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

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I start with an apology. I could not be here for Second Reading because I was gale-bound on the Isles of Scilly due to the failure of the air services. Therefore, it seems an appropriate time to look at the whole subject of general aviation, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, to see what can be done. I have been lobbying hard for improved navigation and improved services to the Isles of Scilly, where I live most of the time, for about 10 years; I shall come to that in later amendments. It is 10 years since we left Europe with Brexit and cancelled our membership of EGNOS, which I shall come to later.

It is important that general aviation is included in the Bill, and I support much of what the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Moylan, have said. I am not sure about the European Union amendment, but we will come on to that later. It is worth reminding ourselves that the long title of this Bill says that it is to:

“Make provision for the protection of purchasers and users of air transport and airport services”,


and it then mentions

“air traffic and air navigation services”,

all of which are part of general aviation, just as much as they are part of the rest of the aviation world. It is right to have something at the start of the Bill which demonstrates that this is an important subject which needs full consideration.

Much of what is in the Bill is really good, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, all the issues relating to general aviation need discussing, such as training, access to small airfields—on the islands or different parts of the country—and how things compare with what has been going on in Europe. I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and certainly part of the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and look forward to discussing these issues more in subsequent amendments.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, as set out in the register, as non-executive chair of RVL Aviation. I strongly support the purpose clause which my noble friend Lord Moylan has set out because I think most of the discussion on the other amendments will look at passengers by talking about airlines and concentrating on the experience of passengers. I draw attention to the fact that his Amendment 1 also talks about the international competitiveness of the sector, economic growth and the rights of those who purchase air transport services. My understanding of his amendment and of Clause 1 is that the definition of air transport services is not just passengers but those people who purchase freight and cargo services. I see the Minister is nodding assent.

That is important because it is critical to the growth of the economy. Air freight accounts for over 40% of non-EU trade by value, even though it is only about 1% of freight by volume. That is incredibly important to the overall economy, especially for some sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and high-end manufacturing, where we are particularly competitive, and it contributes to our balance of payments. An amendment that means that Ministers, when making regulations, have to ensure that our international trade remains competitive would be extremely valuable.

That is important, because the conversation about rights and the regulatory burden on airlines is often had while not thinking about the cost of those regulations. It does not mean that you do not make regulations if they have a cost; it just means that when you think about regulating, you have to think about the cost, look at the benefit and balance those two things. You also have to look at them cumulatively. My noble friend Lord Moylan touched on that when he talked about the Government’s target to reduce the cost of administrative burdens by 25% over this Parliament.

It is worth putting on the record—this is why the competitiveness of the sector is important—that overall, in 2024, European airlines had a net profit margin of around 3.9%. They are also expected, once all the results are in, to have had a net profit margin of around 4.4% in 2025, with a profit per passenger of around $8 or $9. I accept that that varies hugely by carrier, but it means that we have to think carefully about the costs that we load on to the industry so that we ensure that it remains competitive for both freight and passengers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. I think he will agree that much of what he said—and it was reflected as well in the comments of many of my noble friends—came from the reaction that we both had from the All-Party Group on Aviation. It is a bit of a disaster situation. That group criticised the CAA strongly, not only on training—and everything else that noble Lords have talked about—but on the exam syllabus. The incident training syllabus has apparently not been upgraded for 20 years. This is in spite of examiners and other people asking the CAA to incorporate the charges, to no avail. My plea to my noble friend the Minister tonight is for him to put a bomb under the CAA and convert it into a new, customer-friendly regulator.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, the amendments in my name insist on statutory duties that would secure workforce resilience and international regulatory alignment, rather than leaving these matters to open-ended secondary legislation.

Amendment 103 would require the CAA to prepare an annual report on commercial pilot licence holders, including anonymised demographic data, and an assessment of workforce sustainability as a regulatory monitoring tool. The licensing authority needs to understand whether the pool of qualified pilots has been maintained at a level that supports safe and continuous operations. I thank BALPA for supporting this amendment and helping to draft it. An important point that has not so far been drawn out is the need to identify the proportion of pilots licensed to fly commercial airliners who are women—the kind of important data that ensures that there is a workforce that reflects the future.

The amendment would also require the CAA to consider the future availability of a pilot workforce. As we have heard, commercial airline pilots must retire at 65. An authoritative annual assessment by the CAA would flag issues about the future supply of trained pilots.

I feel that we are all currently dancing on the head of a very particular but extremely useful and important pin. Between now and Report, I hope that we can put some of this together—unless the Minister says in the next few minutes that he is accepting all our amendments. We live in hope.

Amendment 104 would place a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to pursue UK-EU mutual recognition in relation to pilot and engineer licensing and aircraft parts certification. This came through from one of the APPGs, which had particular concerns about this issue. The absence of recognition mechanisms can create duplicated compliance burdens. We are all familiar with this kind of thing: regulatory friction and delays in maintenance and staffing, all of which matter operationally and economically.

I will not take up any more of noble Lords’ time, except to say that I commend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. We first served together in 2018 on the first Select Committee on artificial intelligence, so never let it be said that Peers are not sometimes ahead of the curve. Its report was entitled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able? and he continues to pursue this issue with his usual energy. I always support and listen to him on these issues, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the last group, I came up with a modest amendment that would have involved increasing the threshold at which strike ballots had to be passed before a strike could be undertaken—a clear consumer protection measure well in line with the purpose of the Bill. In this group, we seem to have wandered off into discussing pilot training, which I do not see as being intimately connected with consumer protection. Everyone is agreed that something should be done to interfere in the market, and that the Government or one of their agencies should take some sort of responsibility for this. It is entirely opposite to the thrust of the response I had on holding strikes. I find it remarkable.

I understand the problems identified by the noble Lords, Lord Barber and Lord Tunnicliffe, and my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. I understand that these are indeed serious problems. I am willing to go so far as to accept that the Civil Aviation Authority might want to take cognisance of them and have a sense of how extensive the problems are. But it is surely very clearly for the industry itself to solve these problems, and that is what we must insist on. I imagine that the Minister will be as firm in rejecting these interferences with the market as he was in rejecting my modest amendment in the last group.

My noble friend Lord Holmes made points of great wisdom and vision, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, rightly pointed out the assiduity with which my noble friend has brought attention to bear on these important technological issues over a number of years. I do not feel competent myself to make direct comments on them, but I applaud the notion that we should be looking very carefully at the developments that technology will bring. That will include, of course, the abilities and skills required of pilots. I do not want to push it too far, but we have planes that now practically fly themselves—I do not mean that they can do without pilots, but they can practically fly themselves. Of course, in freight, we have drones appearing everywhere and great technological advances being made. That must have an impact on a training curriculum for pilots.

I was astonished to hear the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, say that the training curriculum for pilots was several decades old. I am not sure if I heard him correctly, but if that is so, then perhaps it needs to catch up with modern technology. There are many things that an aeroplane does nowadays that it could not do 30 years ago and that the pilot ought to know about.

I want to make this point again about UK-EU alignment—

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

What I actually said was that the syllabus was 30 years old. I hope the noble Lord understood that correctly.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am very grateful, but does the syllabus not determine the content of the training? It is a matter we can take up outside—it is not something we need to detain the Committee on at the moment—but I am very grateful to the noble Lord for making it clear what he said and putting me right to that extent. I had no wish to put words into his mouth, but I was just struck by what he said.

I wanted to come back briefly to the question of UK-EU alignment on this. It would, of course, be very good if there were mutual recognition between the UK and the EU, but it would also be very good if there were mutual recognition between the UK and the US. I am not entirely sure why there is this relentless focus on the EU. In the days when we had freedom of movement—mercifully, we do not anymore, because we voted against it—mutual recognition would mean that a pilot could move from one country to another and live there and pursue his calling in those countries. That is no longer the case, any more than it is with the United States, so the argument for a specific arrangement with the European Union seems to me to fall largely by the wayside. Apart from that, I thank my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower for his contribution, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in the four minutes remaining.