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Civil Aviation Bill

My hon. Friend’s ingenious analogy shows how weak is the system, which will be the only way of controlling noise. The frequency of flights through the night and early morning, when there is reduced background or ambient noise, is not considered. The same total noise exposure can be achieved with a few noisy aircraft or a larger number of less noisy ones. The removal of the night movements limit implies that as aircraft become less noisy, more flights can be accommodated in the same noise quota. For example, under the quota count system, one Boeing 747 could be replaced with four Boeing 777s. It is no wonder that hon. Members on both sides who represent residents in the vicinity of a designated airport are concerned about the proposal, especially as the relationship between airports and local residents is not bathed in trust. Mr. Steve Charlish, who is well-known to my hon. Friends as chairman of the East Leicestershire Villages Against Airspace campaign group, sent a letter to the managing director of Nottingham East Midlands airport :"““You might be aware that I have sent since 8th August 2005, forty two…noise complaints…sent by fax to your offices, relating to NEMA aircraft noise. However you may not be aware that I have had no response to my 145 complaints of wholly unacceptable aircraft noise, detailed within those 42 pages since that date 8th August 2005. As your radar records are deleted within 30 days, it is essential therefore, for me to bring this to your attention, as this makes further scrutiny of complaints impossible””." Evidence supplied by Steve Charlish and others makes it clear that people whose lives are disturbed by aircraft noise and movements that deviate from established flight paths—the Minister did not discuss that at all—and who make frequent complaints are regarded by NEMA as nuisance complainants. It does not help that responsibility for such things is fragmented between different agencies and organisations. The public and Members of Parliament are given the runaround by airports and the air traffic control system responsible for air traffic movements if they try to establish whether a flight diverged grossly from its flight path, which is why we sought to provide in another part of the Bill for a commercial flights officer. I do not wish to reopen that debate, as I simply wish to highlight the fact that there is little protection against noise. Airports do not always have the facts to hand, which is why we should be concerned about the removal of one of the two remaining golf clubs in the bag. Page 117 of the White Paper on the future of air transport highlighted the obligation"““to put in place a scheme to address the problem of generalised blight resulting from the runway proposal.””" The stop Stansted expansion campaign highlighted BAA’s disregard for that obligation, which has resulted in local communities around the airport, led by Takeley parish council, pursuing a legal challenge againstBAA. It estimates that airport-related housing blight, resulting from plans to expand Stansted announced in July 2002, totals £635 million across Uttlesford district as a whole. According to analysis taken from the latest Land Registry house price statistics, the number of affected homes is about 12,000. However, BAA is prepared to consider compensation for only about 500 homes in the immediate vicinity affected by airport expansion. Any increase in night-time disturbance has the potential seriously to alter the value of someone’s home, the most valuable asset that most people own. It is not good enough for the Minister to say, ““Trust us””, or rather, ““You’ll be okay at Heathrow until 2012, but the other designated airports must trust us, and people round Heathrow will have to trust us after 2012.”” The Lords were right to strike out subsection (2) and to reinstate the power to control numbers. I urge the House to support their verdict.