Queen’s Speech

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Morse, on their excellent maiden speeches. I draw attention to my entry in the register, in particular my presidency of BALPA, the pilots’ union. I am addressing what is fundamentally a transport issue to the Minister. I realise that he is not a transport Minister, so all I am going to ask him to do is to say that he will pass my comments on to the Transport Minister and ask her to respond to me in writing. That is as much as I could really hope for.

The subject I want to raise is the problem of what is called the potential airline insolvency Bill. This issue has been around for two or three years. It comes to the fore when an airline such as Monarch goes under, and then it disappears from the headlines and people forget all about it—until the next tragedy happens.

In March 2019, the Airline Insolvency Review published its full report. We are now two years and two months on from that. Just over a year ago, before the Covid shutdown, I table a QSD asking for a report, and the then Minister what had happened and what was going to come forward. First, the review called for arrangements to be put in place to finance the cost of protecting customers. Everyone will remember that when an airline goes bust, you suddenly have customers all over the world who need to be brought home. Secondly, it proposed that the airlines themselves should fund a financial package that would cover these eventualities and the cost of repatriating passengers. Thirdly, it said that some legislative cover was needed for all of this. It is not only passengers who are affected; people often forget that staff are also affected. If an airline goes bust, the staff are just left with the administrators; they do not even get their wages paid. Of course, in the case of airline pilots, they could not only have no wages; they could be on the other side of the world. There are severe difficulties. The suggestion, which I think very sensible, is a kind of US chapter 11 situation whereby an airline could keep flying for a short time in order to bring passengers back and get a sensible wind-down.

This is not an area of great controversy. I do not think that the party opposite would find any difficulties with this; indeed, the vice-president of BALPA is the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, with whom I have a very good relationship. I would therefore like the Minister to put to his colleague that this is exactly the sort of Bill that could be introduced in the Lords, that would be unlikely to cause any great problem here and that could then be sent down the Corridor. It is something we need, particularly at the moment, when the aviation industry is in dire trouble.

It will take some time to get it out of that trouble. There are a lot of problems, which I am not going to go into, associated with reopening the industry. Certainly, the transatlantic routes need opening up, because that is where the principal finance comes from. I would be grateful if the Minister took that on board.

I make one other observation before I close. It is now two years since the Government promised a workers’ rights Bill to look at basic problems such as the gig economy and employment regulations. This is another issue that has not been addressed in the gracious Speech. Will the Government look at introducing not a complex but a simple Bill to sort out some of the manifest injustices and to correct the law as it has been applied according to successive court judgments? There needs to be some tidying up in this area as well. I hope that the Minister will be able to write letters to get other people to do the work to address the two suggestions I have made.