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Civil Aviation Bill

I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker. Otherwise, I would not have had much of a Third Reading speech. The group of amendments tabled in my name and by others addresses the heart of the Bill. Everyone, including the Secretary of State, accepts that this is to some extent a hotchpotch of a Bill. It has no great coherent form; it contains a group of half-concocted measures that do not quite come together into a serious regime. Following the deliberations in Committee, which were so ably conducted by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), the amendments are an attempt to introduce more cogency. The amendments largely define the way in which the Bill will work in practice in terms of noise and emissions, turning it from a simple enabling Bill into something more focused. The amendments also cover the growing problem of consumer concern about the monitoring of flights at night and the wall of silence faced by many people on the ground when investigating the problem of noise above them, particularly at night. Amendment No. 1 is a rather sly wolf in sheep’s clothing. It would remove clause 2(2), which says:"““In subsection (3) for ‘limit the number of occasions on which they make take off or land,’ substitute ‘impose limits or other restrictions relating to aircraft taking off or landing,’””." That specifically removes from the Secretary of State’s duties the stipulation to determine the number of flights at designated airports that may or may not take place at night, and replaces the number of flights with various other stipulations, particularly concerning noise and emissions. At first sight that seems logical, and the argument will be that as noise and emissions improve, the number of flights will become less relevant. However, beneath that seeming logic lies a severe danger that those who live under the flight path of an airport will experience many more flights at night, which despite the noise and emissions stipulations will be no less disturbing. Such an argument contains a fallacy of methodology. Decibels alone are not a measure of nuisance. Occasions of noise—undercarriages going down and the roar of engines that do not necessarily break the decibel barrier—wake people up. We are facing, especially for designated airports and given the underlying concept perhaps for many other airports that are expanding at the moment, a depressing and unpoliced regime for the growth of flights at night.