Airports Slot Allocation (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2021

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I support the changes proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Vere. The crisis in the airline industry has left us with really no alternative and it is always better to provide an orderly system rather than to leave matters to themselves, as it were.

However, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, I do not count myself among those who want to see a return to normal, if normal means that we are going to have the same levels of noise, pollution and disruption which airlines give to many people. Airlines are polluting, and while they bring the mobility benefits to which the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, referred, we must look forward to quieter and less polluting aircraft. In my view, this sort of thing is not an optional extra. If our concern with climate change is genuine, it is a must. I guess the third runway at Heathrow will itself be a long time coming, if it ever happens, but we have to make a useful contribution very urgently, probably by the time we go to Glasgow for COP 26, because as a nation we have to be able to show that there is a way forward to a genuinely better aircraft industry.