On 10 April 2026, the Leader of Reform UK Doncaster, Cllr Craig Ward, wrote to four MPs. The letter set out the case for rescinding the council's £57 million airport borrowing of November 2025 and invited them to test it for themselves.
The recipients were Lee Pitcher MP, Sally Jameson MP, the Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, and the Rt Hon John Healey MP. Two hold constituencies in Doncaster. Two hold neighbouring seats whose constituents use Doncaster services. Two are Secretaries of State.
The position
Reform UK Doncaster's position has been consistent. The group supports the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield Airport. What it does not support is a £57 million borrowing decision taken without members seeing the lease, the current passenger projections, or the private-sector proposal that would have shifted risk away from the public purse.
The three questions
The letter placed three questions before the MPs.
Why were councillors asked to approve £57 million of borrowing on a passenger forecast of 2.5 million a year, when the council's own later modelling shows 1.1 million by 2037?
Why has the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority not placed commercial risk on comparable terms to Doncaster's borrowing?
Why was a private-sector proposal to restructure the risk received, but not assessed, before the vote was taken?
Each is answerable from papers the council holds. None has, to date, been answered.
Why the letter goes to MPs
Parliamentary accountability matters here for ordinary reasons. The funding package includes central government contributions and draws on public money that flows through more than one level of government. Two of the recipients are Cabinet ministers. A scheme of this scale, with a lease that includes an energy supply arrangement tied to the landlord and a strategic infrastructure dimension, engages their departments at the level of public interest even where it does not engage them at the level of formal consent.
A rescission motion is a local instrument. It reopens the council's decision. It does not, and cannot, review the wider funding arrangements, the central grant components, or the commercial terms with the landlord. Parliamentary interest in those wider dimensions is therefore complementary to the rescission, not in competition with it.
What the letter asks
The letter did not ask the MPs to take a position on the rescission. It asked them to read it. It asked them to satisfy themselves, through whatever means are available to them, that the material before councillors in November 2025 was sufficient to support a £57 million commitment, and that the council's subsequent handling of disclosure to elected members has been consistent with the standards expected of a public body at that scale.
That is not a heroic request. It is the request every MP can be asked by constituents to make of a council that has committed public money on their behalf.
What this is not
A rescission motion is not an argument against the airport. It is not opposition to regional investment. It is not an attack on any individual MP or member of the funding consortium. It is a procedural remedy to a decision taken without the full facts, and it is a mechanism for returning the decision to the chamber that took it, this time on the document.
The rescission runs through the council's own process. The parliamentary dimension runs through whatever routes the four MPs choose. The public dimension is answered by the facts the council is willing to put on the record before the next vote. The MPs now have them in writing.