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

Debate between Lord Empey and Earl Russell

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 9, which seeks to strengthen the consumer protection provisions at the heart of the Bill. This amendment would insert two paragraphs into Clause 1. We believe that both are desirable and necessary if this legislation is to deliver meaningful change for the travelling public. The first would add the requirement for

“standardised, comparable information at the point of sale”.

Anyone who has purchased an airline ticket recently will be familiar with the booking experience. I will not go through all the painful detail but suffice to say that, by the time you come to the payment page, the fee you are charged bears little resemblance to the one that first encouraged you to make the booking.

That is not an accident; it is intentional. It is a business model that has moved, frankly, from the sublime to the ridiculous. For example, at the moment, the CMA is investigating Ryanair’s mandatory charge of £8 each way for the privilege of sitting with your own children. It is a business model that harms consumers, distorts competition and corrodes trust in the aviation sector. Airlines that compete fairly on total price are undercut by those which strip out every possible cost, just to put them back in. We do not tolerate these practices in other markets—imagine for one moment that the same situation was in place when you were doing your online grocery shopping. It means that consumers cannot make rational or informed choices. Again, that is the intention. Families on modest budgets find themselves paying significantly more than they had intended to.

My amendment would address this directly by requiring airlines and all ticket sellers—I emphasise all ticket sellers, whether the airlines themselves, online travel agents or price comparison websites—to display the total price up front, including all fees, taxes and unavoidable charges. We believe this is not a radical proposition. It is not difficult for the airlines, if they are selling direct to consumers, or their agents to comply with. Most consumers reasonably believe that this is the case already, so this amendment aims to make it so.

The second element of the amendment concerns passenger rights. When a flight is delayed or cancelled, or a passenger is denied boarding, they are entitled to certain protections, and rightly so. But the evidence consistently shows that a significant portion of affected passengers do not know what those rights are and that airlines do not always volunteer that information. My amendment would require this information about passenger rights in disruption scenarios to be provided clearly at the point of sale, not buried deep in terms and conditions in the small print, and accessible only to those who know how to look for it.

Thirdly, the information element concerns environmental impact. Consumers are increasingly seeking to make informed choices consistent with their values. Aviation, as we know, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. While the sector as a whole must decarbonise, individuals, too, wish to understand the environmental impact of their individual journeys. Standardised carbon footprint information at the point of sale would enable informed choices. It would also in time, we hope, drive competition on environmental performance, an outcome that we argue would drive consumer-led carbon-reduction measures.

The second part of the amendment includes mandatory minimum compensation standards and, critically, automated payment mechanisms for flight delays, cancellations and denied boarding. The right to compensation for significant disruption already exists in law. Yet, year after year, consumer bodies and passengers find that it is not happening. They are waiting long times and often having to go to court and take legal action. That is an unacceptable situation.

The solution that I have proposed is an automation system to make sure that, where delays happen, there is an automatic payment so that you do not have to go through a complicated process to do it. The airlines have all this information. They know who is on their planes, they know who is not, they know when they are delayed and they know when compensation needs to be paid. We do not believe that this requirement would be too onerous on the airlines. It would simply make it a more efficient, fair and effective system.

We welcome this Bill. We recognise the consumer protections, but we feel that they need to have real bite. That is what my amendments seek to do. Our worry is that, if we do not put stronger protections in the Bill, we will simply have gestures towards consumer rights without actually putting them in statute. With the inclusion of these amendments, we would take concrete steps to make sure that we are acting in the passengers’ best interests in making these systems fairer and more efficient.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 41. The question of responsibility for drop-off charges was mentioned in closing by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. This has become a new and evolving tax in the last few years and it is quite substantial. Edinburgh Airport is now charging £8.50 for somebody to be dropped off. Our major airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, are around the £7 to £8 mark, and other airports around the country have various levels. What effectively is happening is that the sharp increase in business rates applied to the airports has been passed on to a passenger being dropped off at the front door.

This has a huge impact on the potential for growth. It has an impact on the cost of doing business in this country and on the cost of travel. While it might be nice to say that we would like as many people as possible to go to airports by public transport, the realistic situation is that there are many airports around the country where the practicalities of doing that are very limited, particularly if you live outside an urban area. We have to take these charges into account. It seems to me that more and more airports are making more money out of drop-off charges and car parking than they are out of running the airports. While I do not want to see the model of airports made less competitive, the fact of the matter is that this is a tax on travel and a tax on business. There are many parts of this country where, if you are going to do business, there is little alternative to using aviation. I think that is a very important point and I would like the Minister to address that.

The other issue I want to raise relates to Amendment 40 and air quality on aircraft. Obviously, we all fly, some of us more than others, but thousands of people work in the airline industry and are in aircraft all their working days. There have been cases, because the air supply in most aircraft—although changes and improvements are being made—comes from the turbines, of seals failing from time to time in those turbines and oil being vapourised and fed into the cabin, where it is visible. What worries me is that there will be many times when it is not visible. What is the Minister’s response to that? Who is monitoring this and at what levels? Are the levels reviewed and are any checks being carried out on those who work in the airline industry as to whether their health is affected by long exposure?