European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Trefgarne

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Noble Lords opposite may well think that that is an appalling prospect, and they are entitled to feel that. However, they cannot deny that that is a possible choice. They also cannot deny that that is a choice that many of our partners in the Union—the majority of them—have taken. They cannot fairly deny that there are good theoretical arguments for all those proposals. It might very well be argued that now would be a very good time to join the euro, before interest rates and the parity go up, but we are not having that discussion today. However, that choice is being denied to the British people. Other people have had the choice of doing that, but we have not—our electorate have not.

Clearly, both parties in this rather squalid transaction between the extremist Eurosceptics in the Tory party and the Prime Minister have been at one, I am sure, in wishing to exclude any possibility of going down that road, which they would call the federalist road. So democracy has not reached that far, and democracy will not include giving the opportunity for that particular choice to be expressed in the referendum. There may be practical reasons: people would say, “Well, you can’t have more than two questions in a referendum”—but that is nonsense. If there was an aggregate majority of those who were in favour of our joining the core of the European Union on the one side and those who were in favour of joining the Union with the various derogations negotiated by the Prime Minister on the other, and if those two votes together came to a majority of the vote, clearly you could not argue that there was a majority in favour of our leaving the European Union. So in practical terms this is a very real possibility.

I notice that I have gone beyond 3 pm. Quite disgracefully, no one from the Front Bench and none of the Whips sitting there has interrupted me, which of course they should have done. Therefore, I have no bad conscience at all in delaying the House a little longer. That is their fault, not mine. They are in breach of the rules. What is more, this precedent is something that we should not forget, and one that should be applied in all fairness and in all honesty to all future Private Members’ Bills. Otherwise, this will just be seen as a very underhand procedural trick by the Government. Of course, it also blows the cover completely about this being a Private Member’s Bill. It is nothing of the kind.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

No, I am not going to give way. I know perfectly well what the noble Lord is going to say, and I am not going to give way. I am going to finish my remarks, and I am not going to give way. I make that absolutely plain. There has been scandalous conduct in this House this afternoon, not by me or anyone on my side but on the part of the Members of the government Front Bench sitting opposite, and I am certainly not going to allow them or any of their minions to interrupt me.

What do we do in the squalid circumstances that I have described? We do our duty, and look at this Bill thoroughly, sceptically and responsibly. If we can improve it, we improve it. There are one or two particularly scandalous aspects of the Bill, notably where the Government try to override the decisions of the Electoral Commission on the formulation of the question. That amounts to appointing an umpire and then rejecting the umpire’s decisions. It is a scandalous thing to propose and, obviously, something that this House needs to look at very sceptically, along with many other things. We will not do our duty if we do not do that.

Civil Aviation Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Trefgarne

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I thoroughly agree with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Rogan. When I was Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and therefore about twice a month a regular customer of Belfast City Airport, I realised how enormously important for the economic self-confidence of the Province is that link to Heathrow and, through it, to international networks. I also very much agree with my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis, who spoke of course, on the basis of very considerable personal experience in having held two immensely important positions in civil aviation. I will follow very much the logic of what he said.

Of course, as always, I listened with great attention to the Minister. He started off by saying something that we would all agree with, which is that aviation is “vital to our economy”—I think I noted down his remarks correctly. To my amazement, he did not say anything at all about the fact that the aviation industry is in fact facing a major competitive threat at the present time and is extremely worried about the future. You might hope that a Government of the day would take that on board and do something about it. Far from it, unfortunately. That is a very troubling situation.

Most of us were brought up thinking complacently—perhaps we always were very complacent about this—that Heathrow was the biggest airport in Europe and so we were quite safe as we had the centre of at least the European aviation industry right here in our country. That is no longer true and is becoming less true all the time. Already two of Heathrow’s rivals, Roissy Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt, have more aircraft movements than Heathrow. By the end of this decade, which is only eight years away, they will almost certainly have more passengers, as will Schiphol, so Heathrow will be number four and going down.

Heathrow is enormously important and I make no apology for focusing on it. I fear that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, was completely wrong to say that it is all right because although there is not enough capacity at Heathrow there is enough capacity at Birmingham, Luton or somewhere else. People who want to come to London want to get there as quickly as possible. That is particularly important in the business world. Frankly, the noble Lord did not focus at all on the enormously important economics of the hub and spoke system—what an economist would call the networking effects, which are so important in the aviation industry. If Heathrow is not allowed to become a hub, somewhere else will and it will not be Luton or Birmingham. It will be Schiphol, Paris or Frankfurt. I illustrate that by means of a brief personal anecdote.

In February I was lucky enough to be part of a parliamentary delegation to Mexico. The IPU was rightly concerned to save taxpayer funds and got the best deal that it could, which involved us flying via Schiphol. We went to Schiphol and changed, which meant that we flew 300 kilometres in the wrong direction and 300 kilometres back over the United Kingdom again. That is 600 kilometres more than we needed to fly. We took off twice rather than once. As we all know, most carbon emissions occur on take-off and early altitude gains. I should think that we emitted twice the carbon that we would have done had we been able to fly directly from Heathrow to Mexico City. I witnessed some colleagues taking advantage of Schiphol Airport’s fine duty-free shopping facilities. That, again, is very good news for the economy of Schiphol and of the Netherlands but very bad news for this country. I say to the Government and to the Liberal Party—they should be aware of that and focus on it but they simply are not doing so.

The Bill sets out the obligations of the Secretary of State. I am, of course, totally in favour of the Bill, which was conceived by the previous Labour Government, as has already been pointed out. Clause 2 is headed: “Secretary of State’s general duty”. Clause 2(1) states:

“The Secretary of State must carry out the functions listed in subsection (3) in a manner which the Secretary of State considers will further the interests of users of air transport services regarding the range, availability, continuity, cost and quality of airport operation services”.

The Secretary of State is doing nothing of the kind at present, nor did her predecessor. That is precisely why we have the current problem and why it is cheaper to fly to Mexico City via Schiphol than it is to take off directly from Heathrow—that is, taking off from Heathrow to Schiphol, and then flying from Schiphol to Mexico. Why is that the case? It is because there are not enough slots at Heathrow. Therefore, airlines that want to put on more flights cannot run them from Heathrow. They have to reserve the slots at Heathrow for the high-margin flights going to destinations such as New York, Chicago and Washington DC, where there are lots of first class and club class passengers. The other aircraft with a greater proportion of discounted passengers have to go elsewhere, and so they go to Schiphol, Roissy or Frankfurt. That is the simple logic and the Government must face up to that fact.

The key issue is not just the importance of the aviation business as regards employment. As has been said, it generates nearly half a million jobs in this country. However, it is important for two other reasons as well. First, it is not the only factor or the leading factor but is certainly a factor in location of business decisions. If you decide that you want to locate an international headquarters in a particular city, one of the things that you undoubtedly take into account is the air communications. If you put your office in London and you have to go via Birmingham to get there, that is a very major disincentive to coming to London at all. The aviation business is very important as regards business traffic. It is also important as regards tourism. If you ask the Government whether they care about tourism, they will say, “Of course, we care very much about tourism. It is a very important industry”. However, in practice, they are handicapping tourism over and over again. We have the problem that we are not part of the Schengen visa system so people coming to this country as part of a European tour—the bulk of private tourists from outside the EU coming to the EU come on organised tours—often will not take the trouble, time or additional cost involved in purchasing a British visa. That is a big handicap. We now have the longest delays at our border controls of anywhere in Europe as a result of mismanagement by this Government. That is also a handicap. If we now have shortages of airline slots and people are diverted to Birmingham—I again take the example put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw—that will also be a considerable deterrent to tourism. Therefore, it is no use the Government saying that they care about tourism if their policies have the effect of weakening British tourism’s competitiveness worldwide. That is exactly the situation.

[Lord Trefgarne]

Everything the noble Lord is saying is directed towards more operations, more slots and more flights from Heathrow. What was the policy of the Government, of whom he was a distinguished member, between 1997 and 2010?

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Our policy was to expand Heathrow and build a third runway. That was the policy which I supported then, which I support now and which I trust my party will support again at the next election. It is the only policy that seems to make any sense. As regards the third runway that we were planning to build—the BAA third runway—I read an interesting proposal the other day which I recommend to the noble Lord, who knows a lot about this subject. It was produced by the Institute of Directors. Noble Lords may be surprised to hear a member of the Labour Party referring to the Institute of Directors but I thought that it came up with an interesting proposal for a third runway to be built within the existing perimeter of the airport to the south, which would be something like 2,600 metres in length and would greatly improve the situation. The scheme has been well documented and the noble Lord may like to look at it. However it is done it is clear that all the airlines and BAA are of one mind on this—the solution is the one that, had we won the previous election, we would have implemented, I am proud to say.

Of course, the whole of this is against the background of the present Government’s neglect of infrastructure generally. We have had the postponement of the high-speed rail project.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Trefgarne

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Rosser on so effectively and so definitively refuting the bogus myth of the £38 billion deficit, about which we have heard too much. After my noble friend's refutation, I hope that no one will be so shameless as to purvey that any further. I was going to speak on that but now I do not need to do so.

I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, make the suggestion that we should have available in the House, and no doubt in the House of Commons as well, on temporary secondment, uniformed officers of the Armed Forces to keep us informed on military and defence matters. That was one of the 40 recommendations of the study on the national recognition of the Armed Forces, which I was privileged to chair three years ago, and it was one of only two recommendations out of the 40 which was not accepted by the previous Government. I hope that, with the advocacy of the noble Lord, we may have more luck with the present Administration on that point.

It has been said, quite rightly, so many times from different sides of the Chamber today that the strategic defence and security review was neither strategic nor a review that I do not need to repeat it. I think that has become the consensus in the country. However, I wish to comment on one very important aspect that has not been mentioned. The lack of consultation in the review process was particularly regrettable. There was no effective consultation with industry. As I have pointed out in the House before, there was only one meeting of the National Defence Industries Council between the election and the defence review. That is a terrible mistake. We now know that there is to be a Green Paper and a White Paper on defence industrial policy. In other words, the Government recognise that there are important consequences for our defence industrial structure of the defence review, but those consequences should have been taken account of in the consideration of the defence review. The defence review should have included precisely what we intended to preserve by way of defence industrial capability and structure in this country.

If the procedure was regrettable, the results of this so-called review have been utterly deplorable. I take in turn a number of the points where there have been devastating reductions in the nation's defence capability. First, I ask the Minister what are the savings from the reduction of the infantry of the AS90 and Challenger 2? My instinct is that the reduction is very small. If you reduce just part of the inventory and not all of it—thank God they did not get rid of all of it—you still have the fixed costs, such as training costs. I suspect that the actual savings—I shall bet a drink in the bar for the noble Lord on this—are very derisory and probably not much of a multiple of the 27 photographers and beauty or vanity consultants, or whatever they are, which the Government have seen fit to take on the public payroll for the benefit of the Prime Minister.

Secondly, I turn to helicopters. The Government have cut in half our order for two Chinooks. I am delighted to take full responsibility for that order. I am very proud that we made that order and that I got rid of the original future medium helicopter project and put the money into buying helicopters off-the-shelf as rapidly as possible. We have heard from the Conservative Benches this afternoon, from the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that he considers that there are still too few helicopters, but I am very proud that there are now 50 per cent more helicopters on the front line this year in Afghanistan than there were in the summer of last year as a result of the measures that we took. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that we actually need more. It is a great mistake to cut that order. It is all part of the Government focusing on protecting Afghanistan, which is absolutely right and important, but at the expense of all flexibility for our future ability to respond to different threats so that we shall end up well equipped for Afghanistan and able to fight no more than the last war once we have got through the Afghan conflict. That is a classic mistake to make in defence procurement; it is not one that we made in office, but it is one that I am afraid the coalition is now sadly making.

The prolongation of the Vanguard class and the postponement of the construction of successor class submarines was dealt with so devastatingly by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, that I do not need to enter into that. I just say that it appears, since that announcement was made, that far from saving public money, the Government will end up spending £1.8 billion more on keeping the Vanguard class in the water for that extended time—with the law of diminishing returns which always applies towards the end of the life of any class of naval vessel. That was not a very intelligent decision either.

I come on to the most important issue, which is the decision about the Harriers and carrier strike. I think that the decision to get rid of our Harriers is utterly unforgivable. It is quite the wrong decision. The right decision would have been to do what we were planning to do, and what I was working on at the time of the election. That is to withdraw the Tornados well before the original date, the official date, of 2022—I queried that date when I first saw it—but to withdraw them as and when we were able to upgrade the Typhoon with a ground support capability, with a full suite of weapons, with Paveway IV, Brimstone or its successor, with Storm Shadow and with a sensor equivalent of the Raptor, which has done so well in the Tornado. That was why, last year, we put more money into the Typhoon enhancement programme. I was hoping to be able to withdraw the Tornados by 2014 or 2015. There would have been a considerable saving there, but we would have continued to have a carrier strike capability right the way through.

I think that the Government think that they are geniuses—not, sadly, military geniuses but geniuses in predicting the future precisely and accurately. What they are saying to the country in this document amounts to this: “We need a carrier strike capability. There are threats in this world to which we might have to respond in desperation with that carrier strike capability. We have to spend the money, we have to invest in that capability, but”—they are telling the nation, “between the years 2011 and 2019, those threats will not arise”. How remarkable. How do they do it? I do not know whether they do it by astrology or tarot cards, but one can only either marvel or shake in one's boots that defence planning is being conducted on that basis.

Not surprisingly, that has opened up a very useful and healthy debate about our ability to fulfil some of our obligations—to defend, for example, the Falklands. I am not going to make any judgments about this, I will deal just in facts. The Government are saying that we have the capability, without any carriers, to defend the Falklands. What do we have? We have four Typhoons in Mount Pleasant. We have a company of troops. We have one runway fit for combat aircraft. What happens if, by subterfuge, sabotage, bomb attack, missile, or whatever, that runway is taken out? Presumably, if the Typhoons happen to be in the air at the time, the crew will have to eject, and we certainly cannot expect to be able to replenish the Falklands by airlift.

The Government talk about submarines. We have not got a submarine in the Falklands and I do not think—because they have not told the nation so—that they have any intention of basing a submarine on the Falklands. Let me tell them that if they did, they would have to assign two—probably two and a half—of the hunter killer submarines, Trafalgar class and, potentially, Astute class, to that role alone. That is not provided for in the number that we plan to build—the seven Astutes. If the Government are going to put a submarine there, they had better tell the nation that they are going to do that and explain how. If they are not, if there is not going to be a submarine there, they had better stop saying that submarines provide an adequate protection against a potential invasion of the Falklands. Some very serious issues have come to light over the past few days on this and we need an answer.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord. He has been very good at describing how he thinks the money ought to be spent to defend the Falkland Islands. Does he not realise that he and his right honourable friends left the financial arrangements in the Ministry of Defence in a complete shambles: there is no money?

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I absolutely do not recognise that. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Rosser has already dealt with that particular falsehood. What is more, I think that the Government are absolutely wrong to cut public spending generally, as they are doing, so far and so fast; and they are certainly wrong to take it out on defence in the way that they are.