‘I will not resign if Doncaster Sheffield Airport loan is cancelled’, Mayor Jones

The Labour Mayor of Doncaster has said she will not resign if the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield Airport (DSA) is stopped next month.

Ros Jones was narrowly re-elected as the directly elected leader of the City of Doncaster Council in May 2025, after convincing voters she was the best option to reopen DSA.

The Mayor, who is now in her fourth consecutive term, told voters her Reform UK competitor would put the airport reopening at risk and promised to reopen it if she was re-elected.

However, following the revelations that Reform UK would soon “kill” the reopening by rescinding approval of a £57million loan for DSA, voters discovered that re-electing Jones did not provide the certainty over the airport they had been promised.

Mayor Jones has repeatedly denied misleading the public over details of the reopening, including over how soon the airport would be “opened”, with the Spring 2026 election promise having already passed.

During an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), Mayor Jones said she would not resign if the loan was rescinded at a meeting scheduled for May 11, 2026.

“I’m here to drive Doncaster forward, to bring back all the greatness that we can achieve. If this is just a party political stunt to get me to resign, it’s the wrong way forward,” Jones said.

“[Reform UK] are not thinking about Doncaster, they’re not thinking about residents, businesses and the whole of South Yorkshire. Medium-to-long-term the economic impetus it will have when it’s open is the right thing,” she added.

The Mayor stated if the airport project failed over the vote, blame would lay with Reform UK.

She said: “This is Reform not turning up at meetings to get all the information they need, not reading all the documentation, making one statement then flip-flopping about, then they’re attacking officers who cannot stand and answer back, so Reform need to learn the art of true governance.”

Reform UK deputy leader, Councillor Jason Charity, revealed his party planned to reverse permission for the DSA loan during a speech in the council chamber on April 2, 2026.

It has sparked a series of political attacks and rebuttals between Labour and Reform UK figures, including national big-hitters like Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Ed Miliband.

Reform UK Doncaster have said new information contained in the lease for DSA, leaked to journalists in January 2026, should have been provided to them ahead of the original approval of the loan in November 2025.

Senior figures suggested that the agreement to provide the Peel Group, the landowners, with 20 per cent of turnover above the rent for the site was one of the financial agreements they did not support.

Concern has also been raised over clauses which allowed Peel to break the lease if Doncaster Council’s planning department did not provide planning permission for two applications close to DSA – including one which breached the council’s own Local Plan.

Mayor Jones denied including those planning-linked break clauses were a mistake, when challenged by the LDRS.

She even stated that the clauses were “not linked to [planning] at all”, despite the explicit wording in the lease.

“Planning is quasi-judicial… it gave [Peel] the option, it didn’t say they would cancel it,” she said.

The Mayor added that “Peel know that this is going to be a very viable airport”, despite the company closing DSA in 2022 and stating it was not commercially viable.

Jones told the LDRS she would not give up on the reopening if the loan was rescinded, despite claims from herself and the South Yorkshire Mayor, Oliver Coppard, that it would “kill” the project and downplayed suggestions from Richard Tice that Reform UK would explore a compulsory purchase order for the land if it won a general election.

She said: “I will continue to find any route I can. However, [Reform] are putting the airport in jeopardy.

“A compulsory purchase order was already off the table, we’d already looked at that. Once the lease was offered, CPO won’t achieve it and it’d be five to seven years anyway.”

The Mayor suggested that the ongoing uncertainty over DSA’s funding is currently a “hindrance” in the council’s renegotiations of the lease with Peel, which is required for £160m of funding from the South Yorkshire Mayor to be released.

“It’s a hindrance to actually getting people to buy into the airport, getting all the people we want to come, bring their aircraft, get all the cargo coming forward and each delay [Reform] cause costs money,” she said.

Reform UK have repeatedly stated over recent weeks that they support the reopening of DSA, but not “at any cost”.

The party is yet to set out what the next steps would be if the loan is rescinded, but said they want it done “properly” and in a way that protects the taxpayer.

In a visit to Barnsley ahead of the local elections in May 2026, Nigel Farage suggested his councillors in Doncaster would like to see private investment in DSA.

Councillors will meet in the Civic Office on Waterdale on Monday, May 11, 2026, for the critical vote over the DSA loan, with little indication from sources that Reform UK will back down.