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Civil Aviation Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. Amendment 9 states that it should be incumbent on the licence holder to ““develop passenger welfare plans””. That does not necessarily mean that the licence holder has to be totally responsible for delivery. There should be engagement with the airlines and a collective approach to that matter. Obviously, the CAA and the Government should be involved in that. I was not narrowing down the responsibility in the way that I misled my hon. Friend to believe. Passenger welfare plans were a recommendation of the Select Committee on Transport in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. In Committee, the Minister did not give a good reason why she does not believe that those plans should be included in the licences for airports. She said that the CAA will draw up the licences and that it will be a matter for that organisation. We do not think that that provision is strong enough. Given that the primary duty of the Bill is to the passenger, as we have discussed for some months, we believe that the development of passenger welfare plans would reinforce the focus on giving passengers the best experience possible at our airports. They have clearly not had that in previous winters. The Transport Committee also stated in its pre-legislative scrutiny:"““Where possible, airport licences should be structured so that they address key areas of passenger dissatisfaction.””" I do not need to repeat the statistics on the misery that has been experienced by passengers at difficult times over a number of years. The reports, particularly the Begg report, on what happened to passengers at Heathrow during the disruption of December 2010 make alarming reading, even if one looks only at the headlines. Nine and a half thousand people were sleeping in the terminal, passengers were seeking refuge in subways, a lorry carrying blankets for passengers had to turn back on the M25 because of traffic conditions and very few passengers were provided with water or refreshments. It was absolute chaos and confusion. I am not blaming anybody for that. It is matter of record and fact, and we all want to avoid it happening again. I anticipate that the Minister will refer us to clause 83 on the collection of information and data, which we discussed extensively in Committee. We accept that clause 83 is drawn widely enough to include the proposals in new clause 2 and amendments 8 and 10, because the airports could be responsible for providing the relevant data. However, given the experience of recent years, we believe that amendment 9 should be a basic licence requirement. The fact that the CAA has suggested that such a requirement could be incorporated and has included it in the example for the Heathrow licence suggests that it thinks that it will do that anyway. We think that the Government should make it a duty on the CAA to make passenger welfare plans a licence requirement.