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

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his comments on my Amendment 61. I will speak to it only briefly, because it is pretty self-explanatory.

The legislation rightly gives some power to the Government to intervene and, in effect, act as arbiter when it comes to airspace redesign. Airspace redesign has taken much too long. It started when I was Secretary of State and now, nearly eight years later, we are still not close to bringing it to fruition, yet it is fundamental to the future of the aviation sector in this country. It will unlock extra capacity and use next-generation technology to enable us to provide more respite to communities that are affected by aircraft noise, even though the level of aircraft noise, in the world in which we live, has dropped enormously over the past generation.

The Government rightly believe that they need some degree of arbiter powers in this, but I do not think that they should have those powers just to say, “Right, that’s the decision”. There is an obligation there—nothing at great length, because we know that government consultations can last for ever, take months to be responded to and all the rest, but with a simple process saying, “Look, that’s what we’re going to do. Is there anything we haven’t thought of? Is there something we’re not quite getting right here?” I say to the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that the wording of the amendment is what it is, but I would expect pilots’ organisations, air traffic organisations and all the rest to be able to input a view on this point.

I would see this as being not an isolated consultation but a standard government consultation—a short, snappy one—simply so that the organisations and communities that have a vested interest can come forward and say, “There’s something you haven’t thought of. This is going to have an adverse effect that you haven’t thought about. You really shouldn’t be taking this decision”. It would be improper for that process not to exist where the Government have what is, in effect, a pretty absolute power of direction under the legislation as it is at the moment. I very much hope that the Minister will take that on board and perhaps look to include something of this kind on Report.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 60 to 62; I express a specific concern in my Amendment 62. I thought that I knew about the technology in this debate until I decided to brush up on it yesterday; I have spent most of my working hours since then getting up to date, to some extent.

The essence of the technology, which would allow a much more holistic review of airspace use, is that it is dependent not on aids on the ground but on global positioning systems. That gives great benefits, in terms of what it does for aviation, but I put it to the Committee that it also gives great benefits to those who are concerned about the environmental impact. If your route does not fit with that bit of society and there is a route that can fit with that bit of society, then, with the overarching technology, it can be changed. Up to this point, changing where aeroplanes go close to the ground has been totally dominated by the ground-based aids that they use to land.

The essence of my amendment—as an ex-BALPA shop steward, I thought that I had better represent my old team—is to get pilots involved in this consultation. They are going to face dramatic differences. One of the first things that I would say relates to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made the other day, which is that the planes can fly themselves. Normally, you have to drag the plane into the air then tell it to fly itself, and, when you get to the end, you actually have to make a few decisions. It is a very good theory; hopefully, when you press “flight nav” or something like that, that will happen.

The problem facing the modern pilot is that one of their most important tasks is to cope when there are system failures. There will be system failures. There are no big computer systems in the world that do not have system failures, as we all know to our cost. The problem is that the level of knowledge needed by the operative to cope with a system failure is very large but it is not often practised. It will, I am sure, follow the pilot’s standard of continuous checking. I have never flown an airplane with its engine on fire, but, when I was an airline pilot, I flew a plane with its engine on fire many times in a simulator. It was dramatic and great fun, but the whole essence here is that the systems delivering this will intrinsically and inevitably have failure modes early on. The crew are there to look after that, among all the other safety issues that they have to care about.

All the literature on the impact on pilots of a very different system says that it will require if not an almost completely new licence then certainly a substantial licence endorsement to equip pilots to look after these systems. How can their views and their wisdom be taken into account? They are the only people who can envisage the situation, together with a very dramatic change in standards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have a lot of amendments in this group, but I assure noble Lords that a number of them are duplicative, because they seek to replace “document” with “guidance” wherever it appears in the clause. None the less, it will take me a moment to go through my amendments.

We are dealing here with the CAA’s rule-making powers. It is worth reminding noble Lords that the first part of the Bill is about consumer protection and the CAA’s role as the direct enforcer of consumer protection powers. This is a very different part of the Bill. It is about making rules. It gives the CAA huge, unprecedented powers to make rules, including ones that may have criminal penalties, and it does so with practically no supervision—certainly not by Parliament and, as far as I can make out, very little by the Minister either. That is what these amendments are intended to deal with.

The first one probes why it is necessary for the Civil Aviation Authority to have rule-making powers at all. Until recently, the rules it made emanated from the European Union; in fact, they often came through from the ICAO, trickling down in that fashion. But, for all their faults, regulations made by the European Union were not made in secret. One could see what was happening. We had, here in your Lordships’ House, a committee that reviewed regulations and statutory instruments relating to European Union legislation.

All these rules were made under air navigation orders, which are a form of statutory instrument—again, it is a parliamentary process. In future, neither will apply. There will be no scrutiny whatever. But, since these rules have been made by statutory instrument and similar in the past, a question arises: why should they not be made in that fashion in the future?

The Minister said—or I may have read this somewhere in some of the supporting documentation—that there is a backlog of 100 or so of these that have to be got through, and that using parliamentary time for this purpose is not appropriate. It is disturbing to think that there is a backlog, but that is not an excuse in itself. After all, we are all being made to sit here in Grand Committee for five hours rather than four, and for three hours on a Tuesday morning. There is no lack of parliamentary time for considering statutory instruments. We are all being held to the last, and we work very hard. There is no excuse that there is no room for them when the Chamber is full of debates on subjects such as tackling child poverty, rather than legislating, which is what it should be doing while we are in here. We will carry on in here; we will do the statutory instruments and put the time in, so there is no problem there.

At an earlier stage—I cannot remember whether it was on our first day in Committee or at Second Reading—the Minister said he had a trump card. He said that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee thought that it was appropriate for this regulator-led rule-making approach to be adopted. But he did not read the next sentence:

“Inherent in the proposition is that CAA made rules would be highly technical in nature”.


But this Bill does not limit the CAA to making rules that are highly technical in nature. It does not limit it simply to implementing ICAO powers.

In fact, this has caused concern to another committee of your Lordships’ House: the Constitution Committee. The chairman of that committee, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, has written to the Minister saying among other things that:

“This Bill strengthens the secondary law-making and rule-making powers of both the Civil Aviation Authority and the Secretary of State”


and that this

“will, by the nature of negative parliamentary approval of secondary legislation, be subject to minimal parliamentary oversight. We are concerned that this will result in a scrutiny gap”.

We will wait to hear, but so far the Minister has had no answer to that.

So my first question is: why should we make such a dramatic change at all? Secondly, if there is going to be a rule-making power of this character, the Secretary of State should publish the underlying principles. It is not all given to the Secretary of State: it is for the Secretary of State, following the enactment of this Bill, to decide which rule-making powers are given over. There is no limit in the Bill on what those powers are. The second amendment, Amendment 77, would require at least a statement of principles, in advance of enactment of the Bill, as to what basis the Secretary of State is going to use for deciding which powers should be transferred over into this new process. Amendment 79 would require consultation by the Civil Aviation Authority when making rules. There is no requirement for consultation in the Bill.

Amendment 81 in my name probes why the Secretary of State’s priorities and objectives statement is described as a “document” rather than “guidance”. As I said at Second Reading, this is the oddest part of the Bill. It says that the Secretary of State is allowed to issue a document that gives guidance to the CAA on what the Government’s priorities are in relation to rule-making. The word “document” is used and the word “guidance” is avoided. I fear that that is a deliberate choice. The word “guidance” has a legal weight to it; we understand what guidance is in relation to the action of public bodies and how they are bound to it, but we do not understand what obligation a public body has to pay attention to a document issued by the Secretary of State. Does it have the weight of guidance? What weight does it have? I am trying to replace it with the word “guidance” so that we have clarity.

Then we come down to this further point: the Bill prohibits the Secretary of State from issuing this “document”, which I would change to “guidance”, without the agreement of the Civil Aviation Authority. This is truly remarkable. I do not think that I have ever come across an example where a regulated body acting on behalf of the Secretary of State can refuse to accept the document or guidance that the Secretary of State is going to issue. I raised the point at Second Reading, and the Minister made no defence, although no doubt he is better prepared now—but what could it possibly be, and how could your Lordships possibly agree to such a thing?

There are other matters here. For example, on Amendment 98. The Bill states that the Civil Aviation Authority “may” publish a consolidated set of rules so that people can look at them. That is a good idea, but it would be a better idea if the Bill said that it “must” publish a set of consolidated rules. How could this be left to the discretion of the Civil Aviation Authority? Then the Bill has the cheek to say that anybody who is so impertinent as to ask for a printed copy of that set of rules can be charged a fee, with no limit placed on the fee or on how that might be used. My amendment would take away the fee.

This whole section gives new and unprecedented powers. There is no justification given for them and it is very difficult to understand why the Government would want to do this. I have respect for the Civil Aviation Authority because, as a safety regulator, it is of the highest quality. It is in the box of good regulators; there are bad regulators, but the CAA is not a bad regulator. I do not like to say something disobliging about the CAA, but it seems that this Bill has been written as an enormous power grab by the Civil Aviation Authority. It muscled its way into the digital markets Act in relation to consumer protection, and now it is taking over a whole swathe of rule-making powers. I just remind the Minister that, when we voted for Brexit, one thing we voted for was that rules should not be made by unelected bureaucrats. This Bill moves from a system where there is some scrutiny and understanding of the process and some parliamentary scrutiny of how these rules are made, to one where they are all being made by unelected bureaucrats, without supervision. It is a retrograde step, and not one that we should support. I beg to move.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 78 in this group. I shall only say a few words, and I suppose the very few words I could say are that, if we are to get new powers that may affect pilots, we wish to be consulted. In many ways, it is as simple as that. Hopefully, the Minister can give us a better feel for what this piece of legislation will be used for. I find myself almost agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. If we are to have powers where we are not clear what they will be used for and what their extent will be, there are two sensible outcomes: either you do not bother with the powers, or you have an appropriate set of checks and balances to make sure that the powers are sensible.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Moylan has done the Committee a service by bringing to our attention some of the conflicts within the Bill in terms of rule and regulation-making powers. I should add that I am a member of the Delegated Powers Committee. I have previously been a member of the Delegated Powers Committee, but I was not a member at the time that its report on this Bill was made, for reasons that I explained on Tuesday—I was not a Member of the House at the time.

This a highly complex subject and complex field, and it is very easy to get tangled up in it. Some of the principles that my noble friend has elucidated are extremely valid. The other point is that one perhaps needs to be careful what one wishes for, because I could see hundreds of very technical regulations—technical in the technological sense of the term—coming before your Lordships’ House for scrutiny. None the less, my noble friend has made the particular point around the Government choosing which regulatory process to utilise, and I think there are some real difficulties in that.