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

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Harper

Committee stage
Thursday 18th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment, I shall also speak to Amendment 105 in the name of my noble friend Lady Grender, to which I have added my name. Amendments 69 and 105 address what is, for me, the key issue with the Bill: whether the powers could be used to facilitate airport expansion and, if so, on what terms. Amendment 69 would require the Secretary of State to consult affected communities, complete an environmental impact assessment and complete a noise impact assessment before making any regulations that facilitate expansion. Amendment 105 would go further by prohibiting the use of the powers in the Bill for that purpose altogether.

All the communities that are most directly affected by airport expansion—those living under flight paths, those experiencing noise, air quality and traffic impacts and those with a general disturbance from planes flying over them quite some distance from airports—have consistently found themselves presented with fait accompli decisions rather than meaningful consultation. Amendment 69 would, at a minimum, require such consultation, environmental assessment and noise assessment to precede any regulatory action that facilitates expansion. That is not a high bar; it is basic good governance. Although I heard what the Minister said to us in our debate on an earlier group, we believe that this amendment is very much needed, so that it is clearly spelled out.

Airport expansion, at Heathrow in particular, is one of the most contested infrastructure decisions that this country faces. It has planning implications, climate implications and profound implications for communities living under flight paths. Amendment 110 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, rightly asks for a published assessment of airspace slot and scheduling impact before any decision on a third runway. We think that he makes an important point.

The central question for the Minister is simple: can he give this Committee a clear, unambiguous assurance that nothing at all in the Bill could be used to facilitate airport expansion decisions that have not been subject to full environmental scrutiny, proper community consultation, which goes far further than the exercise we discussed earlier, and meaningful parliamentary oversight? I look forward to his answer with interest and I beg to move.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 110 and make one or two comments on the amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, spoke to. Amendment 69 seems perfectly sensible, requiring consultation and so forth. I have more of an issue with Amendment 105. If the processes to determine airport expansion have been complied with, it does not seem sensible to say, “As a result, you can’t use any of the powers in this Act to facilitate that properly taken and consulted-on decision”. While I do not have enormous objection to the noble Baroness’s first amendment, the second one goes a bit too far, so I am half agreeing with her, which is an improvement on where we were last time. I hope that she takes that in the spirit in which it is intended.

My remarks on my own amendment may appear a bit disjointed because I am going to slightly amend them in flight, as it were. Members of the Committee may or may not be aware that, while we have been debating this, the Secretary of State has published a Written Ministerial Statement on the aviation framework, which is specifically to do with Heathrow expansion. I thank the Minister for his courtesy in drawing to my attention, because I have tabled amendments on Heathrow, that the timing of the Written Statement would be during our debate today. I have been through the Statement, but it is quite extensive, so I have done it at speed and might ask things that are covered in it or in some of the attached documentation, which I have not had a chance to study. Given that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, talked about airport expansion, my amendment might give the Minister a helpful opportunity when he comes to wind up this group of amendments to perhaps set out for the Committee’s benefit one or two of the key points in the Secretary of State’s Written Statement, which I think will interest all noble Lords who are interested in aviation.

My amendment is drafted in such a way as to make sure that it is within scope of the Bill. The purpose of tabling it was to press the Government a bit on the choice that they made, which they set out last November and reiterated in the Written Statement today, to settle on the more expensive of the two options set out: the proposal by Heathrow Airport Ltd for a more ambitious, longer runway with a total price tag of £49 billion. Heathrow Airport has committed that that will be financed entirely privately. Obviously, there will need to be a regulatory funding mechanism for that, but I will not dwell on that now because I have some later amendments, in group 7, which I will touch on at that point, so as not to repeat myself.

I want to understand from the Minister whether the Government are satisfied—I presume that they are, given that they are proceeding in this direction, but I have not seen the underpinning rationale that supports the decision. When she made the decision, the Secretary of State said that the Government’s choice of the more expensive of the two options was “the most credible”, so I would like to understand the Government’s thinking about that.

The Minister and I worked together on HS2 when I was Secretary of State and he was chairman of Network Rail. He knows that infrastructure projects, albeit publicly financed ones, can end up costing rather more money than originally intended. I am worried that this project is now intended to be entirely privately financed. If that does not stick, the Government are very much committed—rightly, in my view—to expanding Heathrow, and I want to make sure that the taxpayer does not at some point end up being on the hook for very significant amounts of public money that they are not currently planning to spend.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Harper

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 13th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his work on this Bill and for meeting me to discuss any concerns that may remain. We on these Benches are pleased to hear from the Government a commitment to a comprehensive review that will cover many of the issues that we discussed at earlier stages of this Bill and were the subject of many amendments to the Bill earlier in the year. These, we hope, will include the impact on SEN bus services, the £3 bus fare cap and the impact on villages and rural areas. The Government have already mentioned their published review of the £2 bus fare cap.

Within this group, for our Benches, the one key area remains the affordability of bus fares. We think the overall package of legislation in this Bill will help to transform bus services across the country and equip local transport authorities with a wide range of powers to deliver the right services to their local communities in the right way, but this needs to go hand in hand with affordable bus fares. The increase in the bus fare cap from £2 to £3 has created real barriers for passengers, particularly those on low incomes who rely on buses to go about their everyday lives. Budgets are tight for many families, forcing difficult choices between transport and other essentials. Bus fares outside cities such as London are very expensive. Without addressing fares, we think the Bill risks deepening existing inequalities and leaving many people isolated. This legislation is about improving bus services and enabling local authorities to have a choice about how local services are provided, but unless there are affordable bus fares, we think there is a hole in the plan.

The amendment that passed in this House on Report was about a review. It was not about providing a £2 bus fare scheme to support bus routes, particularly socially necessary routes, which are a lifeline for many villages and rural areas. The Motion in my name that we will get to would insert Amendment 8C into the Bill and ensure that the legislation contains a statutory commitment to the £2 bus fare scheme for socially necessary routes. It would require the Secretary of State to take all necessary steps to ensure that the £2 bus fare cap is maintained for passengers using socially necessary local services. We believe this is a far clearer amendment to the legislation, putting into action what we are committed to and ensuring a focus on the £2 bus fare cap by the Secretary of State. I hope Members on all sides of the House will see the merit in this provision to enhance further this bus legislation. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and look forward to testing the opinion of the House on this later.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words on this issue as the introducer of the £2 bus fare cap and the person who wrote the relevant sections of our manifesto, which committed to keep it for the duration of the Parliament and fund it, importantly, from savings that we were going to make in rail services. We do not spend enough time in this country talking about buses. Two and a half times more journeys are made by bus than by the national rail network. You would not know that from the national press, which is very London-centric on this subject, but in most parts of the country buses are critical, so I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

I shall say a word or two about my noble friend Lord Moylan’s purpose clause and his remarks on that. He talked about the Government trying to help their friends in local authorities. What is interesting about this legislation is that, if you look at what has happened to bus services, the real challenge, and one of the problems, is that what happened during the pandemic is that a significant number of people stopped using buses for rather obvious reasons and never returned. That caused a huge financial problem for the bus network and has caused lots of routes that were previously profitable not to be profitable. The thing that is missing in the legislation is that you can offer local authorities the powers to franchise services all you like, but unless the Treasury is going to give local authorities the money to pay for those bus services, all you do is take loss-making services that are being reduced by private sector operators or by local authorities that cannot pay for them, and the local authority ends up having to take them away because it has no ability to pay for them.

When this legislation gets on to the statute book, I will be interested to see whether the Government fund the powers to the level that you would have to in order to deliver an improvement to bus services. I suspect, given the dog’s breakfast the Chancellor is making of the economy and the fact that there is less rather than more money available for public services, that that is not going to happen, but we will see how that develops in the future. I think my noble friend Lord Moylan does not have to worry in one sense, because I do not think this cunning plan that the Government have implemented to help local authorities is going to help them at all.

Specifically on the cap, the Minister talked about the review of the £2 bus fare and said that it was not good value for money. What he missed out was that the Government decided, without having concluded the review of the £2 bus fare cap, to have a £3 bus fare cap, which suggests that they like the principle, but introduced it and picked a number without having done the review on the £2 bus fare cap in the first place. That demonstrates not sensible, evidence-based policy-making but a Treasury-driven “Let’s just reduce the cost of the policy and not look at the impact it was having”.

When I talked to bus companies, I found there were two issues relating to the bus fare cap that were important in driving up bus ridership. One was the obvious one, which is that it reduced the cost. Particularly in rural areas—as has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords—where you often have to take a number of parts of a journey with a number of fares, it drove down the cost of those journeys. That is really important for people going to work or accessing education, so that had a big impact.

The other thing was the clarity and the consistency that it provided in communicating the level of bus fare to people, which had, I have to confess, a rather surprising impact. When talking to bus companies, I asked the question, “If we were to take this away, what would you do to your pricing structure?” What was interesting was that they all said having a round-number bus fare had a surprisingly powerful effect on their ability to market services to consumers, rather than people not knowing what a bus fare was going to be and a whole range of complexity. I think it needed a bit more time to bed in, and that is why I support a proper review having been carried out.

To go back to the point I made about funding, what we suggested—to take savings from the reforms that we were going to put in place for rail services and use some of that to fund the bus services—would have rebalanced where people chose to take their journeys. More people depend on bus services for important local journeys. Whether to access education, to access the health service or to access employment, far more people across the whole of the country use bus services to do that than use the rail network.

The Government have done the reverse. The first thing they did was come in and give railway drivers—some of the best-paid public servants—a pay rise and ask for nothing in return; they got no productivity improvements for the rail user. That money could have been spent on improving the quality of bus services across the country. That would have been the right decision, and it is the decision that we were going to make. When we do not see increases to funding for bus services—when we simply give local authorities the powers to franchise but with no money to deliver that—then people on all sides of your Lordships’ House will think that making savings in the rail network and putting the money into buses would have been the right decision. I am sorry the Government chose not to do so.