Airport Capacity

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The analogy with nooses that my noble friend draws is certainly not how I or the Government view it. This is an opportunity to expand airport capacity in the south-east, which is a central part of ensuring the growth of our country and our future development. As I said, it is important that we listen to all views—the Airports Commission produced a very detailed and thorough piece of work—and that we consider all environmental impacts, including air quality, noise and carbon emissions. I know that my noble friend has made representations in this regard and we are listening to those representations. It is important that we make the right decision for the south-east, for our country and for moving our economy forward.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, someone coming anew to this debate and hearing the Minister’s opening remarks might think that Sir Howard and his colleagues set out three options, weighed them immaculately and left the choice open. It is hard to imagine a more thorough report than he and his colleagues wrote or a clearer conclusion and recommendation. What were the shortcomings in the report that have occasioned this delay? What did the commission not make clear?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

One issue, which I mentioned earlier and which was referred to by the Environmental Audit Committee, was the need to ensure that air quality standards are applied to each proposal within each of the options that we are considering. We feel quite strongly that those need to be considered, reviewed and analysed so that we make the right decision on the basis of not just the economy but important environmental considerations.

Drugs

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for her relentless focus on drugs policy—a matter I spent 18 months of my life studying when I led the Cabinet Office review 10 years ago.

Serious drugs have been with us for hundreds of years. Heroin was sold over the counter in the UK in the mid-19th century, although it was not until the mid-20th century that diverse drug use began to rise exponentially and to involve many millions of users. Those of us who were young in the 1960s can understand this well. Drug use was part of revolutionary social and cultural change. We read about hallucinogens in our Aldous Huxley. My next-door neighbour at college, a biochemist, kept a test tube on his bookshelf that was openly labelled LSD. Marijuana appeared exotic and bohemian. Jazz musicians took heroin, we were told, and that seemed cool—and no one talked about the dangers. We know better now. Which of us would not be horrified to learn that our children, or in my case my grandchildren, were using a class A, B or C drug, or one of their legal high near-equivalents?

There are, however, modest grounds for hope. A combination of better public education and the street-smart insights of a new Trainspotting generation have reduced the allure of drugs. Overall numbers appear to be in gradual decline. It may take another 50 years, however, before we return once again to mid-20th century norms. In the mean time, unlike many of your Lordships, I continue to support the notion that the state needs to do all it can to stigmatise—and not to legalise or in any way legitimise—the use of classified drugs, for they are all harmful in their different ways.

We should focus on one category of drug user above all others: the 300,000 consumers of heroin and crack cocaine. They do terrible harm to themselves and to their families but cause grievous harm to the rest of us, too. They commit the majority of all crime—more than half of all burglaries and muggings—to fund their habits. The consequence is huge trauma for their victims and a vast economic cost that is borne by us all.

Problem drug users do wicked things, but for the most part, as other noble Lords have suggested, they are troubled individuals, many with mental health problems. They are rootless and chaotic, caught in the whirligig of short sentences, routinely switching in and out of prison. They merit our compassion and they need our help. We offer well intended help, but the system is itself chaotic. The problem drug user is passed between different health and justice institutions and slips between the cracks again and again. I have long believed that our present approach is not fit for purpose.

The notion that treatment will invariably lead to abstinence is a chimera. At best, 20% may become abstinent for more than five years, for heroin is the most pernicious and unshakeable of all addictions. Treatment, none the less, is worthwhile. A broad-based regime with a battery of approaches from heroin substitution to heroin prescription, from counselling to coaching, from help with accommodation to workplace training, will not bring a cure but will bring substantial harm reduction, including a significant cut in acquisitive crime. However, help must be available consistently and continuously.

To protect society, we need something that we do not have now: a legal framework—not necessarily a criminal framework—that would enable us to grip problem drug users to ensure that they do not slip through the cracks, and an agency that is part of the criminal justice system to keep them under what may well be a lifetime of humane and compassionate supervision. Only a step change in our approach will reduce the impact of what will be a very long-lasting epidemic.

UK Border Agency

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, who is one of this House’s treasures, for not only prompting a debate of exceptional power and authority but speaking so forcefully on so many of the shortcomings of the border agency. I want to focus on another.

At 6 pm on 14 January this year, I landed with my wife at terminal 4 of Heathrow after a very long flight from India. I was shocked as I came close to the border controls to see the longest queue that I have ever seen anywhere, probably 300 to 400 metres long. I am tempted to say it was longer, but that was my estimate at the time. As it was terminal 4, it contained predominantly people from the subcontinent, including a great number of families, many with young children, and 17 desks at border control were unmanned. I subsequently put down a Written Question asking the border agency to identify or estimate the average time in that queue. The agency came back with the suggestion that it was one hour and 40 minutes. I am sure that estimate was given in good faith but I am deeply sceptical of it. I myself, along with my wife, was in the UK nationals queue, which was very much shorter, but we still had to wait something like thirty or forty minutes before being let through. Even if it was only one hour and 40 minutes, that is far too long for people who have been on such a long flight and then find themselves on arrival in such horrible conditions.

I have travelled, and still travel, a great deal, either on business or for pleasure. I travel in the developed and developing world and have sometimes, as I am sure many of your Lordships have, faced queues in other countries, particularly in America. However, generally speaking, border controls the world over increasingly allow speedy and efficient entry. I have never seen, anywhere in the world, queues to rival those that are now commonplace at London Heathrow and which I saw that evening. This is profoundly unwelcoming and uncivilised. We all know and understand that it is damaging to the UK’s reputation and our national interest, not least because of its impact on potential investors in the UK economy, many of whom I regularly meet in my work and for whom London Heathrow is now a watchword for a torrid experience.

After I got through passport control on 14 January, I asked to see the officer in charge, who was not close to the desks but buried somewhere in the offices at the back. I questioned him about the reasons for this intolerable queue. He of course answered that he had insufficient resources to man the many empty desks and also told me that he thought the matter was only going to get a lot worse. Other noble Lords have mentioned the border agency’s own reports, from which we know that 5,200 staff are to be dropped in the next four years.

I recognise and support the Government’s drive to reduce public spending and the deficit. As somebody who has managed in the public sector, I do not for one moment underestimate the enormous complexity of the task that the border agency faces, which has been exceptionally clear throughout this debate. Implementing government policies in all the areas we have been discussing—security, immigration and asylum—is not trivial. These are very difficult and complex challenges. Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, and the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Ramsbotham, gave us some very tough reminders of how important it is for the border agency to get so many things right to maintain our civilised standards with respect to the tortured and the brutally oppressed, to safeguard the vibrancy of our education system and to husband and develop the skills of the UK workforce.

I am also someone who has had to reduce costs at many points in his life, both in the public and private sectors, in a variety of organisations, and I am not one who assumes that increasing costs is necessarily the answer to all the challenges that we have heard about during this debate. However, in respect of Heathrow, is the Minister satisfied that the agency deploys its resources optimally? One obvious thing to note about international travel is that it is very data-rich. We know where the airplanes come from, how many people are in them and when they are going to land. It must be possible to give very precise estimates of the flow of passengers through an airline terminal. Is he satisfied that we have such accurate forecasts of passenger numbers? Is he satisfied that we can flex what capacity the agency has to varying demand? Are the working arrangements of the staff in the agency sufficiently flexible? Can they be shifted easily on the basis of need from location to location? Can they be rostered flexibly? Are there enough part-time staff to deal with the inevitable peaks?

If the agency is underresourced, and it may be, it must, like all organisations, cut costs in ways which create, not destroy, value and which are hard-headed about priorities—we have heard many of those in the course of this long debate. There can be no excuse at all for the UK having the longest airport queues in the world. It is a national shame.