Statistics, more statistics and polls

Much is being made of the local support for Manston Airport by the people who want the airport back however to back up their claims they are relying on Facebook polls conducted on groups who support the airport creating their own inbuilt bias. 

The only recognised polling company in recent times who have conducted a poll are MORI and I will be discussing the findings in this blogpost.

First thing to say is the poll was conducted between March/April 2005 and just 500 telephone calls were made out of a population of 130,000 residents. Mori state the following:

"A representative sample of 500 Thanet residents was interviewed by telephone. Quotas were set on age, sex and work status to reflect the known status of the area as recorded in the 2001 census. Because the sampling methodology involves making a ‘1 in n’ selection from a full list of domestic telephone numbers (digits from which have already been randomised to take account of ex-directory numbers), each household has the same chance of selection for interview. As there are more households in urban and suburban areas, more interviews will take place in areas in which population density is higher"

and further

"It is important to note at this early stage that we place greater emphasis on the results from the telephone survey. This exercise is scientifically sampled and is not as prone to self-selection on the part of respondents or bias caused by nonresponse as is the self-completion consultation questionnaire. A table is appended which shows the overall population profile for Thanet, the respondent profile for the telephone survey, as well as a respondent profile for the consultation questionnaires. Given that the respondent profiles are so different, it is inadvisable to make comparisons between the two."

Further they were given postcodes by TDC to identify those under the flightpath as follows:

"We also run sub-group analysis on residents living under the flight path and those living away from it. The flight path is defined as postal districts CT7, CT11 and CT12. All other postal sectors fall outside of the flight path."

CT7 covers Birchington, CT12 Minster and Manston and CT11 much of Ramsgate.

It is also important to remember at the time of the poll Manston was still a going concern having in 1998 been bought from the Ministry of Defence by the Wiggins group and had recently changed their name to Planestation. Within 3 months of this poll both EUjet and Planestation had collapsed with debts exceeding £25M.

The poll was commissioned by TDC for the express need of revising the written agreement (S106) as the existing one was considered too "woolly" and allowed the airport operators to ignore the rules on Night Flights, Noise and environmental risks.

Firstly the Poll tries to understand, of the 500 respondents, just how much they actually used the airport for holidays and business travel. This is the response.

From this it is clear that few actually use it for flights and remember in 2005 EUjet are offering holiday flights to 16 holiday destinations in Fokker 100 aircraft.

So if so few use the airport the question is why?, and what does that mean for the current plans by RSP. Remember in 2005 130000 people live in Thanet which means 3/4 don't use it.

So how many are aware of Planestation's plans to expand services?

This first graph shows that 80% of the 500 knew something about the plans, some more than others however few knew about the legal protections that a S106 brought to curb the excesses of the airport management.

When those who did know about the plans were asked a further question as to whether they support or oppose this is the response 

So remembering only 400 knew about the plans 85% of this 400 tend to or are strongly supportive of the plans. This means of the overall 500 68% (340) indicate support. The reasons they gave for their support was broken down into the following areas:

Employment prospects turn out to be the most popular reason cited, however as an indicator this seems even today to be a reason but this very seldom turns out to be true. Even though Planestation collapsed the new company Infratil never managed to create a job bonanza and when it finally collapsed in 2014 only 144 people were made redundant. Even the Examination inspectors stated in their comprehensive report that jobs were being overstated. Their final conclusion was:

To continue the reasons for opposing the expansion were as follows:

The Poll asked the respondents about their quality of life in Thanet and what was important to them:

Clearly only 8% of the 500 though being close to an airport was important which closely mirrors the 75% who don't even use the airport. Clearly Facebook polls that have been conducted online attract a different grouping than a telephone poll and shows in the wider community people aren't as excised about the airport than those who engage do. The issue for the airport operator is that without the local catchment area an airport on the North Kent coast miles from London will always fail no matter how much money you pump into it. This might also indicate why Tony Freudmann (RSP Director and previous MD at Planestation) stated "passengers were the death of Manston".

A wider consultation exercise was also undertaken by Thanet District Council. Postal self-completion questionnaires were sent out as inserts in “Thanet Matters”, copies of which were delivered to every household in the District Council area. The same questionnaire was also placed on the Thanet District

Council website. In total, 2,134 postal questionnaires were completed, and 206 questionnaires were completed online between February and June 2005. These wider consultations attracted the more energised respondents and their responses differed from the Telephone survey. What they thought the problems were are different:

The full 68 page report is available however reading it it becomes apparent that the reasons given for the support for expansion "Jobs" has been oversold by almost all airports in the UK when they want to expand and in Manston's case this has been exposed because of 20 years of overselling by the airport operators. It is unsurprising that people crave improving employment prospects especially for the young  in Thanet but as history has shown Manston dreams are a cruel joke.