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Civil Aviation Bill

As ever, I am grateful for any compliments from wherever they come. On such a subject, to have a compliment from the hon. Gentleman is welcome. He is right, although I confess that the airport has got better in its public relations. Indeed, as a result of the things that I and others have said over the past few years, it has had to appoint a public relations officer. It so happens that it has appointed the man from Birmingham International airport, who seems to send out exactly the same press releases, except that he chisels out ““Birmingham International”” and puts ““Nottingham East Midlands”” instead, so we get the same guff. There we are; that is what public relations is, I guess. The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) is perfectly correct: there have been lots of justified complaints, not just from the ““vicinity”” of the airport—the word used in the clause—but from further away. Those of us who live further from the airport cannot have any confidence in the Bill dealing with the problem. Subsection (2)(c) refers to"““controlling the level of noise or atmospheric pollution in or in the vicinity of the aerodrome so far as attributable to aircraft taking off or landing””." That does not help the people living in Market Harborough or the villages and hamlets between Market Harborough and the city of Leicester, as aircraft come in or out of the airport and bend round the north of the city. One does not have to live near a big airport such as Heathrow to understand what it is like. Noise is a relative, not absolute, concept. If an area that has traditionally had no ambient noise at night—rural Leicestershire—is to be faced with aeroplanes and freighters coming in every 90 seconds, that presents a completely different problem from the one of which the Minister is perhaps aware. I shall use an analogy that I have used previously. If Nottingham East Midlands airport were a lorry freight company that wished to drive trucks through my villages every 90 seconds all night, somebody would do something about it. As the freight is up in the air, however, nobody does anything about it, and the Government will not take responsibility for the implications and consequences of their policy, through the White Paper, of creating this great freight hub in north-west Leicestershire. Were a factory emitting noxious fumes all night, somebody would do something about it, but the Government say that it is nothing to do with them, that they simply set the policy in the White Paper and that what happens next is down to local decision making. There is no local decision making of any value, because the Government will not give the local population any power over shareholders in Greater Manchester—the 10 local authorities that own the airport. What do we do? I make the same speech week after week. I drive the Speaker of the House mad with the ingenious ways in which I try to ask questions about Nottingham East Midlands airport that, strictly, are probably out of order, but he is a tolerant man and I thank him for it While he may be tolerant, however, my constituents are becoming increasingly intolerant of the way in which their lives are being ruined by the bad behaviour of the Manchester Airport Group and the way in which it addresses the issue. The worst that could be done is for the Government feebly to say that Nottingham East Midlands airport ““may”” fix its charges in respect of an aircraft. They should say ““shall””, and a meaningful regime should be attached to make sure that, if the Government are prepared to allow Nottingham East Midlands airport to police its own activities, it does so in a sensible way that bites. The people who get the benefit should therefore also have to pay for the benefits that create burdens for my constituents. Unlike the constituents of the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins), my constituents get all the burden or disbenefit and none of the economic advantage. It is high time that the Government took a grip. I appreciate that the Minister took over the aviation responsibility at a difficult time, but I have now watched half a dozen aviation Ministers push the problem into the wastepaper basket and hope that Manchester Airport Group will behave itself. It will not. It is therefore time that the Government paid a little attention to the people of this country before they finally fade away.