Civil Aviation (Insurance) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for setting out the scope of these regulations, which, if I understand correctly, are a technicality to ensure that the UK rather than the EU is now the legislator. My concerns go wider than that and relate to the compensation levels for disabled passengers and wheelchairs. I endorse absolutely everything the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has just said.

Can my noble friend confirm that the EU regs and these UK regs exactly replicate the 1999 Montreal Convention latest compensation levels of 113,100 SDRs, about £90,000, for death and 1,131 SDRs, about £900, for loss of baggage? The EU regs go further and compensate for delay.

However, my noble friend will have been briefed on the scandal in 2016, championed by our noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, when Athena Stevens had her £25,000 wheelchair irreparably damaged on a BA flight from London to Glasgow and was offered compensation based on its weight. The Montreal Convention deems wheelchairs to be hold baggage, where the compensation is payable on the weight of the articles, not their value.

I have my battery-operated wheelchairs insured for everything, but the one thing you cannot insure for is air travel, so when the delightful Miami baggage handlers dropped my lightweight aluminium wheelchair costing £2,500, the most I would get—after enormous hassle—would be $300. Air carriers are hiding behind an international convention to avoid paying for damaged mobility equipment vital for disabled people to live their lives independently. As our noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond said in the Athena Stevens case:

“This unfair policy is trapping disabled people in a cycle of disadvantage, and British air carriers have the moral responsibility to stop applying it to disabled customers’ mobility equipment, as it’s clearly unfit for purpose.”


The United States has passed the Air Carrier Access Act, applying to all internal flights, which states:

“The basis for calculating the compensation for a lost, damaged, or destroyed wheelchair or other assistive device shall be the original purchase price of the device.”


Canada has said that the levels in the Montreal Convention will not apply, and in Europe only Lufthansa has said the same thing. I wish I knew that when I watched my late departed previous wheelchair dropped six feet from a baggage elevator at Frankfurt.

I ask my noble friend the Minister ideally to introduce US-style legislation for all flights departing or landing in the UK, in which damage to wheelchairs will be compensated at the full replacement cost. There is nothing to stop us from 1 January next year; we will be out of the bureaucratic dead embrace of the EU empire. This country was always ahead of every other country in the EU on disabled rights, so let us be in the forefront once again.

There is no downside to bringing in this legislation; the cost to airlines will be minimal. To be fair, my current electric wheelchair has been to Belarus, Azerbaijan, Ankara, Istanbul, Athens, Strasbourg, Paris, Basle, St Petersburg, Bosnia, Georgia and even Aberdeen, and has not been damaged by airlines or airports—not yet, at any rate, but I am tempting fate by boasting about it. The airlines would have to pay for a small number of cases, but cases absolutely crucial to the disabled passengers affected.

If legislation cannot be brought forward in the short term, which I understand, will my noble friend make it clear to all UK-operating airlines that the Government expect them to implement this voluntarily, the same way that Lufthansa has? Of course, we know that there are nasty little operators—we could all name them, but I will not do so—but if the more reputable carriers make this undertaking, wheelchair users will know who to trust and who to travel with.