---

Civil Aviation Bill

I was rather hopeful that everybody on the Committee would speak and that I would have a full house ranged against me. Perhaps I may upbraid the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, on the grounds that attack is the best form of defence. The notion that every word I speak is not prepared by me on my own, I find very strange, I must say. The noble Lord has failed to recognise, particularly with regard to this measure, which comes to this House from another place, that I have the enormous benefit of having looked at the deliberations elsewhere and having looked at them with some respect for the democratic process. I hope that the noble Lord will recognise that these words are expressed by me: if I were appearing before noble Lords on the basis of a proposition—I admit that it has not succeeded in winning a great deal of support around the Committee at this stage—which had dropped from Heaven to this place beneath and whose origins I was having difficulty in identifying, that would be one thing. The reason why I can come with some confidence to this Committee is that Ministers in the other place went through all these arguments in exactly the same kind of detail as we have done today and addressed the same kind of principles which were adumbrated at Second Reading. I think that I confessed at Second Reading—I do not have my speech immediately before me—that this decision was arrived at in full recognition that there were as many arguments on one side as there were on the other. This decision is not being rammed through by Ministers without having carefully considered all points of view—very far from it. When the Bill was debated in the other place, we said we recognised that this is a balanced debate. My fellow Ministers were not convinced one way or the other, but during the summer we worked with the CAA and received representations from stakeholders. Again, some were for and some were against, and we all recognise that this is a delicately balanced issue. Ministers then decided not to implement the levy. It is not a question of me expressing the words of others; it is me fulfilling my mandate that Ministers have seriously considered all the issues and have reached a judgment. It is that we do not believe that the case is made out as it has been expressed today. I recognise the merit of the amendments. The levy scheme has the beauty of being simple to understand and providing a high level of passenger protection. My noble friend Lord Faulkner, in introducing the amendment with great clarity, recognised that we have principled objections to it. He said that there are some ways in which passengers are compelled to take out insurance—it is obligatory. But that does not alter the fact that we are setting our face against an additional one. After all, the case he has deployed today might be made on the basis that all passengers should take out medical insurance and we should insist on that by law. It might be that no one ought to travel abroad except those who have compulsorily taken out the E11 form. Both of those facilities are available and we certainly encourage people to protect themselves; that goes without saying. We also indicate areas in which there are greater risks—perhaps due to the climate or indigenous illnesses—or that costs in some countries can be devastating if one does not have the appropriate insurance. But we do not compel people to take out such insurance. We do not compel people to take out house contents insurance, although most people choose to do so—and elements in the market encourage them in that. The Government recognise that even in car insurance the compulsory element is limited to third-party liability—damage to others, not to oneself. It is difficult to argue that airline passengers are in a different category and have more to lose than all the other cases. They do have much to lose and we all know of distressing circumstances in which people are stranded abroad. My noble friend referred to the EU Jet experience in which some people incurred considerable costs in getting home. All those passengers did get home. A large number did so on the £25 basis, although I concede that some did not. It is not axiomatic that because it is a good idea we should translate it into compulsory requirements on our fellow citizens. There is a range of other insurance that people ought to take out and it is in their best interests to do so. I suggest that no one in the Committee would be so foolish as not to take it out, but the law does not insist on it any more than it does the rest of our population. I dispute my noble friend’s suggestion that the compulsory element is an easy argument on the Government’s side. He can dismiss that.