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

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

Obviously, you know that, if you are working in an aircraft, you are exposed to higher levels of radiation. That is inevitable, because you are further above the ground, and that is something that airlines are very conscious of. While there have been celebrated incidents where obvious ingress and fear of fire was experienced in an aircraft, the question is what exactly we are doing, what the regime is, how resilient that regime is and whether it really protects the passengers and the people who work in the airline industry. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

I declare that I am president of the CO Research Trust and a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. The Minister has already referred to our report. I am also one of those people who responds when there is a call for a doctor on a flight, and some of my experiences lead to my support for Amendment 36 —in particular, two aspects of it.

I shall deal with my Amendment 14 first. It aims to address potentially toxic dangers sneaking into the air that we breathe, as has already been mentioned. We must have an unconditional duty to protect human life. The silent threat has mostly been ignored; that is the risk of a plane’s cabin air containing contamination by carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. Carbon monoxide is colourless and has no smell, yet it is highly and rapidly toxic.

In much of the commercial fleet, pressurised air for the cabin and other parts of the plane must be kept frost-free, and that air comes directly from the engine compressors. It is called bleed air. When engine seals are broken or even have a micro-crack, synthetic oils and hydraulic fluid leak into this air flow. When subject to extreme temperatures, the fluids become neurotoxins, which are then inhaled, and that constitutes a cabin fume event. The neurological and respiratory symptoms are often short-lived and fade, but they can be far-reaching. They include things such as dizziness, headache, muzzy thinking and even shortness of breath and nausea—but, very occasionally, it may lead on to much more serious issues. Carbon monoxide binds to haemoglobin, which it does much more quickly than oxygen, so in effect it suffocates our vital organs.

Even at low levels of exposure, passengers can feel unwell, but for the pilots in charge of the plane, hypoxia is potentially a threat to aviation safety, nationally and internationally. Filters exist, such as the HEPA filters, which can block around 99.97% particles, including viruses, but they are useless against gases, which just flow through them.

In 2007, the Committee on Toxicity examined several reports on cabin air sampling on a selection of normal flights, showing very low levels of contaminants. It concluded that cabin air quality globally conforms with standards. However, it stated that

“uncertainties remain, and a toxic mechanism for symptoms cannot confidently be ruled out”.

A 2017 study by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency pointed out that

“there is no contaminant-free indoor environment. The aircraft cabin is no exception. However, due to the exceptional high air exchange rates in aircraft, the cabin air has been proven to be less polluted compared to normal indoor environments”.

So far, so good. The 2018 guidance on cabin fumes from the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations states:

“When a fume event occurs, cabin air contamination can cause short-term physical effects which may compromise flight safety. Sufficient scientific concern exists requiring more studies in order to determine any short and long-term effects of fume exposures”.


It is worth noting that the Civil Aviation Authority does not officially recognise aerotoxic syndrome, but Unite the Union and other unions are pursuing legal action over airlines’ duty of care and campaigners have called for an independent inquiry. Fume events are indeed rare, affecting only about one in 10,000 flights. Newer aircraft designs, such as the Boeing 787, utilise bleed-free technology, which draws air directly from outside rather than through the engine turbines. However, these planes represent only around 1,175 planes of the approximate 30,000 commercial aircraft in service. Most aircraft pre-date or did not incorporate that design.

The reality of our skies is interesting. Heathrow registers about 1,300 flights a day and Gatwick over 700—let us round that to around 2,000 flights a day. Mathematically, if one fume event occurs every 10,000 flights, the risk is about one a week over London, ranging from very minor to potentially serious. Currently, we rely on the human sense of smell to detect a fume event, and crew report the typical smell of dirty socks or burnt oil. However, the human nose cannot detect carbon monoxide, which is what caused the tragic crash of the Piper Malibu that killed Emiliano Sala.

In 2025, the CAA mandated that certain small piston engine light aircraft carrying passengers must monitor carbon monoxide. This leads to my amendment. If monitoring is vital for the protection of the users of small light tourism aircraft, on what grounds do we fail to offer the same protection, and de facto guarantee of safety, to hundreds of passengers confined in a commercial airliner? The technology already exists. Airbus is collaborating with the Fraunhofer Society to develop mass spectrometry systems capable of pinpointing the source of these pollutants with extreme precision. Our legislation should mandate every air transport service provider to install, maintain and operate continuous active monitoring systems for carbon monoxide, in particular, and hydrocarbons in the cockpit and passenger cabins.

Notably—I believe this is directly relevant—the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, of which I am a member, gave the view that

“the power in section 61A(7) of the Civil Aviation Act 1982, read with section 61A(1), is inappropriate because its effect is to give the Government unconstrained power to decide which operational and safety aviation rules will be delegated to the CAA and consequently made without Parliamentary process; and to ensure Parliament is properly able to scrutinise the scope of delegation of rulemaking to the CAA: the power … should be amended to make clear the principles underlying the exceptions to delegated rulemaking; and that power should be subject to affirmative procedure”.

I hope that the Government will amend the Bill accordingly. Otherwise, we will have to bring this back on Report.

Very briefly on Amendment 36, there is a risk of deep vein thrombosis in passengers. It can result in a fatal pulmonary embolism. It may well often be linked not only to the passenger’s own propensity to have a blood clot but to whether they are in an inappropriate seat to meet their medical needs and the seat pitch is inappropriate, particularly on very long-haul flights. I have had to look after people on the floor of an aircraft, sometimes for many hours. It is extremely difficult to hear what is going on through a stethoscope, because the engine noise is so great that you cannot hear properly, and trying to take somebody’s blood pressure on the floor of a crowded aircraft is not easy.

The thing that concerns me even more than that is the provision of lavatories. I have had an incident on a long-haul flight of two young people with really catastrophic and probably infectious gastroenteritis, which meant creating a public health measure to seal off one toilet for only them to use and making up rehydration fluids to keep giving them all the way back to Heathrow. It meant that there were not many toilets for other passengers, but I certainly did not want other passengers to use the toilets that these two were using. One problem is that the lavatories in many planes are so small that if anyone needs assistance with toileting, particularly if they have a bowel problem of any sort, including a stoma, it is extremely difficult to be in that toilet cabinet to assist them. Amendment 36 is particularly important.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in Committee on the Bill. As it is my first intervention in Committee, I declare my technology interests as set out in the register, variously as adviser to the Crown Estate, Endava plc, and Simmons & Simmons LLP, and as non-executive director of Avalanche (BVI) Inc and the Avalanche Foundation. It is also a pleasure to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. The whole Committee and everybody should thank her for everything that she has done on flights in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I support everything that she had to say on shortcomings and areas that need to be addressed which, as she clearly pointed out, could be addressed right now.

I also support the amendment from my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson; it must be agreed. I see precious little point in wasting any of the draftsperson’s ink on a “may” provision. “May” is “whenever”. We have seen from other legislation pertaining to disabled people that “may” is a hope that never comes to fruition, so “may” must be converted to “must”.

Similarly, I support the comments of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham—he sounds even better when he is quoting himself from a previous Hansard. It seems extraordinary that the circumstances he sets out have not been addressed. They do not, in any sense, reflect what happens in the rail industry. As a corollary, I ask the Minister: as it works so well in the rail industry, would some systems such as Delay Repay not be a positive addition to the airline sector? Those payments can be rightly collected behind the scenes from the source of the problem, be it NATS or another service provider. Smart contracts could be deployed so that those payments are automatically made when such events occur.

However, there is a situation that we are seeing a creeping illustration of across a number of sectors, including in aviation, as my noble friend Lord Young set out. I will highlight what is happening in the financial services sector around fraud. Banks are on the hook for repayment and reimbursement for certain fraud events, such as push payments, whereas telcos or platforms, where the frauds may originate from, are currently not. I would be interested in the Minister’s comment on the sense that there is an increasing tendency for this, where, in reality, the costs and compensation should fall where the breach occurs. It is a very simple and well-established legal principle. I look forward to the Minister’s response to my noble friend’s excellent intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

This is resolvable and it is not even in the top 100 complex issues in the Department for Transport. All the amendments in this group speak to that potential. Would it not be a phenomenal thing to finally put these principles into a Bill? The detail of the statutory regs, guidance and codes can then flow from that, but it is critical to have the principles in the Bill. That is the only way to have a guarantee for disabled people on the travel experience they not only will receive but have a right to receive. They will be able to have more than reasonable confidence that they will receive it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am absolutely delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who has really put his finger on summarising all these amendments incredibly well. As you go through, you can look at each one as an individual case. Amendment 12 is about vulnerable people and where they are seated. Amendments 3, 6 and 15 are about being separated from medical equipment. Amendment 37 is about having a wheelchair passport. Amendment 45 is about unaccompanied minors and Amendment 48 is about offboarding times being reasonable. I will go back for a second to toilets on that one. It is appalling to leave people unable to get to the toilet after a flight and leave them on the plane for a long time. If they have an accident, what happens? All their clothes are somewhere else and they are left sitting on a wet wheelchair. It is absolutely appalling. I note that, on Amendment 58 and assistance dogs, it is important to remember that they also need to do a wee; it is not just the passengers.

I ask the Minister whether he sees it as possible with this Bill to set a standard that must be complied with if an airline has landing rights at a UK airport? If there is a standard that must be met, it could become very attractive to be using UK airports. It would seem to make commercial sense, and it could then apply everywhere. We have focused on Heathrow, but I live in Cardiff. It is a tiny airport, and we have a small number of flights, but everybody should still be treated with respect. One of those standards would simply be for people to deplane first, rather than last. That would make a big difference to people with a disability. The other passengers could jolly well wait five or ten minutes, having travelled for hours. I worry about the selfishness that sometimes we see displayed.

Also, when it comes to wheelchairs and wheelchair damage, we would not accept a passenger having their leg broken by travelling on a plane. As my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson said, for her and other wheelchair users, their wheels are their legs. Similarly, for people using CPAP, their lungs cannot function without it. We are saying that it is okay to let somebody half-suffocate if they need CPAP, but you would not let somebody else half-suffocate. We have really mixed messages. Could the Minister possibly create a UK-wide standard that everyone with landing rights at UK airports would be required to meet, and, if they are repeatedly in breach of it, they might lose their landing rights? I am interested to know.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee—I was in Yerevan in Armenia monitoring the election for the Council of Europe at Second Reading. This is the only intervention I shall make in Committee. I have done an observation role for the Council of Europe for the last 10 years, and among the airports and countries I have visited are Basel, Malta, Crete, Rome, Athens, Riga, Tbilisi, Frankfurt, Budapest, Monaco, Venice, Ankara, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Gdańsk last year, where I met Lech Wałęsa—he is still going strong—New York, Oslo, Helsinki, Charles de Gaulle, Seville, Sofia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Saint Petersburg—I am banned from Russia now—Monaco, Bulgaria, Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev, before the war. I do not have the authority of noble Lords who have moved their amendments but, by God, I have the experience of 100 check-ins and 50 hours of non-stop hassle.

I support the content of nearly all the amendments in this large grouping, but particularly Amendments 1, 6, 21 and 48. The Minister will say that we do not need any of them, since he has a general power in the Bill to make regulations in Clause 1(2)(e). That is okay as far as it goes, but we need to spell out the areas and aspects of disability on which we need regulations made. We should not leave it to officials in the department at some time in the future to come up with some regulations which may not be a priority for disabled passengers.

Let us take the problems wheelchair users suffer in chronological order. At least 48 hours before we travel, we fill in the airline forms about the chair—its weight, dimensions and battery type. Airline forms are all different and some misdescribe the type of battery, and ask if there is an open cell one, which was abolished about 20 years ago. We tell them whether we can walk a little bit and whether we need a chair down the aisle or can manage a few steps. British Airways are quite good with its forms. That is all good stuff, but I can tell this Committee with absolute honesty that at every single check-in I have done, not one word of what we fed into that computer is on the check-in computer. All the information they have is that the passenger will have a wheelchair, and the only training they seem to have is to ask about lithium batteries. Airlines are right to be paranoid about lithium batteries, which must never be put in the hold. Every time I check in, the check-in person says to me, with a look of panic, “Are they lithium batteries?” I say, “No, they’re sealed, non-spillable, dry cell”, which is an official category on the form. The next question is, “Can they be taken out”? I say, “No, they are bolted in. Only lithium batteries are removable”. That is usually challenged with the question: “Why not take them out”? I explain that they are bolted in and not removable, and they weigh 8 kilograms each.