To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent assessment he has made of the contribution from general aviation in the UK to growth and employment in the STEM sector.

In March 2015 the Government published research that the Department for Transport commissioned from York Aviation entitled “The Economic Value of General Aviation in the UK”. That research contained an estimate of the jobs linked to the general aviation sector in the UK being 38,000. York Aviation did not separate out the contribution from the Government’s STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics) education programmes.

We are commissioning research on what a strategic network of general aviation airfields might look like and this research may review that calculation.