing buildings, allowing the manufacturing, testing, and recycling of batteries to all happen within the advanced manufacturing cluster.

Planning permission was granted in 2022, and detailed planning consent, typically the final stage before development, was granted in April of this year.

However, at time of writing, the project has failed to a secure an anchor tenant to construct and run the ‘Gigafactory’.

In June of this year, the CEO of Rigby Group told the BBC that the plans would need to be scaled back, but he remained hopeful about the likelihood of “at the very least, a single battery manufacturer at Coventry Airport”.

The focus on batteries was partially intended to support the automotive sector, which has seen turmoil since the initial proposal – Jaguar Land Rover, one of the largest employers in the West Midlands, is planning to cut 4,000 jobs through 2028.

According to Councillor Lynnette Kelly’s report to the cabinet, further planning permission is being sought because the initial 2022 planning permission was granted based upon “very special circumstances” and does not encompass any advanced manufacturing other than that of batteries.

The process is set to cost each joint venture partner up to £1 million, which is being financed as an advance on future land sales, not through typical council revenue streams.

This represents just over 30% of CCC’s total contributions to the planning process.

Investing the £1 million in adding to this permission will not impede the construction of a ‘Gigafactory’ if an investor does materialise, but it allows the redevelopment to be more flexible, open to a larger number of industries, and potentially more attractive to investors.

We want to be at the forefront of advanced manufacturing and we’d like there to be a gigafactory on that site, that takes up the whole site, and is manufacturing batteries

Lynnette Kelly, Coventry City Councillor

Councillor Kelly told the BBC in June: “We want to be at the forefront of advanced manufacturing and we’d like there to be a gigafactory on that site, that takes up the whole site, and is manufacturing batteries.”

She added: “But we have to be realistic, at the moment people are interested in parts of the site rather than making one giant factory.”

Despite worries from opposition councillors that this pivot could spell trouble for the project as a whole, development remains underway, with the demolition of airport buildings and a new National Grid hookup both set to be complete in 2027.

Ground has already been broken on the latter.