Nobody should take any pleasure from the demise of a company employing 2400 staff. Flybe workers aren’t to blame for the sins of its management teams over the years.
But its death was inevitable in a country not generally keen on spending taxpayers’ money propping up the failed business plans of private companies.
Particularly when the firms involved are owned by rich tycoons and private equity barons.
The strange thing is, six weeks ago the Government was hell-bent on offering a bail-out. “We’ll make a decision in a fortnight,” we were told. Then, silence.
Something changed its mind.
Coronavirus will have made the finances look even more frightening for ministers in recent days, but my guess is they were put off long before by the simple fact that Flybe just had too many planes on too many routes that will never make a profit.
Cool Cabinet heads prevailed over hotter ones boasting of “levelling up” the regions.
It’s the right decision. Had a bail-out gone ahead, taxpayer cash would have been going straight into the deep pockets of Virgin Atlantic and Stobart.
Not just through their shares in Flybe, but indirectly to their other businesses, too. In the case of Virgin, rivals say it could have reshuffled some of Flybe’s Heathrow domestic slots into lucrative transatlantic ones for its other airline partners. For Stobart, Flybe’s survival pushed growing amounts of traffic through its Southend airport. Big money.
It’s brutal, but keeping half-empty aeroplanes in the air is not a good use of taxpayer largesse.
