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

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments from my noble friends Lord Moylan and Lord Davies of Gower. This is not a failing market. This is a highly competitive environment, where both domestic and international competition are working aggressively to make it a challenge to run an airline or a freight airline in today’s world.

The need for extensive government regulation, therefore, is limited and questionable. We are not trying to solve a massive problem. There are, of course, specific issues. We will hear more, for example, about disability rights, where, yes, of course we should make sure that airport operators in particular deliver the right environment for disabled people. But first and foremost, we must ensure that the Government do not interfere in this marketplace in a way that damages the competitiveness of one of the UK’s most important economic sectors. That is why my noble friend Lord Moylan is absolutely right. As we go through this debate—not simply on these amendments but on the Bill as a whole—the Minister needs constantly to have in mind the need not to cramp the style of our sector by overregulation, and, where he is regulating, to explain why, otherwise he will not have the support of this Committee.

Finally, on general aviation, the comments made so far are absolutely right. There is a genuine issue around the future of general aviation—the loss of smaller airports, for example, to planning pressures and planning opportunities, and those who own them trying to make money out of them. General aviation needs to be looked after in this country because at a time when, as we hear, there is a growing shortage of young up- and-coming pilots, general aviation is an essential way of developing the skills that we need for the future. It is not simply a way for a few rich people to have a good time.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 and Amendments 23, 24 and 25 are in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. As we noted previously, the Bill sets out the framework but leaves a great deal of detail to be determined later, so we welcome these amendments. We have consistently argued that such an approach risks leaving both passengers and Parliament with too little certainty about how the regime will operate in practice. We see these amendments as useful in probing how that framework might be strengthened.

Amendment 1 raises an important issue around transparency and consumer protection: the case for clearer comparable information at the point of sale. In our view, it should be pursued and I look forward to discussing my noble friend Lord Russell’s amendment, which aims to strengthen the Bill in this area, in the next group.

Equally, how compensation is delivered remains a live and important concern. The current system too often places the burden on passengers to navigate complex processes to secure redress. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Harper—I am sure we will keep coming back to this issue of a low-margin industry—that a different way of viewing this is that if £1 million is not returned to a whole group of consumers by a low-budget airline over a long period, it is, in effect, using families who cannot afford it, or can ill afford it, almost as an overdraft facility with no interest. Getting the balance right on that will be important as we investigate some of the amendments and get into the detail.

On Amendments 23, 24 and 25, we find ourselves in close alignment with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. As the Bill proposes to confer significant new functions on the Civil Aviation Authority, it is right to consider how those powers are to be exercised and scrutinised. A more centralised regulatory role must not come at the expense of transparency, or indeed parliamentary oversight. The noble Lord and I have discussed this issue, which is that unless there is a threat, with teeth, to move a fatal Motion on a piece of secondary legislation, there is a tendency for Governments to plough on regardless—also regardless of previous colours, I would just say. If we are concerned about secondary legislation—and we are concerned about this—there needs to be clarity about what we would do with it. I hope we can get into some of the detail on that.

On Amendment 24, later we propose two amendments that explore a high common denominator between UK 261 and EU 261, and we look at shadowing EU 261. I entirely hear what the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, says about there being no ownership of who has the best, so we want to pursue, on behalf of industry and customers in the UK, what is the best. That may be EU 261, as revised when it cuts, or it may not.

Overall, these amendments highlight two issues. We consider fundamental the need to embed meaningful consumer protections and the need to ensure proper accountability in the exercise of new regulatory powers as the Government move to address the post-EU powers gap. It is essential that this Committee is not asked to accept a blank cheque approach. I therefore look forward to hearing the Minister’s response as we all warm to this theme throughout the rest of today.

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I will stay on group 1, on growth and competitiveness. I will just add a brief word endorsing the comments of my colleagues on this side of the Room: whatever decisions we come to on detailed changes to legislation in this Committee, we need to remember that we are part of international law. We comply with the Montreal and Chicago conventions, and we comply with all the rules covered by IATA and ICAO, so whatever we do cannot be done in isolation—whichever area we debate and come to conclusions on over the next couple of days. I just say to my noble friends and the Minister that this has to be at the back of our minds when we determine anything that we do. What we should not do is come to conclusions whereby we end up putting through regulations that are wholly anti-competitive for the UK airline industry and not compatible either to third-country carriers who come to the UK, as we do not have, in most cases, any extra territoriality rights to impose certain rules or regulations. I just say that as a thought, and I am sure we will have very interesting debates on the amendments laid down.

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[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly comment on some of the issues raised. We have to separate out the former regulation 261 on passenger rights for delays and cancellations from the very important report on the former regulation 1107, which the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has spent a great deal of time working on with passengers with reduced mobility. I certainly echo the points that she has raised.

Without going into detail on the late regulations 261 or 1107, one of the biggest problems is not that we need more regulations on passenger rights but that we need to enforce the regulations that are already in place. These are robust. I was involved in their conception in the European Parliament and they have been revised over the years. We need to be very careful that however they are amended in this Committee does not then cause some sort of conflict. We must have treatment of passengers abroad that would echo the treatment they would have in the UK. We cannot impose differences in regulation on third countries, so we have to persuade, through the international bodies, that we need a certain level of treatment for all passengers. As I said, on the old regulation 261, from a competition point of view, we need to ensure that a balance is struck, notwithstanding what the airlines are culpable for in terms of paying, so that the business runs accordingly and passengers are compensated appropriately.

I will comment briefly on my noble friend Lord Young’s comment on the delays caused through NATS and other providers. We looked at this some years ago when I was in the European Parliament. With the exception of force majeure—people recognise force majeure, where something happens and the airline or air traffic services have no control whatever, and they are pretty magnanimous about it—I wholly agree with my noble friend. It was something we tried to push. What we found, unfortunately, was that air traffic services and providers not just in the UK but across the EU were very reluctant to look at the third party where there was a responsibility for compensation to be paid back to the airlines where it had not been their fault. It is worth pursuing. It is a tough way forward; nevertheless, it is worth looking at.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is a great expert in these fields, with her medical background. If I recall, the initial problem with passenger air quality arose some years ago with the BAe 146 aircraft. The effects on the pilots went on for years. For reassurance—I declare an interest, having spent four years as the head of European affairs for the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe—looking all these years on, the safety of and the quality of air in the aircraft that we produce today is really quite different from some of the older aircraft. Fortunately, as former crew on a lot of the older aircraft, I survived 25 years of air quality that was perhaps not great. It needs to be kept in perspective. It should be monitored, of course, but we should reassure the public that, when they fly on these aircraft these days, they are safe and extremely well maintained.

My final point concerns onboard facilities if people fall ill. Believe me, people like me have called for a doctor onboard in the past. It was not much fun when someone was lying on the floor and I, a mere first-aider, was trying to deal with them and keep them alive. It was not ideal. It is very difficult to see how you could rearrange the entire aircraft. Fortunately, a critical situation does not happen very often, but it is up to the airlines to ensure that the crew and everyone onboard are trained sufficiently, that they have the facilities, in terms of medical kits and everything else, and that, if something is extremely serious, the pilot and the captain have the ability to divert to another airfield to ensure that the passenger is looked after as quickly as possible. Those are my points.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, we support these amendments because they test whether the Bill does more than just create broad enabling powers. If we are giving the Secretary of State and the CAA new regulatory and enforcement functions, Parliament should also be clear about the statutory floor, the scope and the standards against which those powers are to be exercised.

We believe that Amendment 9, tabled by my noble friend Lord Russell, should be agreed to because it would insert a specific passenger safeguarding obligation to prohibit carriers separating children from accompanying adults. In doing so, it would remove a gap in the consumer protection framework and prevent airlines monetising what is, in practical terms, a safeguarding issue. It would also give statutory weight to the principle that family seating should not be treated as an optional extra, which is consistent with the Bill’s wider consumer protection purpose. Although we are aware of the CMA’s present investigation into Ryanair, we think that this an excellent opportunity to embed something in this legislation. We think that that is the right approach.

My Amendment 13 is technically important because it would refine Clause 1 by requiring air passenger rights regulations to standardise hand baggage dimensions by reference to recognised industry standards. This matters because the present position is too often defined by variable carrier policies rather than a clear statutory baseline, which makes the operation of Clause 1(2)(d), on price transparency, much harder in practice. A uniform volumetric standard would enable genuine, like-for-like comparisons at the point of sale. We all know people who have to hold three different sizes of hand luggage if they are using three different airlines. It just does not make any sense.

This amendment would still preserve commercial freedom because it would standardise the box but not the fee. It would also give the CAA an objective benchmark for compliance and enforcement, which is preferable—we can all agree on this, I think—to relying on what is, after all, very patchy guidance or post hoc disputes at the gate. We have all seen those, I am sure.

My Amendment 20 would provide a non-regression safeguard as domestic aviation consumer law replaces assimilated EU-derived protections. The amendment would require the Secretary of State to ensure that new regulations are at least equal to, and ideally better than, the protections that are already in place. I mentioned this in our debate on the previous group. It would provide an important constraint on delegated power because it would prevent the framework being used to dilute rights over time. It would also convert what is currently a permissive approach into a continuing duty of review, which is a sensible way to ensure that consumer rights do not fall behind evolving standards.

Amendment 36 would give the Bill a more coherent accountability structure through providing a passenger charter—I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, not only for her support but for bringing to life the realities of being on a plane in some difficult circumstances. At the moment, the risk with the Bill as it stands is that powers exist in principle but passengers have no clarity or codified statement of what service standards they can expect or how failures will be remedied. Embedding a charter with objective performance measures and a defined redress framework would make the regulatory architecture more intelligible and more enforceable. That said, I recognise that the Minister has set out the challenge to us about being more specific about this passenger charter and we will continue to attempt to do that, including in the run-up to Report. I thank him for the ongoing discussions about that.

Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friend Lady Brinton, is also an important technical correction, because it would turn accessibility from a general policy objective into a legal duty. Disabled passengers should not be left dependent on guidance, voluntary compliance or uneven airline practice. A statutory obligation, accompanied by annual reporting, would create clearer lines of accountability for both operators and the regulator. That is especially significant where the Bill is otherwise expanding the CAA’s enforcement role. I thank the Minister again for his willingness to engage and discuss this issue with us behind the scenes. I feel that there is a door that is reasonably open to achieving some kind of understanding, particularly in this area and particularly in the light of the absolutely hair-raising stories that we all heard in the Second Reading debate.

I added Amendment 59B a bit late. It is—with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan—about echoing and shadowing EU 261. This is a probing and exploratory amendment, which goes to the coherence of the UK passenger rights regime at the moment, when the European framework is evolving and the Government are asking Parliament to confer broad powers on the Secretary of State. If the Bill is to modernise aviation consumer protection, it should not allow UK 261 to drift away from EU 261 without some kind of explicit policy choice or decision and clear scrutiny here in Parliament with a proper explanation.

The practical concern is straightforward. We know that EU 261 is making progress on embedding greater rights—for instance, about travelling with your child or about compensation after three hours’ delay. It would be useful to make sure that we mirror that, unless we can do better. That is in my other amendment, which is saying, “Let’s not do a race to the bottom; let’s do a race to the top of the highest possible standards”. That is why Amendment 59B should be seen as a non-regression and alignment safeguard, not a mere technical tidying-up provision. That said, I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister says in response.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will introduce my amendments in this group and will then make a few comments about remarks made by other noble Lords in the course of debate—not, I assure your Lordships, responding to every noble Lord who spoke, although it was a very valuable and interesting debate. I will speak first to Amendments 4, 5 and 30. I also have Amendments 38 and 39 in this group, but Amendments 4, 5 and 30 stand as a set that work together, so I will speak to them first.

Amendment 4 would require a review of hidden or undisclosed charges imposed on passengers by airlines or airport operators. I am singing from a similar hymn book to that used by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and others in trying to get to the heart of understanding how, cumulatively, passengers are being charged for various things. I have cast my amendment in the form of asking the Government to have a review. We all have anecdotal experience of this sort of thing. I booked some air tickets the other day. Of course, a very attractive price is offered, but by the time I have chosen the option that includes the suitcase and I have booked my seats, it is a bit more expensive than it started out.

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The sad saga I have recited is not the unique bad luck of this weary wanderer but is exactly what tens of thousands of disabled passengers complain about daily, exactly as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said. I have just recited the main problems they all face. We can and we must do better for disabled passengers. The issues raised here today need to be mentioned in this clause of the Bill so that we will get action on them in due course.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

Wow—how much blood has to boil before this is dealt with? It was striking at Second Reading to hear these stories, and striking that a lot of them came from behind the Minister on the Government Benches. In a sense, that gives me a little hope that there is enough political will and heft here that something can be done. From meetings that we have had with the Minister, I think there is political will here.

We cannot ever hear these stories again without having taken this opportunity and this moment to do something. It is beyond shocking that this happens. It should never happen, but, in a modern age, today, that this is happening on a regular basis is beyond the pale and needs to stop. Whatever support the Minister requires to get this over the line, I know that my noble friend Lady Brinton, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Blencathra, are powerful advocates who can help deliver on that.

We support the amendment by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. I have two amendments in my name, one of which is about an accompanying adult with a child. This is an incredibly important issue. We recognise that there is one bad actor at the moment on this and that the CMA is looking into it. That said, embedding this in the Bill would give the reassurance that families need and deserve. When I was talking about this amendment with my noble friend Lady Brinton, she pointed out that it is not simply families who get separated from their children; people get separated from their carers—when you go searching, you find that there are plenty of examples of that. Again, surely this is a small change that can and should be implemented.

I am incredibly hopeful that there is an opportunity between this Committee and Report to do some serious and significant work, to make use of this Bill to ensure that we never have to hear of this appalling treatment ever again.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it has been an important, valuable and moving debate. I do not have anything to add that would be helpful to the Committee, except to say that we must all take account of the important stories of people’s real experience, which are illustrative of what so many others have to face.

I said at Second Reading that I hoped that there would be sufficient unanimity on these issues and that the Government themselves would bring forward amendments around which we could rally. The advantage of that would have been that any government amendments would be workable and acceptable, so we would have been able to rally around something that worked rather than struggling as Back-Benchers, with the modest support we have, to devise something and impose it on the Government, which is always unsatisfactory in a certain sense. Unfortunately, the Government have not come forward with amendments, but there is still an opportunity for them to do so on Report. If they do not, I am sure that there will be a wide range of amendments that will almost certainly go to a Division. I do not see that they are going to be defeated, given the attitudes that have been expressed by noble Lords across the Grand Committee.

I urge the Government that it is in their interests to seize this issue and run with it. If they did so, I think that the whole Committee, across parties, would rally round them.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. I think he will agree that much of what he said—and it was reflected as well in the comments of many of my noble friends—came from the reaction that we both had from the All-Party Group on Aviation. It is a bit of a disaster situation. That group criticised the CAA strongly, not only on training—and everything else that noble Lords have talked about—but on the exam syllabus. The incident training syllabus has apparently not been upgraded for 20 years. This is in spite of examiners and other people asking the CAA to incorporate the charges, to no avail. My plea to my noble friend the Minister tonight is for him to put a bomb under the CAA and convert it into a new, customer-friendly regulator.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, the amendments in my name insist on statutory duties that would secure workforce resilience and international regulatory alignment, rather than leaving these matters to open-ended secondary legislation.

Amendment 103 would require the CAA to prepare an annual report on commercial pilot licence holders, including anonymised demographic data, and an assessment of workforce sustainability as a regulatory monitoring tool. The licensing authority needs to understand whether the pool of qualified pilots has been maintained at a level that supports safe and continuous operations. I thank BALPA for supporting this amendment and helping to draft it. An important point that has not so far been drawn out is the need to identify the proportion of pilots licensed to fly commercial airliners who are women—the kind of important data that ensures that there is a workforce that reflects the future.

The amendment would also require the CAA to consider the future availability of a pilot workforce. As we have heard, commercial airline pilots must retire at 65. An authoritative annual assessment by the CAA would flag issues about the future supply of trained pilots.

I feel that we are all currently dancing on the head of a very particular but extremely useful and important pin. Between now and Report, I hope that we can put some of this together—unless the Minister says in the next few minutes that he is accepting all our amendments. We live in hope.

Amendment 104 would place a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to pursue UK-EU mutual recognition in relation to pilot and engineer licensing and aircraft parts certification. This came through from one of the APPGs, which had particular concerns about this issue. The absence of recognition mechanisms can create duplicated compliance burdens. We are all familiar with this kind of thing: regulatory friction and delays in maintenance and staffing, all of which matter operationally and economically.

I will not take up any more of noble Lords’ time, except to say that I commend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. We first served together in 2018 on the first Select Committee on artificial intelligence, so never let it be said that Peers are not sometimes ahead of the curve. Its report was entitled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able? and he continues to pursue this issue with his usual energy. I always support and listen to him on these issues, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the last group, I came up with a modest amendment that would have involved increasing the threshold at which strike ballots had to be passed before a strike could be undertaken—a clear consumer protection measure well in line with the purpose of the Bill. In this group, we seem to have wandered off into discussing pilot training, which I do not see as being intimately connected with consumer protection. Everyone is agreed that something should be done to interfere in the market, and that the Government or one of their agencies should take some sort of responsibility for this. It is entirely opposite to the thrust of the response I had on holding strikes. I find it remarkable.

I understand the problems identified by the noble Lords, Lord Barber and Lord Tunnicliffe, and my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. I understand that these are indeed serious problems. I am willing to go so far as to accept that the Civil Aviation Authority might want to take cognisance of them and have a sense of how extensive the problems are. But it is surely very clearly for the industry itself to solve these problems, and that is what we must insist on. I imagine that the Minister will be as firm in rejecting these interferences with the market as he was in rejecting my modest amendment in the last group.

My noble friend Lord Holmes made points of great wisdom and vision, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, rightly pointed out the assiduity with which my noble friend has brought attention to bear on these important technological issues over a number of years. I do not feel competent myself to make direct comments on them, but I applaud the notion that we should be looking very carefully at the developments that technology will bring. That will include, of course, the abilities and skills required of pilots. I do not want to push it too far, but we have planes that now practically fly themselves—I do not mean that they can do without pilots, but they can practically fly themselves. Of course, in freight, we have drones appearing everywhere and great technological advances being made. That must have an impact on a training curriculum for pilots.

I was astonished to hear the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, say that the training curriculum for pilots was several decades old. I am not sure if I heard him correctly, but if that is so, then perhaps it needs to catch up with modern technology. There are many things that an aeroplane does nowadays that it could not do 30 years ago and that the pilot ought to know about.

I want to make this point again about UK-EU alignment—