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Civil Aviation Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Aviation Environment Federation. As noble Lords have said, there are some good elements in the Bill. I was interested to hear the Minister talk about aviation being a gateway to the world and that it produces wonderful travel opportunities. That is an extension of the Government’s long-held view that they should predict and produce for the needs of air passengers and freight while not doing the same for road, rail or any other surface mode. Maritime does not come into it because we have not yet had a strategy on that. I worry, as other noble Lords have said, that we continue to pay lip service to the problem of emissions and Kyoto, but with the terrible proviso—so long as it does not hurt anybody and does not cause anybody to change his behaviour. As my noble friend Lord Faulkner said, I am afraid that in order to do good it will have to probably hurt and cause a behavioural change. I am a member of the European Energy and Transport Forum. Earlier this year it produced a report on taxation of aviation. Emissions trading came into that report. It said:"““The scope of any [emissions trading] scheme must include all flights to and from EU airports, but domestic and external, as well as flights over EU airspace. If emissions trading rather than a fuel tax is chosen as the preferred route, this can only be achieved by severely limiting the free ‘allowances’ allowed to airlines at the start of the scheme””." I suspect—the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, alluded to this—airlines are very keen on emissions trading because they will get this free start. So, any trading will probably only affect any increase in the traffic that they create. I do not think that is its objective. The Energy and Transport Forum concluded that in order to be effective for air to pay the full cost of the damage it imposes, there should be a charge of something like £50 per 1,000 kilometres passenger journey or about £200 per 1,000 tonne kilometres of freight. So the emissions trading scheme needs to be taken forward but the free ride to start off with is not an option; and, I am afraid, if we are to meet our Kyoto targets, as other noble Lords have said, this must hurt. If it causes some passengers and some freight—and I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group—to transfer to rail, or even road for short distances, because the emissions will be less, then surely we should accept that price. Turning to the problems of noise, the Minister said that the Bill would be positive for those who live around airports. I have not found that. Uncertainty about the amount and the level of noise is hardly positive, as many noble Lords have said. I shall not repeat a load of briefings from different people about noise, but I believe that there is a serious problem about how you measure noise. The method is crucial to how it affects people, in particular this quota system, which I am not sure works very well. I have a 35-page copy of the judgment from the Queen’s Bench Division in 1993 of R v Secretary of State for Transport ex p. LB Richmond and others where the judge says that the quota count system is ““wholly unreal”” and seeks to bamboozle residents into thinking that more night flights somehow equals less noise and less sleep disturbance, which, the judge says, is a counter-intuitive proposition. I will not go on any more. This is something that we can explore in Committee with some interest but it is clearly a serious situation. If we think it is just going to apply to Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted today, we can be quite sure that in the future it will be extended to other airports. In that context, I remember a press cutting about concern by residents around Coventry Airport about noise in the last few months. Apparently Coventry Airport has such a small terminal building that it does not need planning permission to operate as one so they can therefore make as much noise as they like there. I probably have not paraphrased it correctly but it is something that we have got to be careful about: new airstrips coming up with a small portakabin as a terminal and they can suddenly run flights all night. Finally, this Bill provides the opportunity for doing something which I do not think is in it at the moment, which is the suggestion that it is time that the air industry funded surface access to its airports, with a view to reducing the number of cars that are used—whether by passengers or workers at the airport. We all remember the long, drawn out Heathrow terminal five inquiry where we were told that the Heathrow Express was going to be extended and that there would be one or two more bus services. But for such an enormous development at Heathrow it should have been a requirement for the rail connection to have been extended to Staines and back to wherever the Staines line goes to—either Waterloo, Ascot, Reading or anywhere else—and also for a line to be added which could then extend back on to the Great Western to Reading. There is an enormous catchment area there of customers for the air and workers so why was the extension of these rail networks not part of the conditions attached to the giving of planning permission? They are absolutely essential. The traffic jams around Heathrow, even before the opening of Terminal 5, are enormous and what it will be like once it has opened heaven only knows. The same applies to Stansted. We need some legislation on this. Otherwise we are relying on individual public inquiries and the opinions of the inspectors to put on conditions. There is a precedent for this. In the railway White Paper of 2004, the Government made it plain that on road and rail connections to new ports developments, the port developer would have to contribute to the cost of such developments; they are putting that into practice on some of the subsequent decisions on planning applications. That is not altogether satisfactory but at least it is in the White Paper. We should make something a bit stronger in the air industry so that with any increase in the number of passengers or planes going through an airport it is required that the number of cars going to the airport is not increased—I refer to both congestion and emissions. In conclusion, I welcome bits of this Bill and I welcome the opportunity for looking at other issues that might conveniently fit into this Bill during Committee and thereafter. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.