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

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been a Back-Bencher for two years, and in that period I have rather assumed that I bored enough people during the previous 14 years, so I have not been making too many speeches. I have a Select Committee and I do my duty there, and most important of all, I vote as my Whip instructs me. However, it was put to me when this Bill came up that, given my background, I had better participate, so the real reason I am speaking now is, frankly, just to say that I am going to participate.

I will give just a little information on my background. I spent 22 years in civil aviation. I spent about eight years as a pilot—not a captain, I am afraid, but a mere co-pilot; status matters in that industry. I spent 16 years as a manager, and very early on in my career I spent three years as a pilot shop steward. Since I spent the rest of my career in one management role or another, it was fascinating to listen to managers talking about strikes, and to recognise that they did not have the faintest idea how trade unions work and the emotions involved in making decisions. But enough of that. That was a fun career.

I have read the Bill and the notes from cover to cover, and frankly, I think it is a pretty good Bill. Generally speaking, I will be supporting it, and perhaps in places defending it. I received a briefing from my old trade union, BALPA, and three points stood out which I intend to explore. Unfortunately, however, the noble Lord, Lord Barber, got the same briefing, so I do not have a lot of original things to say. I will also make a point or two about some of the issues the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised in the debate on the King’s Speech.

Flying is relatively straightforward. I am not talking about the disastrous sort of dangerous flying that the noble Baroness, Lady Antrobus—I think it was her; I am not good with names—does. I admire her doing it and am deeply jealous, but, in civil aviation, the flying of the aeroplane is pretty straightforward. This does not mean that it is not fun. Racing down a runway at 200 mph and gently pulling back the control column, persuading 320 tonnes of aeroplane to follow you into the air, has a rather special excitement about it that is matched only by getting the damn thing back on the ground eight hours later.

One thing that has not come up in this debate is that flying is dangerous. It is very dangerous, for a series of reasons. Perhaps the single most significant one is that you do not have little accidents in aviation. When they happen, they are very significant. We have not had any in the UK for several years, but, in the rest of the world, things have not been going well. Aeroplanes have been crashing.

It is important to understand why flying is dangerous. It is not about getting the aeroplane into the air or getting it back on to the ground in those final few feet; it is about all the other things that get in the way. One of the most important hazards is the weather. Way back, I was a private pilot. That is great fun but, if the weather is bad, the key skill of a private pilot is deciding not to fly. In civil aviation, you want to fly right up to the edge of what is possible. You want to fly when there are thunderstorms, when there is fog and when there are gale force winds. But there are other aircraft, and those aircraft have lots of people in them. You have to not fly into them.

Then there are technical problems. It is no good saying, “They’re all right now”. They are all right only because of the considerable efforts that regulators and airlines put into assuring that those technical problems do not become disastrous. There are also communications problems. London has been mentioned. One of the privileges of London is that it is an international centre, but this means that communications are not always that straightforward—and when they go wrong, they can go very wrong.

Lurking in the background is the terrain, especially when you cannot see it at night or when it is covered in fog, in snow and so on. That is the challenge. That is what makes airline operations important, and that is where the pilot comes in. The pilot is in the business of flying these wonderful, modern aeroplanes and coping with all these hazards, which, as we have seen in recent years, all crop up sooner or later.

As my noble friend Lord Barber said, in essence, the three areas that BALPA brought out were: pilot involvement in airspace design; the CAA rules; and the issue of pilot numbers. The first two—airspace design and the pilot rules—must involve pilots and other critical workers, but especially pilots because, without being there, it is almost impossible to appreciate not only each problem individually but how they crowd together. Accidents happen usually—almost exclusively, I would say—when two or three of the issues come together; then a lot of people die. So it is crucial that workers, particularly pilots, are involved in a consultative fashion in airspace design and in the whole issue of the rules so that the redesigned airspace and the rules are workable and acceptable.

BALPA also raised the issue of the pilot workforce, which has been pretty chaotic ever since the Second World War. Broadly speaking, in the early part of that period, the Royal Air Force produced pilots. For many years, the Royal Air Force was a pilot-rich environment. Of course, there are fewer and fewer pilots in the Royal Air Force now, but there are more and more technologies. We are talking about fighter aeroplanes and jet fighters, which carry a swarm of drones with them. Twenty years ago, they tried to carry a swarm of aeroplanes with them, but no longer. It is about single people, and fewer pilots are being produced. When BEA and BOAC had a monopoly, they saw that coming. It was their job to create pilots, and they did so. I was a product of that creation. It all happened in a place called Hamble, and then in larger places.

Then came the issue of who should pay. I was lucky in my university career. We had to pay a mere £1,000. In retrospect, that does not sound like a large amount of money but, if you apply inflation, it is around £27,000. More recently, though, individuals have had to pay. The real cost of achieving the qualification that will make a pilot employable by an airline is £115,000-plus, and there is no scheme of loans. Whatever you think of the student loan scheme, at least it is there and is automatically available. Frankly, if you wanted to become a pilot in recent decades, it was a good idea to be born to an affluent family. More recently, I have to commend my old employer, which has at long last gone back to training its own pilots.

I want to pick up the issue of secondary legislation. Concern has been expressed that there will not be enough parliamentary involvement once the Bill has been passed. I have seen the other side of that, I am afraid. For 14 years, I was Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition’s odd-job Front-Bench Peer. I used to pick up transport, defence, Treasury matters, and so on. You would batter away at Bills, and the one thing you went for was, “Let’s get some more affirmative orders. Let’s get the Government to come back and get involved in this piece of legislation”. Over and again, I was punished for that. I would end up in the Moses Room with three other Peers: the Government Minister, the Government Minister’s sidekick, and a Lib Dem. Is that really involvement by Parliament?

The problem with our secondary legislation processes is that, in the Commons, the Government always have a majority, but, in this House, there is a constitutional crisis when we vote down an affirmative resolution. It is much more important to get the involvement of the people who know what they are talking about—the trade unions, the owners, the operators, and so on—as well as, of course, customer representation, especially in the important area of disability.

I will be looking out, as this develops, to see that we use secondary legislation, affirmative secondary legislation in particular, only where it will add real value, because I have to tell noble Lords that, in my 14 years of experience—including 40 or 50 appearances in the Moses Room in a year when we were going through Brexit—secondary legislation adds no significant value. We must look for a much wider view of how to input things and have checks and balances.

I hope that we have a good time working through this Bill. I hope that we do not spend too much time on it, going late into the night. The Bill in general is sound. I hope that we fine-tune it, rather than ruin it with unnecessary amendments.

Open Access Rail Services

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has a good point. The regulator necessarily needs to give a successful open access application sufficient time to recover the significant costs of rolling stock. Many of these arrangements run for at least 10 years, and it would not be right to curtail those activities. Serious investment has been carried out to allow them. What happens in the future we can debate during the passage of the railways Bill, but for the moment those open access operations that have 10-year or similar periodicity will continue.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I spent 32 years of my career working in the public sector and came to understand that the objective was the needs of the customer, value for the taxpayer, protection of the environment and having regard for society in general. Open access, on the other hand, tends to create conflict, encourages gaming the regulator and inhibits evolutionary change. Will the Minister exercise extreme caution when considering open access bids?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I listened to my noble friend with care and respect because he has significant prior experience in running railways. He is right that we should be careful, because we are dealing with only 1% of the passengers and the rest of the network has 99%. We should be careful to allow people to innovate where innovation is a good thing and where there is space for it. We should not allow innovation where it is not a good thing, costs taxpayers money and cannot be accommodated on a very constrained network.

Great British Railways

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for tabling this debate. Much of his involvement took place in the mid-1990s. At that time, he was my ultimate boss, and I became the ultimate student of this operation, in which, on the basis of the somewhat bizarre writing of an excellent letter, we could have been involved as well.

My simple answer to the Question is that open access should be phased out as quickly as reasonably practical. It is a bit of a shock to be informed that I am agreeing with the RMT on that matter. Rail privatisation was a product of the political doctrine of the day: that private ownership and competition would solve all our problems. My personal view is that privatisation as a generality has failed. Rail privatisation has failed, at best, bizarrely, and, at worst, disastrously. The bizarre part of it comes from the track being given to Railtrack, which is a sort of private sector company which went broke and then turned into Network Rail, which is a pretend independent company that was nationalised not by the Government of the day but by the ONS, which said that so much of it was tied-up with the Government that it was really a nationalised company. It dumped £34 billion on the national debt, which virtually nobody seemed to notice.

There was little pure competition in the railway throughout this process; open access was the closest, and was therefore pursued. There was some slack in the system and some open access operations emerged. It is my view that they undoubtedly cost the taxpayer money and that there was not much benefit. In future, they will inhibit total system optimisation.

Any operator of open access will need long-term stability of their rights, whereas the great thing about Great British Railways is that it will eliminate all the conflict in optimising the railway. There will be a single guiding mind. The only disputes in future are likely to involve open access operators, since they will be the sole source of external commercial pressure. This will absorb a disproportionate amount of management effort. The only case for open access is doctrine, and it is a doctrine I do not share.