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Civil Aviation Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this, because my noble friend has made some useful comments. I, too, declare an interest, as campaign director for Future Heathrow, which is a campaigning organisation made up of business groups, trade unions, airlines and professional associations. The organisation is deeply concerned, as I am, about the continuing decline of Heathrow airport. Whenever we discuss these things, we need to remember that 170,000 people are either directly or indirectly dependent on Heathrow alone. Few people know that Heathrow has already been overtaken by three continental airports; at the end of March, it will also have been overtaken by Munich and, shortly after that, by Milan, Rome and Madrid, too. If anyone thinks that we can just opt out of the world as it is, they are wrong. My noble friend is absolutely right to say that neither expansion nor modernisation should take place without a high priority being given to the environment generally. That does not just mean noise; it also means air pollution problems and looking at the whole area. The issue is this: if we let our airports stay as they are, they will decline, particularly the big ones. People who talk about their areas in this context had better look at the job consequences of that, in relation to high-tech jobs in particular, but also in relation to low-income jobs. Airports are immense generators of wealth. My experience is that many of the people who wrote to me when I was an MP complaining about the noise of planes were the same people who said to me that flights were at times too expensive and that they were very pleased to see the arrival of the low-cost operators. That is similar to the letters one got from the people who dropped their kids off at school in their cars and then complained that there was too much traffic on the roads. We all have double views on this matter. If I was thinking of my own personal needs, having lived under the airport flight path for 30-odd years, I would close down the airport tomorrow. However, I do not think of my own personal needs and, fortunately, I do not think that the vast majority of the population does, either. I think that the public are far more sympathetic to the idea of expansion than people give them credit for. The people who write the letters on noise are not necessarily representative of the majority community, particularly given that an airport such as Heathrow provides 170,000 jobs—people are not daft. The issue is how we can operate in a more environmentally friendly way. My noble friend has put forward an interesting measure, although I think that there are better ways of doing this. We ought to look at the long-term solution to the problem, which is a difficult one. When I look at what local authorities are doing around airports that are expanding, I see an immense variation of response. Some local authorities are extremely good and work very closely with the airport, trying to work out ways in which they can mitigate the impact of that airport on the people living immediately around it—my colleague from Manchester will know about that. Other local authorities seem to take the view that all they have to do is try to stop the airport, as though they can stop the world and get off, and go back to a pre-industrial age. I am always amazed by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, with his family background. He seems to have forgotten that in the early part of the 19th century, when trains were being developed, there was a minority of people with opinions similar to his who took the view that trains were nasty, dirty and smoky and that they carved up the countryside and should not be allowed. Fortunately, they lost the argument. People recognised that, in a country driven by the industrial revolution and scientific advance—which is what this country has been so good at—we needed to improve these things rather than stop them happening. I suspect that the alternative to my noble friend’s efforts, although I have no enormous problem with the amendment, is to start getting local authorities more effectively engaged with airports. In some cases, they are really well engaged and good discussions take place. I often wonder why we do not discuss in rather more detail whether we can move schools. Some schools which are under flight paths are in an undesirable location, for a variety of reasons. We should consider that, but it can be done only if we take a view of the airport in the whole area. In relation to Heathrow, I have talked to some of the bigger developers, such as Arup. I think that I have mentioned on a previous occasion that Arup has just won two contracts in China to build two cities, each of 1 million people and each designed to be carbon-neutral. If our companies can do that in China—it demonstrates how fast the Chinese are jumping ahead of us—there is no reason why we cannot expect our airport operators and the local authorities working around them to develop a more strategic approach to airports which recognises their immense economic value in terms of jobs, prosperity and everything else and, at the same time, recognises that there is an impact on the people who live around them, which needs to be addressed.