---

Civil Aviation Bill

I support the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. I, too, have had representations from local authorities. I will endeavour to explain to the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, why we are concerned. As I understand it, the present arrangement for night flying consists of an overall noise restriction. As the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, says, it is an amount of decibels divided by an amount of time. It does not refer to each occasion on which there is noise. It is a broad average over the average of the night hours. I believe that in 1993 the Government decided on a ““noise only”” scheme, which had the potential to allow 24,000 night movements at Heathrow. Local authorities challenged that in the High Court. In the end, the Secretary of State was required to introduce a scheme that included both a noise quota count and an absolute movement limit, which allows 5,800 movements a year. Consultation on the regime, through a two-stage public consultation process, ended in September 2005—so the consultation is pretty current. If the Government were able to abolish the movement limit and go back to a noise-only limit, there would be the potential to increase the present limit of 5,800 to 39,000 movements a year, which is what we are arguing about—the number of times that people living around designated airports are to be woken up at night by aircraft. A potential six- or seven-fold increase in movements would be absolutely dreadful. It is mainly the volume of the noise at the moment when an aircraft takes off or lands which causes people to wake up. In this amendment, we are probing the motives behind the changes in the Bill. Are they a subtle requirement for the Secretary of State to remove the movement limit and to legitimise a noise restriction scheme? If they are—I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, and I speak from the same script—we will seek to overturn it on Report if the Minister cannot give us a satisfactory reply.