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Civil Aviation Bill

All Members of the Committee will appreciate the tour de force of the noble Countess, Lady Mar, not only in introducing an amendment that has a pristine beauty to its entirety but in speaking in great detail and to good effect about issues that should concern us all. It therefore falls to me to make a response that may appear to some Members of the Committee to be somewhat churlish. It is not meant to be so; it is meant to indicate that we have disagreements with the analysis that the noble Countess has advanced. Of course we take her views very seriously. They are in no way reduced in their seriousness by the fact that my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis associates himself with these concerns through his role with the British Air Line Pilots Association. We have addressed the arguments, although not in minute detail until the noble Countess kindly offered her speech to me this morning. I then realised the full weight of it and the real problem of whether I was remotely equipped to respond to a fraction of the arguments presented therein. But I am equipped to indicate the broad lines of the Government’s thinking about how we tackle the serious issue of health and we will very much take into account the representations made by the noble Countess. I am not that sanguine that the reply I give this afternoon will be my final statement in response to the issue. I am mindful of the fact that this is merely the Committee stage and that we may well return to the issue later, but I ought to outline the broad position the Government adopt. I shall deal first with the proposal in the amendment to set up a new centre and new organisation to fulfil functions that are already carried out by the Civil Aviation Authority and its Aviation Health Unit. I recognise that the noble Countess is calling into question the validity of that work. She predicates her assumptions on the evidence she presents that it is potentially intrinsically bad for the health of anyone to step onto an aircraft and either fly it or sit in the passenger cabin. We are not convinced of that that is the case. Until there is evidence to substantiate that position we would find it very difficult to justify the cost that the new centre would impose on taxpayers. The Bill, addresses safety issues in the airline industry and at airports and we are out to show our good faith and concern about issues where we can identify the scientific basis on which action is necessary and the appropriate action to take in response to that. We do take aviation health seriously. In fact it would be difficult to understand why this Bill would be written in the way that it is if it were not for the seriousness of that concern. Indeed, in a number of our debates, including some of the contributions at Second Reading, such is the generosity of Members of this House—more so in Committee—that we have been commended on the steps that we are taking. In particular, we have been commended for taking the unique step of establishing a specialist unit to the Civil Aviation Authority to deal with aviation health issues. It is not the case that the Government are not addressing the issues—far from it. We take them very seriously indeed. We have an alternative strategy for dealing with them with which, I recognise, the noble Countess is not satisfied for the reasons she has expressed in such articulate terms. The current arrangements were set up in response to a committee of this House in 2000. That committee stated:"““We thus conclude that cabin atmosphere levels of volatile organic compounds present no risk to cabin occupants under normal operating conditions””." We are not resting there, but the Committee will recognise that this House has addressed the issues and put before the Government its mature judgment. We will continue to investigate these issues through the independent Committee on Toxicity at Imperial College. The noble Countess has been extremely helpful and co-operative in identifying to me not only her general points of concern but the precise points where the dubiety of the Governments case might be identified. She has helped me address these matters with greater precision than would otherwise have been the case without her help. I recognise that she lacks confidence in one member of that committee of experts, but that is only one member. A raft of documents in evidence has been assembled by BALPA, the organisation of which my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davies is president. These documents are before that committee for its full examination and exercise of judgment. The noble Countess is pushing at an open door by emphasising that we need to take this issue seriously and that we could not possibly have a health measure for the aviation industry unless we addressed ourselves to this factor. I am mindful that she is emphasising developments more recent than those that the Select Committee considered in 2000, although we should not underestimate the expertise involved in that examination and the judgments that were reached at that time. We are involved in considerable ongoing work and we are totally receptive to fresh evidence. BALPA is in a position to present some of that evidence and is doing so within a framework in which we can tackle these issues if they turn out to be as serious as the noble Countess fears. They may do; but I am not in a position to reach a judgment on that. The Government have not formed a judgment at this stage but we are in a position to say that if there is a problem, its impact is limited at present to such a degree that we see no threat to aircraft and their passengers.