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My Lords, it is a pleasure to start the second day in Committee on this Bill. I open this group on airspace modernisation, consultation and charging and move Amendment 60 in the name of my noble friend Lady Grender, as she is unfortunately unable to be here today.
The amendment is straightforward and seeks simply to insert a new subsection requiring that, before the Secretary of State makes any directions under Clause 4, three things must happen: a consultation with persons and communities likely to be affected; an environmental impact assessment; and a noise impact assessment. On these Benches, we feel that these additions are a basic requirement of legitimate decision-making where the power may have serious local consequences. The Clause 4 directions on airspace redesign are not merely a technical tidying-up exercise and can be used to alter flight concentrations, runway throughput, and the intensity and timing of overflight experienced on the ground. A ministerial direction made under this clause is capable, in substance, of facilitating additional capacity without ever being labelled as such.
As was said at Second Reading, the Bill is a blueprint; it is not the final product. It provides a framework that leaves the substance to future regulation. In that sense, as we have described, it is paving legislation. The Committee is entitled to ask what safeguards are built into that paving before being asked to drive on it. The Minister has given us reassurances that the Bill will not be used as a vehicle for airport expansion; we note and welcome those, and we accept them in the good faith in which they have been given. However, personal reassurances, however well-meaning, are not a legal safeguard. Ministers change, Prime Ministers change, Governments change, and interpretations can also change. The whole point of us seeking to put this duty into the Bill is to ensure that Parliament and the public can distinguish between a necessary operational change and one that, in effect, delivers additional capacity through the back door of airspace decision-making. Without mandatory consultation and impact assessment, the distinction cannot be realistically made. Even if it could be made, it would happen only after the fact.
Airport change proposals are already assessed through environmental methodologies, noise matrices and statutory directions. This should therefore be aligned with that pre-existing reality. For our communities, these matters are really important. Many, as we know, are already impacted by the noise and environmental impacts of existing airports, and future communities could be impacted by proposals under this legislation. These are real impacts on our communities, from noise late at night to environmental pollution. They should not have to rely on good will, however well-meaningly it is given. If the Secretary of State is to have this power, the Bill should state clearly what the procedural safeguards must be before it is used. That is exactly the point of Amendment 60. We are simply seeking to put a safeguard and some handrails in place around these powers. This is a crucial issue for us in our scrutiny of this Bill.
I turn briefly—I am sorry for speaking to these before others have managed to—to the other amendments in this group. In general, they all seek to do fairly similar things to Amendment 60. Amendment 61, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, would require a minimum 28-day targeted consultation with local communities, local authorities and airport operators before any direction on airspace redesign is issued. We have considerable sympathy for this amendment, for exactly the same reasons that I outlined on our Amendment 60. The 28-day objective is not onerous; it is fundamentally achievable. We hope that the Minister sees fit to put our Amendment 60, this Amendment 61 or some combination of them into the Bill.
Amendment 62, from the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, would add the British Airline Pilots Association to the consultation list. We are broadly supportive of this amendment and recognise the central role that our pilots play, particularly in matters of safety. Their judgment and professionalism are essential in any plans to modernise our airspace and capacity. However, our concern is that the amendment, by its nature, names one organisation and does not, for example, name air traffic controllers. We would prefer it if the amendment was reworded to talk about consultation with representatives of the industry, as opposed to naming only one organisation.
Amendment 63, from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, would require the CAA to establish a blockchain-based audit trail for every airspace change program. We recognise that the underlying objective and purpose of this is to create a tamper-proof, long-term record of what has been decided, by whom and when. That is an entirely legitimate concern. In the past, too many of these decisions have been opaque; it has been extremely difficult for anybody to know what has been happening and what has been done by whom.
The requirements in this amendment, particularly those in proposed new subsection (3) for cryptographic security, 15-year retention and tamper-proof records, are all laudable aims, but we wonder whether naming one specific technology would make this a hostage to fortune in the future. We suggest alternative wording that asks for a secure, auditable and publicly accessible record, without prescribing the exact technology to be used. We feel that that would be a better way forward. It might be that the technology that the noble Lord suggests is the one that is chosen, but alternative wording would at least leave more scope for examination in the round.
Amendment 64, from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, probes with characteristic precision the rationale for allowing changes to be imposed under Clause 6 on persons who neither use nor benefit from the air traffic services in question. This is a serious point: the Bill should have open scrutiny of who bears the costs for these matters. I hope that the Minister can provide some clarity on those points.
The final amendment in this group is Amendment 65, from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope. It would require the Secretary of State and the CAA to have regard to the growth and sustainability of general aviation when setting charges and to ensure that charges on general aviation users are proportionate to the use that they make of air traffic services. General aviation is too often forgotten, and this seems a proportional requirement and a modest and reasonable ask. We look forward to the Minister’s response to it.
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My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his comments on my Amendment 61. I will speak to it only briefly, because it is pretty self-explanatory.
The legislation rightly gives some power to the Government to intervene and, in effect, act as arbiter when it comes to airspace redesign. Airspace redesign has taken much too long. It started when I was Secretary of State and now, nearly eight years later, we are still not close to bringing it to fruition, yet it is fundamental to the future of the aviation sector in this country. It will unlock extra capacity and use next-generation technology to enable us to provide more respite to communities that are affected by aircraft noise, even though the level of aircraft noise, in the world in which we live, has dropped enormously over the past generation.