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Civil Aviation Bill

The people of Coventry are about to enjoy a delightful feast, as I am about to come to those sort of issues. For the moment, I shall stick with climate change. Research conducted by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which is published on the Friends of the Earth website, claims that at the present rate of growth aviation would wipe out all the emissions savings made by other sectors in the economy. If that is the case, it will be almost impossible for the Government to meet their stated objective of reducing CO2 emissions by 60 per cent. from 1990 levels by 2050. Indeed, aviation on its own explains why CO2 emissions have increased since the Government took over. Not even higher oil prices seem to be arresting the continuing growth. The Government concluded in their White Paper that there was a desperate need for additional runway capacity in the south-east. With development at Gatwick blocked until 2019, if their demand figures are right, it can only mean looking at Heathrow airport, which is the favoured choice for the big airlines. What hampers development there is that heavy levels of pollution from the M25 already make air quality around Heathrow an environmental problem. In addition, Heathrow’s new terminal 5 could generate up to 50,000 car trips every day across London and in the south-east. Ironically, it is the Government’s proposals on Crossrail that may undermine both the existing Heathrow express and the imaginative new proposals for a link to Waterloo. If they fail to get that right, people will simply return to their cars. Instead of grappling with that, the Government have fastened on Stansted for expansion, yet that brings them into direct conflict with the established principle that there should be no cross-subsidisation by BAA. The second runway at Stansted is expected to go into service by 2013. However, Stansted is not fully utilised now and operates no intercontinental business. Nine tenths of flights leaving Stansted are operated by Ryanair or easyJet. Those airlines are highly profitable, but airports derive income from passenger numbers, so the revenue that short-haul carriers bring is much less than the revenue from wide-bodied jets. Nobody believes that Stansted could possibly finance the hugely expensive expansion in infrastructure required for a second runway out of its own revenues. It can only happen with massive cross-subsidy by Heathrow and Gatwick. So what do we have? A runway where the market clearly does not want it and little thought to proposals that could make a runway environmentally acceptable where the market does want it, and a professed desire to tackle climate change, but also a desire to expand capacity. In short, the Government have piecemeal preferences but no overall strategy. In the context of all that, the Bill is neither one thing nor the other. It is really a bit of everything and a bit of nothing, and it illustrates the confusion in which the Government find themselves on aviation matters. The Bill allows airports to design and include stipulations about noise and emissions in their contracts with airlines. It is, to put it mildly, bizarre that the airport companies that have a fundamental interest in attracting airlines to use their facilities should also be the ones that set noise and emissions requirements for their customers. That is potentially deeply perverse. It is also bizarre, and something that compounds the peculiarity of the structure, that they should then be empowered with the authority to fine their customers for breaching criteria that they have no especial interest in enforcing. The Bill asks the poacher to police the gamekeeper—or perhaps it is better described as one poacher policing another. Although the Bill pays lip-service to both noise and emissions, it lacks an all-embracing regime into which the criteria would have to fit.