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Civil Aviation Bill

At the beginning of the debate, I said that I felt that the Bill was essentially a good one with a number of omissions, and perhaps the most glaring omission of all is the statutory environmental duty. That statutory duty was part of the Bill when it was drafted by the previous Government, and it is not clear to me why the ““greenest Government ever”” would remove it. In Committee, the Minister told us that the Bill is about economic regulation and that there is therefore no room for a statutory environmental duty. However, the Bill is about much more than simply the economic regulation of the CAA. If was just about economic regulation, it would not include safety or security or an extension of the air travel organisers' licence. It is not a clean and simple Bill about economic regulation; it is a long overdue consolidation and updating of regulations covering a wide range of issues in which those sections dealing with a statutory duty on environmental issues should have been included but have been deliberately expunged. I could perhaps understand the Government's reluctance to include the environmental duty if the CAA was the only economic regulator to have such a statutory duty placed on it. We have heard the Minister say in response to that point that the Bill only covers certain airports, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) has said, in some areas, such as security, it covers all airports.