Heathrow Airport Expansion

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

As the noble Baroness knows, recording carbon emissions is challenging, because they cannot all be attributed to a single country. There is a global agreement on the way in which they are usually reported. The noble Baroness also knows that there is headroom in our carbon budgets that is informally allocated to aviation.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the Supreme Court did not give the go-ahead for a third runway, as was reported in some parts of the press. All it decided was that the Minister under a previous Government, Chris Grayling, did not act unlawfully in failing to take into account expressly the international obligations of the Paris Agreement, which were not declared as domestic policy at that time. Will this Government simply rescind the Grayling decision and uphold the Paris Agreement by incorporating those obligations into domestic policy?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The noble Lord is quite right that the Supreme Court did not give the go-ahead to anything; it simply ruled that the ANPS is lawful. What is the case is that expansion, if Heathrow Airport Ltd decides to do it, would move to the next step, which is the development consent order—that is, the planning approval that would need to happen, which itself is a fairly lengthy process.