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Civil Aviation Bill

My Lords, my name is associated with this amendment, and I am pleased to be able to follow the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, who has made a clear case based most essentially on one fact—namely, that the behaviour of customers has changed over the past 10 years. Their behaviour 10 years ago was largely to use package holidays when going on a holiday abroad. The ATOL licence ensured that if the holiday did not take place and the customer lost money, compensation was available. More importantly, if one was stranded abroad on a package holiday, the scheme, through the licence, would enable one to get back home. The change described by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, means that now there is no such protection. There are trade associations who are not interested in consumer protection. However, one for which I have plenty of praise is the Association of British Travel Agents. For decades it has had arbitration schemes which use independent arbitrators when there are difficulties between tour companies, airlines and the passenger. It is fully in support of this change. The Government are always entitled to reject advice, but on this occasion they have had advice not only from what the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, described as their own regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority; they have had advice from Ernst & Young, who have done the figures, from the Consumers’ Association, from Virgin Atlantic and from the Association of British Travel Agents. What more can you do? The noble Lord has described what more there has been—there has been this latest Select Committee report from the House of Commons. I wonder what the Minister has got to put against it. I would hate to describe the Minister as arrogant. I know he is not. I have had experience of discussions with him on a number of recent Bills in which he has been involved, and he is the very furthest remove from any touch of arrogance. But I cannot actually find a suitable word for what he seems to have been guilty of up to this point in the discussion on the Bill, but it is not one which I think is easy for him to defend. I want to mention one small aspect of his argument in Committee. He rightly said that there were many areas where insurance was perhaps desirable, but we—the Government, Parliament—do not make it compulsory. That is true even in road traffic matters, where we have had some kind of insurance since 1930, I believe. We make it compulsory only in relation to liability to third parties. But this is a very different situation. In this case there has in practice been protection for years and years, the result of which has been partly explained by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. Many of those who now make their own travel arrangements, , as is the custom nowadays, think they are covered by ordinary travel insurance, when they are not. If they happen to use a credit card, then Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act gives them protection. I am glad to say that our Law Lord friends in the House of Lords, in their judicial decision earlier this month, said that that applied when the consumer bought things from foreign suppliers. So, the alternative supplier—namely the supplier of the credit card—is liable for any purchase, whether airline tickets or shopping purchases between £100 and £5,000, I think. But of course many people do not think about the subtlety of using a credit card instead of a charge card such as American Express or a debit card. There are other methods of payment, too, but they do not have that peculiar advantage of using a credit card which I have just described. In practice we have had protection, but as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, explained, it is a diminishing protection as ever fewer people go on package holidays as distinct from making their own arrangements. I think that that is a sufficient argument for this amendment, which is so modest in its implications and yet so significant if you think of people stranded abroad on their holiday.