Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill [HL]

Lord Tebbit Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard)
Wednesday 12th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s words were tempting in some ways because ever since drones first appeared, we have been way behind the game in dealing with their potential dangers. They should never have been made available for the general public to buy and should have required a licence from the very beginning. All those things should have been done early on. So there is a temptation to support the noble Baroness in what she said, but when you think about it a little more, you realise that if we legislated in the way she asks for we would almost certainly be behind the game again. It is better that we leave things as they are drafted in the Bill so that we can take action much more easily in those circumstances when we see what is happening.

We cannot go back and undo those mistakes made at the very beginning because most people thought that they were toys. I remember that I in particular warned against the dangers of them being used, for example, as weapons launched at this building from a boat going up or down the river outside this place on to the Terraces, where people sit outside. That danger is still there. We need, all the time, to make sure that our powers are as flexible as possible—in the Bill now, I believe that they are—to deal with those threats as they arise.