The consortium aiming to re-open Manston as a cargo airport has resumed its attempt to acquire the site.

RiverOak Strategic Partners has submitted a fresh application to force the current owners to relinquish the site through what is known as a Development Consent Order.

The consortium withdrew its original application in early May after the Planning Inspectorate raised a number of questions around details of the bid.

The current owners are proposing the site be used for a mixed development of 4,000 houses and business use.

The news of a renewed DCO comes ahead of a critical meeting on Thursday when councillors will vote on Thanet’s draft Local Plan - its future blueprint for where houses will be built.

That plan includes a proposal to continue to earmark the site for some kind of aviation use.

Thanet Conservative county councillor Paul Messenger first revealed the news that there was to be a second application at a full council meeting.

And he revealed there was the possibility the company - RiverOak Strategic Partners - could offer part of the site for holding lorries during Operation Stack.

In remarks that pre-empted any official announcement from the company, Cllr Messenger said Manston would help build the county’s resilience in the event that Brexit threatened to cause gridlock.

He said: “I am pleased to announce that RiverOak will be submitting its DCO ‘mark two’ this week.

"Manston will provide resilience for freight through Kent because there is evidence that a vast quantity of freight is trucked to and from northern European airports to the UK increasing the costs for all those in the supply chain.

"This occurs because cargo shippers cannot find slots at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted and is therefore a major contributing factor to the truck movements through Dover and Folkestone in Kent.”

He went on to say that RiverOak wanted to discuss with KCC and other agencies the idea of using the site for lorry freight.

“A new Manston cargo airport would help reduce “ro-ro” freight through Kent and the channel ports.

"A post-Brexit east Kent will need parking resilience and RiverOak will perhaps be in a position to help KCC through a combined facility for air freight HGVs and sea freight HGVs and I can confirm that RiverOak would be very pleased to enter into such discussions.”

Meanwhile notes of a meeting between officials from the Planning Inspectorate and RiverOak about the DCO have been published.

The notes indicate the Planning Inspectorate has received various assurances about details of its plan.

However, the notes also suggest it again raised concerns regarding the funding of the project.

The notes say “advice from the previous meeting was reiterated in terms of providing evidence-based assurance that adequate funds would be available to enable Compulsory Acquisition (CA) of land and rights within the relevant time period".

RiverOak said while it was was “keen to demonstrate the availability and credibility of funding” it was “cautious to only release into the public domain such documents as were necessary at a suitable time in the process so as not to prejudice its on-going relationships with funding partners.”

George Yerrall, a director of RiverOak Strategic Partners (RSP), said: “The original DCO application, which was submitted in early April, and which ran to 11,000 pages, was the culmination of 27 months of intensive work on the part of the RSP team and our professional consultants.

"This included three separate consultation exercises as well as a complex planning appeal.

"We were therefore naturally disappointed to be informed by the Planning Inspectorate that, in their view, the application fell short in certain respects.

"Nevertheless, we have taken up all the points raised by the Planning Inspectorate and, working with our full team, we have used the past nine weeks to provide full and comprehensive responses to those points.

"We have also taken the opportunity to clarify the situation in relation to the two museums.

"We are promising to safeguard their position, as before, but have now made it clear that any future development consent relating to either museum would be a matter for Thanet District Council, rather than the Planning Inspectorate."

“The submission sent to PINS today incorporates all that additional work and we believe that the documentation as amended is sufficient to justify the DCO application being allowed to move to the next stage.”