---

Civil Aviation Bill

My party has some sympathy with the thinking behind the new clause but it is not able to support it. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) has set out concerns about a number of airlines that have poor safety records. He has said that a number of them are banned from visiting the UK. He started to lose me when he suggested that his clause could be a half-way step towards ultimately the issuing of EU-wide guidance, if I understood him correctly. He may wish to correct me. It seems to the Opposition that the issue should be decided by national authorities—the Civil Aviation Authority in our case. We may have a particular reason why we do not think that a particular airline is safe and may disagree with other countries on that. Conversely there are circumstances where a European-wide body might come under pressure to ban a particular airline for a reason that had nothing to do with its safety record.