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

Baroness Kennedy of Cradley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

It is time that the whole system changed. It is important that the UK Government do what they can, with their soft power, to start to change the real problem, which is at the level of IATA and the Montreal Convention. Without that, all of our discussions today will not give the important person here—the disabled passenger—the safe and accessible journey that they want.

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 7 in my name. I declare my interest as chief operating officer of Natasha’s Foundation, the UK’s food allergy charity, which was previously known as the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation.

At Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill emphasised that the purpose of the Bill is to strengthen consumer protections and improve the passenger experience. He recognised the importance of accessibility and ensuring that aviation works effectively for all passengers. We have heard passionate speeches from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. My amendment would not only address their issues around reduced mobility but would include non-visible disabilities and medical conditions, such as allergies, so that all passengers—including those with visible disabilities, non-visible disabilities and medical conditions, especially food allergies—can travel safely and with confidence.

I will focus on food allergy today. It is a serious medical condition, where a trace amount of an allergen can trigger a rapid and potentially fatal reaction. If someone is in the air and ingests the food to which they are allergic, they can be unconscious within 30 minutes. Whether they are on a short-haul or long-haul flight, they therefore experience serious difficulties. More than 3 million people in the UK—and around 220 million people globally—are living with a food allergy. This is not a medical condition the aviation industry can afford to continue to overlook.

UK tribunals have recognised that a food allergy can constitute a disability under the Equality Act 2010, where it has a substantial and long-term impact on daily life. Moreover, legal advice commissioned by Natasha’s Foundation concluded that Natasha’s law applies to pre-packaged meals served by UK airlines, and that airlines have a legal responsibility to provide allergen information under UK food safety law. However, in practice, that does not happen: Natasha’s law is hardly ever applied to pre-packaged airline food. Can my noble friend the Minister clarify the Government’s position on Natasha’s law and pre-packaged airline food? Does it apply, and if so—to illustrate the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—who is responsible for ensuring that airlines comply with Natasha’s law and current UK food safety laws? That question covers both UK-based airlines and those that operate within our UK airspace.

As is it clear to many food-allergic passengers, despite the seriousness of their condition and the laws designed to protect them, allergen management is too often treated as an afterthought by the aviation industry. Passenger support is frequently inconsistent. Passengers encounter a reluctance to make reasonable adjustments or to provide any support to help them travel safely and with confidence. Passengers frequently report difficulties sourcing an airline’s policy on allergy. There is hardly ever a list of the support available to them, and it is not clear whether a plane carries spare adrenaline auto-injectors. Food-allergic passengers need to know that information, especially when research suggests that around one in 10 food-allergic passengers reports experiencing an allergic reaction when flying.

Passengers regularly ask the cabin crew for food ingredient lists on a plane. IATA states that the lists should be available to passengers, but they hardly ever are. Even when passengers do everything asked of them and pre-order a special meal, many find that it has not been loaded on to the aircraft, it has been mistakenly given to another passenger or, worse, it contains the food stuff to which they are allergic because there are weak controls over meal supply chains. Unless a provision such as Amendment 7 is added to the Bill, the lack of priority and attention given to allergen management on flights will continue.

The support for food-allergic passengers that we are asking for is not hard to provide, and it is not hard for the aviation industry to make a big difference. My amendment does not impose disproportionate burdens on the industry. It is largely about ensuring better training, information and communication, as well as compliance with the laws that already exist. In brief, Natasha’s Foundation has identified four areas where improvement is needed: leadership, training, policies and food. Airlines need to be asked to publish clear policies, setting out the support passengers can expect. They should be easily available on their websites, communicated before booking and throughout travel, and applied throughout the passenger journey. Simple adjustments, such as announcements on flights or time to pre-board to wipe down food trays, are easy to accommodate in the airline industry, but they are frequently inconsistent. A food-allergic passenger may request them, but that does not mean that the request carries through to the cabin crew on that plane, as they often do not receive the communication that someone is a food-allergic passenger.

All airline staff, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson, said, should receive training. We would obviously say that that needs to be food allergy and anaphylaxis training, how to recognise an allergic reaction and how to use an adrenaline auto-injector. Spare AAIs should be carried on all flights and be available in many different sites across airports. Accurate allergen information must be available for all the food served on board. Natasha’s law should be applied and enforced, and cabin crews should have access to information about the food they serve.

All these recommendations are very much in line with the conclusions of the Aviation Accessibility Task and Finish Group, chaired by my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson. Natasha’s Foundation thank her for her support, as we were very grateful to have the opportunity to provide evidence, and we were pleased that allergy was recognised in the group’s final report. The group’s recommendations on staff training, passenger information, communication and support for people with disabilities and non-visible disabilities, including allergies, is exactly as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said—we are all trying to do the same thing, because all these conditions need the same thing: information and training.

I therefore hope that the Government will look favourably on the amendment. I also ask my noble friend the Minister to take time to read, before Report, the report from Natasha’s Foundation, Flying with a Food Allergy, and agree to meet the foundation and others to discuss this amendment and the practical solutions that it contains to improve safety, build trust and enhance passenger experience, which is what the Bill should be about.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

I thank noble Lords who have taken part in this debate so far, not least my friends the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Brinton, who have done so much for disabled people for such a long period of time, despite suffering indignity and discrimination on their own account, often when using various transport modes. It is impressive, and continues to be messaging that Ministers in any and every department should take more than a passing note of.

To take one tiny step back—here I am in danger of giving a bit of a Second Reading speech, but I promise noble Lords that it is purely Committee-stage chat—I want to talk about what is possible. So much of what has been discussed with regard to disabled people goes into the “too difficult” file, or somehow health and safety trumps the rights of disabled people.

At London 2012 we faced the world’s finest elite disabled athletes coming to London—and, whatever we did at the park, the venues, the stadium or the aquatic centre, imagine if we had not looked at the aviation experience, not least at the port of arrival for air, London’s Heathrow Airport. Noble Lords can imagine that whatever we did in terms of athlete experience in the venue and the village would have been as nothing; if we had not intervened, we would have had the world’s finest Paralympians coming to London, and their first experience of London 2012 would have been being pushed through the airport in an airport wheelchair, because it was said at the time that it was too difficult and operationally impossible to repatriate a person’s wheelchair to the door of the aircraft. We were fortunate that we had the power, the brand and the most immovable of deadlines of London 2012 to make that difference.

But the reality is that, no matter how good we planned that golden summer of sport to be, it is as nothing to ensuring, enabling and empowering all disabled people to assert their rights to travel with independence, dignity and respect, or, to put it another way, to have an airline experience equivalent to what a non-disabled person—lucky for them—can just experience and take for granted. I say “experience” because that, I believe, is the most helpful lens to get us to the right position on this. We should think about this experientially before we even make one operational decision in the Bill.