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

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, tomorrow morning the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which I have the honour to chair, will be meeting to consider, among other things, the civil aviation Bill. It is not impossible to imagine that the committee will have something to say about the delegated powers proposed in the Bill. My speech today, however, gives me the opportunity to contribute to the policy substance in it, which I am very supportive of. I am delighted to be able to take advantage of this opportunity because it is a Bill which has the potential to make a real difference to people’s lives.

It is a pleasure, and somewhat humbling, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, with her enormous expertise and of course powerful eloquence, which it has been a great pleasure to hear so many times on disability issues in this Chamber.

Today, I want to talk about my mother, Anne, who sadly died in her 90th year back in 2018, and people like her. Let me explain what I mean. My mother was born into poverty in 1928. There was certainly no prospect of her travelling abroad, let alone by aeroplane, when she was growing up or as a young woman; nor, indeed, was there any such prospect when I was growing up. But things change, and, in her 50s and 60s, she thought that she should try to make up for lost time—and then, why not carry on into her 70s and 80s? Of course, as we get older, travelling gets more complicated, but she loved getting around, whether by bus—on that, my noble friend the Minister will no doubt be pleased to hear that she absolutely loved the P4 bus from Brixton to Lewisham Shopping Centre well into her 80s—by train or by automobile.

To come back to today’s subject, she loved travelling by plane. When she was in her late 70s and wanted to visit the country of her father’s birth, we flew together to Dublin. By now, her legs were not strong enough for her to climb the steps up to the plane from the runway like everybody else, but the airline made perfectly good arrangements for a lift—I am not quite sure what the machinery was called—to take her up to the plane in London and back down again in Dublin. It was happy news. On the back of this success, my mother knew that she would be able to come with me and her brand-new granddaughter on a weekend in Rome, and to visit the Vatican, which had been a lifetime ambition for her. The flight out was fine and the Vatican really came up trumps, with the people who worked there, on seeing her frailty, secretly shepherding her into the “staff only” lifts to get her smoothly from floor to floor.

However, on returning to Gatwick, she was stuck on the plane. There was no lift for a very long time. Travelling is tiring for us all—we get hungry, thirsty and very tired—but being left stranded after everyone else is long gone because you need help getting off the plane and into the terminal building and into a wheelchair just is not good enough. She could not face having to go through that experience again. The only way to guarantee that was simply to stop flying on aeroplanes, so she did, and that was that. But my mother’s energy and drive for travel were undimmed, so we took her, very smoothly, to Brussels and Paris via the Eurostar. As I may have already said, she carried on enjoying the bus trip to Lewisham, but there were no more flights because of the way she was treated that time on our return from Rome and the Vatican.

Noble Lords can imagine how I cheered when, four years ago, the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner—the noble Baroness referred to him earlier— called out, among other things, the UK’s main airports for the way in which, all too often, they treat wheelchair-bound passengers like him. He did so after being left stranded at Gatwick himself, a few years after my mother. His job meant that he had no choice but to keep flying, and this was his fifth time in four years being stranded and left, as he put it,

“waiting in an empty aircraft long after all the other passengers have been off-loaded”.

He went on to say:

“This is nothing short of discriminatory and Britain’s premier air hubs should be ashamed of the way their disabled passengers have been repeatedly treated as a low priority”.


Hear, hear, as I think we say.

Mr Gardner continued:

“The remedy is simple: invest in enough equipment and staff to do the job, pay them properly, sort out the comms so airports know when to expect a passenger with needs, and get on top of the planning and rostering for the allocation of equipment and the teams that operate it. This isn’t rocket science, it just comes down to better planning and sufficient investment. Disabled passengers are not demanding special VIP treatment, they just expect the same level of service as the rest of society. It really isn’t a big ask!”


Fazilet Hadi, the head of policy at Disability Rights UK, said:

“Huge thanks to Frank Gardner for speaking out about this issue. For every disabled person that tells their story about being left on a plane, there are hundreds more of us that don’t. The level of neglect and disregard of disabled airline passengers is truly appalling. The high number of disabled people experiencing poor service led the Civil Aviation Authority to write to airports, threatening to take action if passenger assistance for disabled airline customers didn’t improve. The situation is obviously not getting better and the Equality Act is being breached on a regular basis”.


Today, on behalf of people from all walks of life—whether they are like my mother, who wanted to follow her dreams; like Frank Gardner, who was flying for work; or anyone else, whatever their circumstances— I wholeheartedly support, as all of us can surely do, legislation that will put an end to the excuses, ensuring that the CAA has the powers that will put this right.