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Civil Aviation Bill

I hope that I have not missed the point. Having sat on the board of an airport company, I say that the hon. Gentleman is simply wrong. If someone wants to have a successful airport company and wants to expand, they need the support of the local community. Those people need to know that there is concern about their concerns. One of the ways of demonstrating that is to fine—not in an ad hoc or arbitrary manner—in a reasoned way so as to reduce unnecessary inconvenience to people who live nearby. My experience is that airports do that even where there is no financial benefit for them. If the hon. Gentleman does not believe in such schemes he should go beyond my experience in Manchester to San Francisco. He might want to go to San Francisco anyway because it is a good place to visit. The airport there runs an extraordinarily good scheme, at its cost, that fines aircraft that go off course. It is supported by the community and has reduced the number of complaints. There is evidence in the UK and abroad that airports can pursue such schemes successfully without there being an intermediary between the airport and the community. The aviation business has been privatised and liberalised, but the civil service has a residual memory of the time when British Airways was effectively part of the Government. It was nationalised, as was the British Airports Authority. That background sometimes distorts decisions on the aviation industry. Those of us who are involved with the airports at Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, which are supported by many other airports, have believed for some time that there should be a completely open-skies policy in the regions. That would help in the south-east in that it would take aircraft out of that region—not many, but such a policy would help a little where the sky is congested. There would be economic benefits in the north of England. I believe that BA does not like that idea. In the short term, there would probably be slight damage to its bottom line, but that would be overcome in a year or two. BA’s interest, as a good British company, is not the same as the UK’s interest, but sometimes aviation policy seems to be driven in that direction. I hope that, in future discussions perhaps rather than in her summing up, my hon. Friend the Minister will respond positively to the recent Civil Aviation Authority report on the granting of fifth freedoms to regional airports. That is not the open-skies policy that I would want ideally, but the CAA says that there are significant benefits for regional airports if fifth freedoms are granted, unless there is an extraordinarily good reason not to do so. A sensible way to start to improve the environment and air quality around an airport is giving the airport the ability to encourage airlines by financial means to move to less polluting aircraft. That is the way forward. Obviously, the airlines are worried about such measures and about noise. They are concerned that any decisions taken by airports do not over-penalise or conflict with airspace requirements. Overall, it seems that such an approach is sensible. There is a real problem around airports, and particularly Heathrow. Primarily, the problem is not caused by aircraft at Heathrow but by cars. I cannot think of any other situation where there is a threat to a major industry because another body or series of bodies is polluting the air. If we return to the principle that the polluter pays, aviation pollutants do not constitute a threat that, by 2010, Heathrow will not meet European standards. The pollution comes from cars. If hon. Members can think of another example of one industry affecting the expansion and development of another industry, I cannot. We need to separate the issues and there needs to be a solution. The noise problem is getting better. I accept that it is a complicated issue. There is not a simple linear relationship with decibels. We are talking about the quality and time of day of the noise and whether the area is rural or urban—in other words, the background noise. As there is more intense criticism of airports, on average, aircraft make a quarter of the noise that they made 20 years ago.