Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Foster of Oxton and Lord Tunnicliffe

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for his very interesting take and amendments in this area.

I want to come to pilot training. I support the noble Lord, Lord Barber, who, as a former trade union negotiator for British Airways cabin crew, worked very closely with our BALPA colleagues for many years—and that continues. I agree with what he said.

My ex-husband trained at Hamble—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, will remember—and when I joined the airline industry, our pilots had come from the RAF or the schemes run by BEA, BOAC and then British Airways. Other pilots went to Oxford Flying School, Prestwick or various other places. It was always a costly venture for any pilot not part of the state-owned airline industry as such. But we have moved on, and the noble Lord is right to say that it is fine to complain but we need some action.

As the noble Lord said, it costs in the region of £100,000 to train somebody up to be a commercial pilot. That is an extremely good investment for an airline but, as has been mentioned, British Airways and Jet2 appear to be the only airlines prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

These loans, if they come as loans, guarantee that those pilots will pay them back over the years. Unlike certain students, perhaps, I do not think they are going to disappear into the long grass. So it behoves government to start to look at a student loan-type scheme. Industry and the airlines need to step up, and those complaining of a shortage of pilots coming forward need to look at the schemes run by BA and Jet2 and start to provide some incentive and some action to deal with a possible shortage over the next few years.

This is a fantastic profession and those young men and women who go into it will have a rewarding career until their mid-60s. I think it behoves all of us to do everything we can. While we encourage youngsters to go to university, this is a profession that really needs to be supported. We now need to get outside the box and start to look at ways to get in those young, enthusiastic people who will be our brilliant pilots of the future.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

I will go next because of the generality of the subject. I find myself in the peculiar position of agreeing with people for once. I, broadly speaking, share the general direction of the noble Lord, Lord Barber, the specific objection of the noble Lord, Lord Davies—I remember well the joys of the instrument rating—and the general direction of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster.

I have a particular interest in this because I was in the airline industry for 22 years. For about eight of those I was a pilot and during that time, thanks to Norman Tebbit, of all people, I was a pilot shop steward. So I am used to this debate but, peculiarly, my future career in the airline industry was as an airline manager, and I was involved with pilot recruitment. Pilot recruitment and numbers since the Second World War have been chaotic. There was not really any serious civil aviation before the Second World War. The expansion of aviation during that period created a situation where there were pilots and aircraft available after the end of the war. Along came, thanks to the Soviet Union, the Berlin airlift, which was a great provoker of civil aviation in the UK, as small firms all over the place set up and participated in that operation between June 1948 and May 1949.

That was the beginning of a period where the Great British public discovered that the sun in Benidorm was actually rather better than the sun in Skegness. There was, generally speaking, a boom from the early 1950s onwards. The nationalised airlines, BEA and BOAC, woke up to the fact that this pool of free pilots was going to run dry and they created the training facility at Hamble. It trained 2,000 pilots over the 24 years it was in operation, including me.

More recently, we have a shortage, and we have worries about how we are going to solve that shortage. It has been funded in the sense of creating pilots by self-funding pilots. People talk of £100,000. Frankly, I do not think you get a lot of change out of £130,000. That has meant it has been an occupation for people who have access to £130,000 pounds. I hate to tell the Committee this, but a lot of people do not have that access to funds. BA has come forward with a scheme over the past couple of years, and we are right back to where I came from—that is, the airlines paying for pilots. I am slightly narked, because its programme is entirely free, whereas I had to pay back £1,000 after being employed ,and that is about £24,000 in today’s money, but good luck to them.

We just cannot have the chaos of the marketplace, including how rich your parents are, determining the supply of pilots. We need a holistic analysis of where we are, what the demand is and what the training capability is. We need to worry about the components of it, the specialist training that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, talked about, and the fundamental training, of which general aviation is such an important part. We need to at least have a situation where somebody sees the total picture, and that should be the CAA.

The amendments in this group basically say that the CAA should pick up that responsibility and create a report every year, or whatever. When see the whole picture, the industry can more sensibly react to it—the CAA can push these things, to an extent, and British Airways can help with this—which could lead to a smooth situation that we have not had since 1945. That is why I support the two amendments that have been spoken to, as well as my own amendment, which says that we should charge the CAA with creating the data picture that will become the basis for future pilot supply.

M56 Motorway (Junctions 6 to 7) (Variable Speed Limits) Regulations 2022

Debate between Baroness Foster of Oxton and Lord Tunnicliffe

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises some serious and good points. However, I gently remind noble Lords of how these smart motorways came to pass. I recall that, in my time in the European Parliament as the transport spokesman—obviously covering road, rail, aviation and maritime—the huge push for smart motorways came from the regulations and directives in the European Parliament some years ago. This was not just about the UK. We found that many member states were having problems with capacity due to the growth in traffic, and it was about trying to look at a way that we did not have to build motorways in different parts of the country but just expand the ones that we had.

I fully acknowledge that there have clearly been some awful accidents due to the fact that there was no hard shoulder. When motorways were built in the first place, it was known that there could be a risk of accident—obviously, there is always the risk of accident—and it was paramount that there needed to be a safe space to go. I also understand that in some cases where there have been accidents, it has been very much a technological failure because the notification above the lane that it was closed, or the X, was not showing. People have then got confused, and of course some of the results of that have been appalling. There are also appalling accidents even for the miles of motorways where we have hard shoulders, which is why we have tried to make sure that people are alert if they pull in and why we now tell people to get out of their cars, notwithstanding the size of the lorries that sometimes have to pull in.

Can my noble friend say whether the Government are looking at how, for example, the technology can work, notwithstanding that we have spent millions expanding these motorways? I use the M6 with great frequency when I drive down here, and the M56 too, which the noble Baroness mentioned, and we have miles of full lanes where we are doing 60 miles an hour. We have had years of this expansion—obviously not of infrastructure—for all the right reasons on the motorways, to get the capacity, and we have been under terrible restrictions with roadworks; it is now even more infuriating that we have four lanes but are still all crawling along half of the time.

Notwithstanding the issue of technology, which clearly needs to be seen to be working and to work properly so that people and organisations have confidence, I look forward to the response from my noble friend. We need to move this on. As the noble Baroness opposite said, there is clearly a need for more laybys to access. This will take some time, because more roadworks will have to be started, but it is imperative that those can be put in place as quickly as possible.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government’s failed rollout of smart motorways costs lives, which is exactly why Members of this House have long warned of serious flaws. It is a tragedy that lives were lost before action was taken, and it is thanks only to the dedication of bereaved families that the rollout was paused at all. It is therefore beyond belief that the Government are still pressing ahead with new introductions.

Even in their current form, smart motorways, coupled with inadequate safety systems, are not fit for purpose, and clearly no adequate explanation has yet been offered for their further introduction. Unfortunately, the reality of this new scheme is even worse. The emergency areas in this new scheme have average spacings of 2.5 kilometres, which is much greater than the recommended separation of 1.5 kilometres. Before pressing ahead, the Minister needs to offer proper reassurances on the monitoring of CCTV, further reviews of the evidence and improved distances between refuge areas, at the very least.

Besides the well-noted safety concerns, there are also serious issues with the scrutiny afforded to these changes, not least the fact that the Explanatory Memorandum does not address any of these obvious issues. I hope that the Minister can provide such assurances today and address the points made in the noble Baroness’s Motion.