Airports National Policy Statement

Debate between Lord Soley and Baroness Sugg

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

I thank my noble friend for his support on this decision. As he said, he is a predecessor of mine, and I am sure that he was discussing it then, so it is great to take this step of laying the final national policy statement. We need to act now. Our latest analysis shows that all five London airports will be full by the mid-2030s, and we are losing ground to our competitor hubs in Europe and the Middle East.

The night flight ban will be at least a six and a half hour ban on all scheduled flights. It could be more than that, with predictable respite. Once designated, that will go to further consultation with local communities to agree the exact detail.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My 20-year campaign to expand Heathrow covered the period when I was a Member of Parliament for two west London constituencies. Of course, some people are vocally against it. I have to say that they are frequently the people who fly more often, which came out in a number of constituency meetings that I did in the area. An awful lot of people who do not speak out clearly are desperately in favour because of high-quality jobs. When I spoke in schools in the area, teachers were often against it, for understandable reasons—because of the noise—but when you asked the children how many of them had family or friends who worked at the airport or in an airport-associated job, nearly all of them did. Please ensure that we take account of the needs of those local people, too.

The regions are incredibly important. We cannot expect the regions of England to do well unless they are linked into the hub airport. If all the other countries have hub airports and are developing them, there is a common-sense question: why is that? The common-sense answer is because you need interchange—interchange for Scotland, Wales, and the south-west of England, which is often underestimated. They need links too. Please will the Minister pursue this and take into account the crucial importance of jobs in south-west London and related areas?

[Baroness Sugg]

I thank the noble Lord for his supportive comments. This expansion will absolutely deliver jobs for the local area: I think that the latest figure is 114,000 and 5,000 apprenticeships, which will obviously be welcome for young people. We have not underestimated the potential impact of this decision on local communities, or the importance of listening to them and doing it in the right way. I personally met some of the local groups which have been campaigning hard on this issue and saw at first-hand their strength of feeling. The NPS commits up to £2.6 billion towards compensation, noise insulation and improvements to public communities but, as the noble Lord said, expansion has support from local communities as well as opposition.