Travel Disruption at UK Airports and Ferry Ports
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to discuss the important issues that noble Lords have raised today, and particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for securing this debate. I shall try to focus on what the Government are doing currently and will do in the future. I agree that it is not about blame, but it is the case that this is a private sector, operated by quite talented and well-paid people, and they need to take some of the responsibility for making sure that communication happens in what is a complex sector, as pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson—it is not just one sector; there are all sorts of different elements within it. The Government clearly have a role to play in that, which I shall come on to fairly shortly.
It is great to see people returning to international travel—it is really good. When I was stuck in a queue in Gatwick about 10 days ago, I actually really enjoyed it. People were in particularly good humour; we all got on our flights eventually and it was fine. People were actually very happy to be going away again. It is such a positive thing to see people traveling again. But very short-notice cancellations of long-awaited trips are absolutely devastating for those families and individuals. Clearly, we have to resolve various elements of what is going on at the moment.
I noted that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, quoted numerous times from that standard of journalism, the Daily Mail, which was surprising to me. Nevertheless, one takes one’s stories from where one can—particularly when the support a particular argument. However, things are not as bad as they are portrayed in the Daily Mail—not by a long shot. The CAA has indicated that, over the jubilee weekend, the percentage of departing flights that were cancelled was 3%. So it is not, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, a crisis. There are issues that we must resolve—I absolutely accept that—with the Government working with industry, and I shall speak as I can.
I am trying to take a more measured tone about this, because we must also recognise that this is happening in all sorts of places across Europe. Noble Lords will have seen what has happened in Dublin and Schiphol. KLM has announced a suspension of ticket sales. In the United States, they had to cancel 4,000 flights at the end of May because of staff shortages and bad weather. This is not unique to the UK. It also means that there are not endless amounts of aviation personnel all over the world waiting to flood into our country. Therefore, even if providing additional visas was an option, which it is not, I am not entirely sure that there are staff who are willing to jump on board in the short term.
The issue of overbooking flights is a very important one. The Government are very clear that we want to see the industry being able to operate the schedule that it has committed to. Cancelling flights a couple of weeks before departure, as happened to me, although it was fine, or on the day of departure, is really not acceptable. We really want the industry to get together, plan properly and make sure that it can deliver what it has promised to deliver—then we will not have the stories in the Daily Mail, because people will be able to get on their planes. So we are working very closely with the CAA to make sure that the industry gets that message—and that, if it has to cancel a flight, which occasionally happens, it gives as much notice as possible. We are also very focused on refunds and compensation, because it is absolutely right that passengers get that.
I want quickly to turn to security alleviations, about which there has been a number of reports in the media. The Government are always very mindful that security must be our top priority; however, we have been able to put some alleviations in place. We have laid a statutory instrument before Parliament which will agree temporary changes to permit certain training to be undertaken while the background checks are still being completed. This is very helpful in shortening the period between the date of recruitment and the date of deployment.
We have already boosted the resourcing of security checks, and I am pleased to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that there is no backlog of security checks within government. We have also agreed that HMRC employment history letters can be temporarily used as a form of reference check. Again, this helps contract the time between recruitment of staff and deployment. We have agreed to a series of alleviations to aviation security regulations, but noble Lords will appreciate that I cannot go into the detail of what those moderate alleviations are.
I am afraid that suggestions that the police, the military et cetera could be brought in to do baggage handling—I know that some airline CEOs have suggested that—are also wide of the mark. Frankly, although people in the military are highly skilled, they are not highly skilled at dealing with baggage. It is a job that requires training and confidence, so it is not a route we will be going down.
We have engaged significantly with the industry throughout the pandemic, obviously, but particularly on this issue. The Secretary of State and the Aviation Minister had an industry round table on 1 June. Minister Courts, and Minister Hinds from the Home Office, also had an industry round table on 12 May. We are establishing a strategic risk group, chaired by the Aviation Minister, which will bring together all the different elements outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. We feel there has not been enough conversation and interaction between the airlines, airports, ground handlers and security people, all of which need to come together. We need to identify the risks—I would hope the industry has already done so—but we also need to identify some of the solutions the industry can put in place, as well as more things the Government can do, because if there are more things we can do, we would be happy to do them. Obviously, we have already done many things.
We have also recognised for some time that we need to focus on aviation skills. We published the Flightpath to the Future strategy very recently, and back in February last year we launched the Aviation Skills Retention Platform, because we recognised, as did the right revered Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, the importance of staff to the sector. There is also this thing about the people who work in it: they quite like it and they want to go back to it; they feel an affinity with it. Once an aviation person, always an aviation person. So, we are trying to make sure that we keep people, at least to a certain extent, so that they have visibility of what is going on in the sector, even if they have chosen not to work in it for a certain period of time but may yet come back to it.
Consumer rights is also top of mind at the moment because, obviously, we see the distressing stories and we want to make sure that consumers are getting the compensation they need. They need the information and the guidance, and they need to know exactly what their rights are and how to go about exercising them. The Flightpath to the Future strategy has put consumers first, and it recognises the importance of government and the aviation sector working together to rebuild consumer confidence. This will lead on various consumer rights elements, and, of course, noble Lords will have recognised that we published a consultation earlier this year on ways to boost air passenger rights. We have received a large number of responses to that, and we will be publishing a response in due course.
Turning to Border Force, the right revered Prelate referred to the important work of those at the border and spoke eloquently about the role of chaplains at airports. When I was Aviation Minister three years ago, I too was struck by the work they do. Border Force has been through a period of extensive planning and resource management to make sure it is as prepared as possible for the peak demand period. We are content that we will be able to cope with the various peaks. Sometimes there will be delays, but it is not going to be massively disruptive. The e-gates have been upgraded over recent months to support the flow of passengers. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, spoke about additional checks coming in from Europe. If they do come in—again, there is some doubt about that—they will be for PAF to undertake, not Border Force.
There were a couple of questions about the Passport Office and getting passports. I am afraid that is not within my brief today, so I will write on that matter.
I turn briefly, because I have a couple of minutes left, to Dover. Again, there is a lot in the press. I am responsible for roads in Dover and Kent and when I was away for the Recess, I would get sitreps probably two or three times a day on what was going on at Dover. They bore no relation to what was in the media. There was no gridlock at Dover, or lengthy queues. There were some delays, but nothing greater than one would have seen pre-pandemic on a busy summer day. Sometimes, people queue a bit for freight: it does not mean they sit in queues for eight hours. The queues still move; people just have to wait a little while. The reason we do that is to allow passenger traffic to move through more quickly. We did not see delays of more than an hour or two for passengers to check in; again, that would have happened pre-pandemic and in many circumstances, in Eurotunnel and at the port of Dover. TAP is currently not operating and we are about to remove Brock, which we do not now need; we will assess it later, towards the summer. Again, I am as relaxed as a Transport Minister ever gets about the situation in Kent. There is no shortage of capacity across the short straits; P&O Ferries is back sailing now, so capacity is not a problem. We had a minor problem with the PAF booths on Sunday 29 May, I believe—a few people did not turn up for work, but eventually the French sent some more, so that was all fine.
In general, we are not complacent but we have very good plans in place. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked whether we have plans and systems in place. Absolutely. I am all over it; I am on top of it. The Kent Resilience Forum has very good local plans and it reports back to the Minister. The noble Lord also asked whether we have a council. We do. A freight council was established last year; it meets quarterly and talks about supply chains and their integration with the transport system. The future of freight strategy will be launched very shortly.
I believe I have run out of time now, but I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions and I will write on any matters I was not able sufficiently to cover.