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

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Harper

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Harper

Monday 8th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

T4. Does my right hon. Friend agree that as unemployment continues to fall, we have a golden opportunity to offer work to those with a learning or physical disability? Will he confirm that programmes such as Work Choice and Access to Work and the work of his Department’s disability employment advisers will continue to have top priority, so that we can make yet further progress?

[The Minister for Disabled People (Mr Mark Harper)]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. In fact, the latest labour market statistics show that disabled people are sharing in the jobs that are being created, with more than 258,000 more disabled people in work over the last year, including 75,000 in the south-east, which will cover his constituency, and there are particularly sharp rises in the number of those with learning disabilities getting jobs, which he specifically asked about.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Harper

Monday 13th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

Well, I think I hear my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House saying that in principle that is what we intend to do.

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)]

indicated assent.

[Mr Harper]

And I know my right hon. Friend always means what he says.

The Bill’s key principle is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is giving up the power to seek the Dissolution of the House. Previous Prime Ministers have exercised that power for their own party advantage. That principle of having fixed-term Parliaments was welcomed by the Chairman of the Select Committee and by the right hon. Member for Blackburn, who speaks for the Opposition; indeed it was in his party’s manifesto.

At this point, I should just add to the comments of the Deputy Prime Minister last week and the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood today. I will miss the contributions from the Front Bench of the right hon. Member for Blackburn. He and I have sparred in this Chamber a number of times, and I have always listened carefully to the guidance he has given me on how to deal with the House. I hope Members feel I have learned something from him. I leave it up to others to decide whether what I have learned is, as the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) said, low cunning or whether I have some way to go in that regard. I should say that I thought the right hon. Gentleman dealt very well with the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell) about what happened in 1950 and how that could perfectly well have been dealt with by our Bill. The expert way in which the right hon. Gentleman did that showed that he is secretly quite supportive of the Bill.