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Civil Aviation Bill

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the disbenefits of air pollution. He may be aware that the Government published the air quality strategy for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in January 2000 and that the strategy sets health-based objectives for the eight main air pollutants and deadlines for achieving them. It identifies the action required at national and international level and the contribution that the Government, industry, transport, local authorities, businesses and individuals can make to improving air quality. I know that this issue will concern you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but the Environment Act 1995 places a duty on local authorities to review and assess the current and likely future air quality in their areas against the national objectives set out in the strategy and prescribed in the air quality regulations. The local authority role is important and if a local authority considers that one or more of the air quality objectives is unlikely to be met by the required date, it must declare an air quality management area covering the area in which the problems are expected. It must then draw up an action plan, setting out the measures that it intends to take in pursuit of air quality objectives. I have been diverted from the subject a little, but I wish to return to the issue of sleep disturbance, which concerns many Members. There are differing views among those who suffer from the problem as to whether a single loud noise or an accumulation of smaller noise events causes more disturbance. It is clear that disturbance is different from annoyance and from sleep deprivation, which relates to lengthy periods without sleep. It is also acknowledged that a small minority of people are much more sensitive to noise and sleep disturbance from aircraft noise than others. That is the important point. The results of the further study that reported in 2000 did not contradict the essential findings of the 1992 field study, and that is the point that I wish to make about the time lag between the two studies. In contrast, a social survey conducted in parallel reported that a substantial percentage of those interviewed in higher noise areas reported being highly disturbed by aircraft at night. After those studies the Government took the advice of independent experts and concluded that a new full-scale objective sleep study would be unlikely to add significantly to our understanding of the effects of airport noise on sleep disturbance. The Government then commissioned a major new study to concentrate on subjective responses to annoyance from aircraft noise and examined, in a hypothetical way, the willingness to pay, in respect of the nuisance from aircraft noise. It is acknowledged that our current understanding of the annoyance caused by aircraft is primarily based on research carried out in the 1980s.