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Civil Aviation Bill

That is an extremely persuasive plea, as is the position adopted by my noble friend Lord Soley. I do not want to appear negative—very far from it. I share entirely the objective that we also need to deal with air quality at ground level. Earlier, in respect of the responsibility of local authorities, I referred to the Environment Act 1995 which places a duty on local authorities to review and assess the current and likely future air quality in their areas against the national objectives set out in the strategy and prescribed in the Air Quality Regulations 2000. When a local authority considers that one of more of the objectives is not likely to be realised, it has to declare so and draw up an action plan on how it intends to tackle that issue. To give another note of comfort to my noble friends—I am not sure that I shall satisfy them entirely at this early stage in our deliberations—airport operators do not have statutory powers enabling them to control emissions from airport vehicles, but they have incentives to do so. For example, the British Airports Authority has introduced a clean vehicle programme to encourage the use of cleaner fuels and technologies targeting vehicle emissions on the ground, which remains a key element of its air quality action plan for Heathrow and Gatwick. Of course, we recognise that it has the general good of the nation at heart. Equally clearly, it wants business and will run foul of emissions standards and the capacity to expand unless the air quality of the environment which so many people live in close to Heathrow does not reach appropriate standards. Those are my two responses to my noble friend, although I recognise that he has greater ambitions than this with regard to what can be done to clean up airports.