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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Kane)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. It was also a pleasure, as a young councillor, to serve under your leadership of Manchester city council in the early ’90s. As I said in a debate the other day, you were chairman of the airport that last built an international runway in the UK—the only one in 80 years. I learned a lot in that period, and I am always grateful to you.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) on securing an excellent first debate in Westminster Hall and thank other hon. Members for their contributions. Famously, my hon. Friend is a pharmacist by training and by trade; he actually lives in a village called Pill, which is probably the strongest case of nominative determinism I have come across in my political career. He is also a doughty champion for Bristol airport. He never fails to tackle me about the issue in the Lobby or the Chamber. The airport plays a crucial role in providing connectivity and enabling growth in the south-west, and I welcome the leading role that it has played in developing hydrogen, such as the recent Project Acorn trials, which demonstrated the safe use of zero emission ground handling equipment in an airside environment.
I am grateful to hon. Members for their contributions on the SAF Bill last week. The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), spoke well about his passion for this issue, and mentioned that hydrogen fuel produces only water vapour. It is good for the environment, jobs and airports. It can help general and commercial aviation.
Upon coming into government, I had to take some tough decisions. The Jet Zero Council, established under the last Government, was reasonably ineffective. It hardly met and it was unwieldy; people said that it had become a talking shop with limited outcomes. I made big decisions to refocus it, narrow it down and ensure that it had tangible outcomes.
For all the groundwork that the Opposition spokesperson said that the last Government laid, we have had to make tough decisions. We are the Government that introduced the mandate for SAF, which came into law on 1 January this year, and in the first Session of this Parliament we are making decisions about the revenue certainty mechanism. I am grateful to all hon. Members who are supporting that, but we should have been doing this years ago. We now have a Government who are committed to making progress, and we will continue doing so.
As the Secretary of State noted when introducing the Bill last week, the Government recognise the key role of the aviation sector in driving growth, and
“we will not accept false trade-offs that pit aviation’s growth against our commitments to net zero.”—[Official Report, 11 June 2025; Vol. 768, c. 1031.]
I want to see a future in which more passengers and goods fly while we transition to a greener aviation sector. In addition to introducing the SAF Bill, the Government have already established a SAF mandate, as I have said. The mandate and the revenue certainty mechanism will provide much-needed support to SAF producers, stimulating investment in domestic production, which we all want to see, by reducing financial risk and uncertainty for those producers and supporting the UK to become a world leader in sustainable fuel production. As I said in last week’s debate, the world is looking to us and asking us about our revenue certainty mechanism, because we are leading the world in that field.
As we all know, we are also acting to modernise our airspace. Earlier this month, we released a response to the consultation on a new UK airspace design service—UKADS—and support fund. UKADS will make flightpaths more direct and efficient, reducing unnecessary emissions and supporting flights with fewer delays.
Let us get to the subject in hand. I recognise the clear potential of hydrogen as a zero emission aviation fuel and what it could contribute towards greener aviation. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said in his customarily excellent speech, it produces zero CO2. He is right that it is costly, but we know that the costs will become competitive as we scale up. He speaks well of Spirit in his constituency and the workers who work there in this field. I pay tribute to him and them for what they do in Northern Ireland.
Given our world-leading aerospace sector, we should seek to capture in the UK the jobs and growth benefits emerging from these technologies. The Government have already acted to support the use of low-carbon hydrogen in aviation through the SAF mandate, with eligible hydrogen rewarded through the provision of tradeable SAF certificates. Innovation led by the sector is key, and I welcome the work by Airbus and GKN on hydrogen technology in the south-west and the support provided by academia, such as by Bath University. I congratulate the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young); the south-west is well placed in the R&D world for this technology. Given her work as a former leader of the council and her expertise in the tech sector, I welcome her valuable contribution to the debate.
We will continue to co-invest with industry on a range of R&D projects, which a number of Members raised, including the development of hydrogen aircraft technology through the Aerospace Technology Institute programme that the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor) mentioned. As announced in the spending review, we will invest more than £3 billion in the next four years in the advanced manufacturing sector on zero emission vehicles, batteries and aerospace technologies. I join him in congratulating Cranfield Aerospace Solutions, which I visited while in opposition, on its work.
The Government will further set out our approach to the advanced manufacturing sector in the modern industrial strategy later this month. That will benefit from the UK-US trade deal signed today, under which there will be zero tariffs on UK aerospace trade with the United States. I am aware that aircraft developers are moving at pace, with ZeroAvia announcing plans last month for a manufacturing base in Glasgow. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) for mentioning it and for being a doughty champion for East Midlands airport near his constituency. He is right to mention the geopolitical situation. There are many reasons why we should make these changes, but energy security is one of them, given that we are in an increasingly uncertain world. He brings his previous tech experience to the debate, and I congratulate him on his contribution.
The wider sector should prepare for the adoption of this new technology and, to support those whole-system changes, the Government, the aviation and aerospace sector, and academia must work together. The Jet Zero Taskforce that I have established is a key focus for that collaboration, and I am pleased to co-chair the expert group alongside the Minister for Industry. Importantly, one of the task and finish groups of the Jet Zero Taskforce is reviewing barriers to the commercial operation of hydrogen aircraft. The group will report on its findings in the autumn, and I look forward to considering them closely.
As the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate said, regulation is critical. Improving regulation in the UK, and ensuring that it enables growth and does not unduly hold back investment, is an essential part of the Government’s growth mission and of delivering on the plan for change. For that reason, in March the Chancellor announced that in the current financial year the Department for Transport will fund the Civil Aviation Authority’s hydrogen in aviation regulatory challenge. This work is helping the CAA to collaborate with innovative companies through regulatory sandboxes, in order to develop a proportionate regulatory framework for them.
Finally, I will touch on the production of low-carbon hydrogen, which is essential not only for aviation but for the wider economy. We have strong domestic expertise and favourable geology and infrastructure to develop a thriving low-carbon hydrogen sector in the UK. We are delivering real projects to kick-start the UK’s hydrogen economy, as demonstrated by the recently signed contracts for projects that were successful in the first hydrogen allocation round.
Later this year, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will publish a refreshed hydrogen strategy to ensure that hydrogen achieves its unique role in the Government’s clean energy superpower and growth missions. Just last week, the Government announced over £500 million to develop the UK’s first regional hydrogen transport and storage network, boosting industrial regions such as Merseyside, Teesside and the Humber.
The week of the international Paris air show is an important time to reflect on the progress that we are making towards a greener aviation sector. I therefore reiterate my ambition on this important matter, as well as my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset for securing today’s debate and to other hon. Members for contributing to it.