---

Civil Aviation Bill

I am sorry to disappoint the hon. and learned Gentleman; we have no such plans at this point. It would be necessary for local Members and interested parties to convince the Secretary of State that he needed to designate a particular airport other than those that are designated at the moment. The Bill, as I shall point out in a moment, provides effectively the same range of powers to the airport authorities that control other airports as those that are available to the Secretary of State at designated airports. We hope that it will not be necessary to designate more airports, but the hon. and learned Gentleman and colleagues around his constituency would be free to make the case to the Secretary of State if they felt that there were evidence to support the designation of Nottingham East Midlands airport. Before I continue, may I tell the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow)—unfortunately, he is not in his place—that I have reflected and that the answer to his earlier question is the negative resolution? I can assure the House that any proposals to change the arrangements by which we control noise at the three designated airports would be subject to consultation in the normal way. Although the Government have a direct role in noise control at the three designated airports, elsewhere, airports are, apart from any planning restrictions that may apply, responsible for their own noise control arrangements, usually as part of their conditions of use; a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd). That accords with our long-standing policy—re-emphasised in the White Paper—that, generally speaking, aircraft noise problems are best resolved locally by the airport working with the local community. In the majority of cases this works well but, in some cases, there has been doubt about what airports can and cannot do within the existing law. That is why, in the White Paper and the Department’s document ““Control of Noise from Civil Aircraft: The Government’s Conclusions””, we gave a commitment to clarify and enhance airport powers in statute.