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

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as I was chair of the Aviation Accessibility Task and Finish Group, which published a report last year. I thank the officials at the Department for Transport for their support. The vast majority of the recommendations from that report are now amendments to the Bill. As of today, I have been appointed a board member of Active Travel England, and I also chair the Accessible Transport Policy Commission. We had a useful meeting this morning which looked in a UK context at disabled people’s experience of travelling. I understand that aviation is more complicated than that. The sheer difficulty that disabled people have in using any form of transport came out clearly in the meeting. I make reference to the Transport Select Committee’s report, Access Denied: Rights Versus Reality.

We have probably a once-in-a-generation chance to make a difference to how disabled people are able to access this industry. Since Second Reading, I have had a much-increased number of emails from disabled people who have had truly dreadful experiences of flying, and some of those will be picked up in the next group.

I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 2 and 16, which are in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. They simply ask that we change “may make provision” to “must make provision”. “May” is too vague in this context, so we have a chance to make a change. The Minister will know from other debates that we have had around disability access, such as the debates around taxis, that it is hard enough when we are trying to enact accessibility legislation that was passed 30 years ago, let alone what we are trying to do now. There have been a lot of promises about what disabled people might have the opportunity to rely on. Unless we have a much bigger commitment to “must make provision”, it feels like we will be kicking the can down the road, as we have done with the rail industry and all the derogations around it.

I am more than happy to discuss a tighter range of regulations that the Secretary of State may make or to work across your Lordships’ Chamber. I am simply looking for assurance that there will be a genuine shift in how disabled people will experience air travel. Both this group and the next have a number of important amendments that both seek to strengthen the Bill and to provide more clarity for disabled people. For them, currently and so far, the experience is far too ad hoc. I beg to move.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 109 in my name aims to remedy a manifest injustice whereby the airlines have to pay for customer compensation when the fault lies not with them but with NATS. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Kirkhope, who trailed this amendment in his Second Reading speech, but, in the time available, the Minister was not able to address it.

The problem manifested itself on 28 August 2023, when the air traffic system, managed by NATS, failed. An independent review was set up and its report gives the scale of the debacle:

“From CAA estimates, over 700,000 passengers were affected by cancellations and delays ascribed to the incident, including approximately 300,000 impacted by flight cancellations, approximately 95,000 by long delays (over three hours) and at least a further 300,000 by shorter delays”.


It went on to say that

“the incident on 28 August had substantial negative impacts on a large number of passengers, not only on the day of the outage but for several days afterwards, as it took until the following weekend for all the re-routed journeys to be completed”.

The review estimated the costs involved:

“Based on the information provided by the airlines most affected by the incident, the Panel has estimated that the costs to airlines were approximately £65m. In addition, substantial costs were incurred by passengers, airports, tour operators, insurers, and others. The Panel was unable to accurately quantify these costs. It is likely that the total cost was in the region of £75m to £100m”.


Finally, it said about passengers:

“Many passengers incurred costs which they could not recover, for example, the loss of pre-paid holidays, lost income from work to which passengers were not able to return, and other consequential losses. The total costs of this large group would be very difficult to calculate but is likely to have been many millions of pounds”.


However, when one reads the NATS annual report for that year, it puts a slightly different spin on the incident:

“A technical flight handling system issue in August necessitated a considerable reduction in flight capacity for a short period in order to ensure the skies remained safe”.


Noble Lords would expect that the guilty party, NATS, rather than the innocent parties, principally the airlines, would have to bear the costs—not a bit of it. The only cost to NATS was £1.8 million. In the words of the review, that was a

“relatively modest penalty associated with not meeting some of its performance … targets”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

Will my noble friend allow me to help him a little? He may have heard of a company called Network Rail, which, if my memory serves me correctly, must pay compensation to train operators if it goes through the kinds of failing that he has identified. Were he to know anybody who used to chair Network Rail, he might have an interesting point to make.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My noble friend is a mind-reader; I was going to refer to Network Rail in about 40 seconds. As I said, as far as NERL’s ownership is concerned, it is different, but that should not preclude it having to pay up for claims.

The review then produced another pretext, which, again, does not stand up to scrutiny. This is what it said:

“Such a liability would probably lead to a substantial increase in the annual costs of the ATC”—


air traffic control—

“service, which could in turn lead to increased costs to airlines and passengers”.

What happens at the moment? The compensation liability rests with the airlines and, as such, it has already caused increased costs to passengers. If the airlines did not have the liability their costs would go down, but if NATS then passed back all the increased costs we would be back where we started. Crucially, that assumes that the regulator, the CAA, would allow the costs to be passed on by NATS to customers, instead of taking it out of profits. If, as happens with the water companies, costs were not passed on to consumers but funded out of profits then costs to the airlines and passengers would actually go down, not up—the opposite of what the review suggested.

I come to my noble friend’s intervention. The Minister will understand and, I hope, sympathise with the case I am making because of his previous responsibility for Network Rail. If, as my noble friend said, a passenger is delayed, the train operator pays the compensation. If Network Rail was responsible for the delay, it then reimburses the train operator. That is as it should be, and it is exactly what should happen in air transport. A failure in traffic control is paid for by the traffic controller. My amendment is supported by IATA, which actually wants to go further. It would like the amendment to be extended to airports and other parties that provide air services that can cause disruption yet are not liable for passenger compensation. Airlines currently pay all passenger compensation regardless of who is at fault—for example, the power failure at Heathrow last year.

To sum up and use management jargon, we need shared accountability across the value chain. I hope the Minister can respond positively to the case I have made and put right this manifest injustice.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 9, which seeks to strengthen the consumer protection provisions at the heart of the Bill. This amendment would insert two paragraphs into Clause 1. We believe that both are desirable and necessary if this legislation is to deliver meaningful change for the travelling public. The first would add the requirement for

“standardised, comparable information at the point of sale”.

Anyone who has purchased an airline ticket recently will be familiar with the booking experience. I will not go through all the painful detail but suffice to say that, by the time you come to the payment page, the fee you are charged bears little resemblance to the one that first encouraged you to make the booking.

That is not an accident; it is intentional. It is a business model that has moved, frankly, from the sublime to the ridiculous. For example, at the moment, the CMA is investigating Ryanair’s mandatory charge of £8 each way for the privilege of sitting with your own children. It is a business model that harms consumers, distorts competition and corrodes trust in the aviation sector. Airlines that compete fairly on total price are undercut by those which strip out every possible cost, just to put them back in. We do not tolerate these practices in other markets—imagine for one moment that the same situation was in place when you were doing your online grocery shopping. It means that consumers cannot make rational or informed choices. Again, that is the intention. Families on modest budgets find themselves paying significantly more than they had intended to.

My amendment would address this directly by requiring airlines and all ticket sellers—I emphasise all ticket sellers, whether the airlines themselves, online travel agents or price comparison websites—to display the total price up front, including all fees, taxes and unavoidable charges. We believe this is not a radical proposition. It is not difficult for the airlines, if they are selling direct to consumers, or their agents to comply with. Most consumers reasonably believe that this is the case already, so this amendment aims to make it so.

The second element of the amendment concerns passenger rights. When a flight is delayed or cancelled, or a passenger is denied boarding, they are entitled to certain protections, and rightly so. But the evidence consistently shows that a significant portion of affected passengers do not know what those rights are and that airlines do not always volunteer that information. My amendment would require this information about passenger rights in disruption scenarios to be provided clearly at the point of sale, not buried deep in terms and conditions in the small print, and accessible only to those who know how to look for it.

Thirdly, the information element concerns environmental impact. Consumers are increasingly seeking to make informed choices consistent with their values. Aviation, as we know, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. While the sector as a whole must decarbonise, individuals, too, wish to understand the environmental impact of their individual journeys. Standardised carbon footprint information at the point of sale would enable informed choices. It would also in time, we hope, drive competition on environmental performance, an outcome that we argue would drive consumer-led carbon-reduction measures.

The second part of the amendment includes mandatory minimum compensation standards and, critically, automated payment mechanisms for flight delays, cancellations and denied boarding. The right to compensation for significant disruption already exists in law. Yet, year after year, consumer bodies and passengers find that it is not happening. They are waiting long times and often having to go to court and take legal action. That is an unacceptable situation.

The solution that I have proposed is an automation system to make sure that, where delays happen, there is an automatic payment so that you do not have to go through a complicated process to do it. The airlines have all this information. They know who is on their planes, they know who is not, they know when they are delayed and they know when compensation needs to be paid. We do not believe that this requirement would be too onerous on the airlines. It would simply make it a more efficient, fair and effective system.

We welcome this Bill. We recognise the consumer protections, but we feel that they need to have real bite. That is what my amendments seek to do. Our worry is that, if we do not put stronger protections in the Bill, we will simply have gestures towards consumer rights without actually putting them in statute. With the inclusion of these amendments, we would take concrete steps to make sure that we are acting in the passengers’ best interests in making these systems fairer and more efficient.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I wanted to let all the Members who had amendments speak first, notwithstanding the Front Benches. I just wanted to touch on one amendment where I think I can add some level of knowledge. I agree completely with my noble friend Lord Moylan about the way in which my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham set out his case with some charm and tenaciousness. However, I am afraid to say that I do not agree with the ineluctable logic. Let me just share with the Committee why.

I was in post when NATS had its failure and I will always remember getting that phone call telling me that something terrible had happened, with potentially millions of people whose holidays were going to get messed up. You pay a great deal of attention in that situation. I spent quite a lot of my time over that short period engaging with the aviation sector and ensuring that NATS, the airlines, the airports and everybody else worked incredibly closely together at pace to make sure that passengers had the least terrible experience possible in the circumstances.

Once the initial events had taken place and we had got everybody back to where they should have been, we considered—or I considered, as the then Secretary of State—exactly the point that my noble friend set out, about whether we ought to change the legislative regime around compensation. Superficially, there is a case for doing so, but let me deal with the reason why we decided not to.

The first point is that, if you look at the ownership structure of NATS, which I do not think that my noble friend touched on, almost half the business—49%—is owned by the Government or, in other words, the taxpayer. Some 42% is owned by a group of major airlines, 5% is owned by the staff through a trust and 4% by the company that owns Heathrow Airport. The conclusion that I came to was that, if you were to change the position so that NATS was responsible for paying compensation, almost half the bill would land on the taxpayer, just over 40% of it would effectively end up on a different group of airlines—not necessarily all the ones hit by it—and a little bit would effectively land on the staff. The conclusion that I reached was that that did not really get you to a significantly better place than the current position, accepting that the current position is suboptimal.

What made me think was that my noble friend set out the position with Network Rail, which is and has for a long time been completely owned by the taxpayer. There is a question about whether there is a purpose in doing that. The conclusion that we reached, and the present Government’s conclusion, is that we are not sure that the regime whereby Network Rail has to pay money to train operating companies is an effective lever in driving up standards. The conclusion that we reached, which the current Government are following through on and which we will be debating in due course through the Railways Bill, is that the way you get more effective working between the train operating companies and Network Rail is by bringing them together in what will be GBR. I am not sure, therefore, that getting the taxpayer to pay a chunk of money to airlines is the right way in which to deliver what we actually want, which is to stop these sorts of outages and disruptions happening in the first place.

NATS is a regulated business, so it has quite considerable constraints on how it acts, and the Government have a considerable say in how it operates because of that 49% stake and the Government’s role in nominating a number of members of the NATS board. Certainly, when the outage happened, I had a considerable say in putting pressure on the management of the company and appointing the person who conducted the review, effectively ensuring that the company took steps to make sure that that particular circumstance could not happen again.

I understand the case that my noble friend has made. I considered it at the time, but we did not think that moving from the status quo to that position was particularly compelling. I do not think that I have changed my mind on that, but of course I will happily take a question on it.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

I thank my noble friend, who may have saved the Minister a bit of trouble. I will make just two points. First, as my noble friend said, the airlines are one of the major shareholders. The airlines support this amendment. I have a letter from IATA and I have seen correspondence from British Airways; they believe that this change should be made. The second point my noble friend made, which I have real difficulty with, is that the taxpayer picks up the tab when an organisation owned by the taxpayer makes a mistake. Look at the National Health Service, for example. What is happening here is that, where the taxpayer is on the hook, the Government have decided to penalise an innocent party, namely the shareholders of the airlines. As a Conservative, I cannot see how my noble friend began to defend that when he was Secretary of State. Had the incident happened 20 years earlier, when I was Secretary of State, I would have come to a different decision.