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Civil Aviation Bill

I shall be brief. I could have made my remarks by intervening during the speech of the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer), but he had to cope with a large number of interventions and I did not want to disrupt his speech any more than was necessary. None the less, I was astonished when he said that noise was lessening. Biggin Hill airport, the famous airfield from which many of the few flew in the second world war, is in my constituency. It now deals largely not with scheduled flights, but executive flights and so forth. Although I accept that many individual aeroplanes are much quieter than they were, we must consider the sheer multiplicity and expansion of ordinary flights to small airports such as Biggin Hill. Many flights are taking place on the shoulder of the times at which they are allowed to take place. Many flights requiring special permission are undertaken by the Ministry of Defence. More flights take place at a lower level than they used to, with flights over Biggin Hill being affected by the change to the pattern of flights over Heathrow. All those factors mean that my constituents have experienced a considerable increase in the noise around such a typical small airfield. My Front-Bench colleagues have made the important point that there is inadequate monitoring, so we simply do not know enough about the facts of noise—I accept that the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley made this point. There are doubts about who should take responsibility for monitoring noise at Biggin Hill. Should it be the local authority or the airport company? Monitoring inevitably does not take place with the frequency that ordinary people and residents are entitled to expect. Additionally, they cannot be confident in such monitoring. On those grounds alone, my hon. Friends would be absolutely right to press new clause 4 to a Division.