Airports National Policy Statement

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and for providing the extensive documentation that went with it. Labour’s position on Heathrow was set out by my honourable friend Andy McDonald MP in the other place yesterday:

“Labour will consider proposed expansion through the framework of our well-established four tests: expansion should happen only if it can effectively deliver on the capacity demands; if noise and air quality issues are fully addressed; if the UK’s climate change obligations are met in their entirety; and if growth across the country is supported”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 172.]


Labour’s decision will emerge in due course.

The Statement says:

“To ensure fairness and transparency we appointed an independent consultation adviser, the former Court of Appeal judge, Sir Jeremy Sullivan”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 169.]


I invite the Minister to set out in a little more depth what the role of that individual was and whether it will continue into the future.

I turn to the Government’s response to the Transport Committee’s report. Recommendation 2 of that report says:

“We recommend that both Houses of Parliament allow the planning process to move to the next stage by approving the Airports National Policy Statement, provided the concerns we have identified later in our Report are addressed by the Government in the final NPS it lays before Parliament”.


Does that mean that we will have a debate in this House on a divisible Motion?

Turning back to the Statement, it says:

“Our draft NPS was scrutinised by the Transport Committee, and I thank the Chair of the Committee and her team for the thoroughness of their work. I was pleased that they, like me and my colleagues in the Government, accepted the case for expansion and concluded that we are right to pursue development through an additional runway at Heathrow. We welcome and have acted on 24 out of 25 of its recommendations. Our response to the Committee is also being published today”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 169.]


For the avoidance of doubt, I will tell your Lordships that the 25th recommendation was recommendation 22, which was about an incinerator. Does “acted upon” mean “We have agreed with the recommendation”? Clearly, it does not. The committee’s recommendation 19 is that there should be a seven-hour noise ban at night and the Government have responded by saying, “No, you will get only six and a half”. I have done my best to try to understand the response to the committee, which is vague and, at times, woolly.

On capacity, the Statement says:

“Expansion at Heathrow will bring real benefits across the country including a boost of up to £74 billion to passengers and the wider economy, providing better connections to growing world markets, and increasing flights to more long haul destinations”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 169.]


That makes it sound like thousands. In fact, the committee’s report says:

“The NPS states that the NWR scheme is ‘expected to lead to more long-haul flights and connections to fast-growing economies’. The DfT’s forecasts show that, at the UK level, the NWR scheme will offer one more destination overall to emerging and fast-growing economies when compared with no expansion”.


One seems a rather modest number.

The Statement touches on savings. It says:

“We took a firm step when I asked the industry regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, to ensure the scheme remains affordable while meeting the needs of current and future passengers. This process has already borne fruit, with the identification of potential savings of up to £2.5 billion”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 170.]


Is this saving coming from the mooted scheme, which I believe Heathrow is consulting on, to reduce the length of the third runway from 3.5 kilometres to 3.2 kilometres? If it does, will there be any significant operational impact of that reduction? When, many years ago, I was privileged to be a co-pilot on 747s, 2,500 metres seemed enough, and certainly many of the operations presently at Heathrow require nothing like 3,500 metres. Given how expensive the M25 issue is to this scheme, are further reductions to the runway length being considered?

We increasingly appreciate the importance of air quality, as well as its fatal consequences. What is the commitment on air quality? There is a commitment in the Statement but there was another in the Government’s response to the Transport Committee, which said very solidly:

“No scheme would be allowed to proceed if it did not comply with air quality obligations”.


Can the Minister flesh out what those air quality obligations are?

On noise, once again the Statement is fairly bullish. It says:

“Communities will be supported by up to £2.6 billion towards compensation, noise insulation and improvements to public amenities—10 times bigger than under the 2009 third runway proposal”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 170.]


That may be, but Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd has recently proposed a cap of £3,000 on any insulation project. Anybody who has their house insulated against noise knows that that is a trivial sum. Can the Minister confirm that there will be no cap and that Heathrow will pay what it takes to achieve the appropriate levels of noise insulation?

It is a shame to see that the references to the community came right at the end of the document. It is the community that will be very impacted by this scheme. Towards the end of the Statement the Secretary of State said:

“Earlier this year a community engagement board was established, and we appointed Rachel Cerfontyne as its independent chair. It will focus on building relations between Heathrow and its communities, considering the design of the community compensation fund, which could be worth up to £50 million a year, and holding the airport to account when it comes to delivering on its commitments today and into the future”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 170.]


Can the Minister set out what powers the independent chair will have? Will she in fact be acting as something like a tribunal and able to direct Heathrow in disputes to provide the appropriate money?

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, this Statement has an air of Alice in Wonderland about it. Governments have been considering this problem for 20 years but I am afraid that the question is out of date, and so is the answer. Hub airports are no longer the growth area in aviation; the growth area is now in direct long-haul flights. The idea of concentrating ever more development in the overcrowded south-east will, the Government say, benefit other parts of the UK as well. Yet the report by the New Economics Foundation, Flying Low, shows that a new runway at Heathrow will cost regional airports 14 million passengers a year. It will harm them, not benefit them.

The first lack of reality is on the timescale, since 2026 is ridiculously optimistic. The idea that you are going to build a runway as well as demolishing 800 houses, moving an incinerator and dealing with the public inquiry, with development consent and—I am fairly certain—with challenges in the courts from local councils suggests to me that the Government do not have realistic expectations in that regard. This is important because it will have a big impact on the ability for any airport development to help our trade situation. There is also a level of fictional economics, which is that the Government have assigned this a zero cost by saying that it is a private development. Can the Minister clarify her attitude to Transport for London’s estimate of a £6 billion cost to the public purse for public transport? Who will pay for the cost of the disruption to the M25 and M4?

I greatly regret that there is a very brief paragraph on air quality. We were hardly aware of emissions issues when this problem was first investigated. Can the Minister provide us with more detail on how this development will enable the Government’s compliance with international obligations? Will she particularly address the issue of surface transport access and surface transport within the airport?

This is supposed to be a national statement yet there is only one brief paragraph in it referring to anywhere other than the south-east of England. How do the Government intend to achieve their promise of supporting other airports to make best use of their runways? Is that a concrete promise of support or is it simply wishing them well in the process? Liberal Democrats believe that the Government should be using airport development as a springboard for the development and prosperity of the north and the Midlands. They should be spreading prosperity across the whole country.

Finally, I warn everyone who is interested in this to look carefully at the wording in the Statement, especially that on page two. All the reassurances are couched in weasel words.

“We expect up to 15% of slots”,


will “facilitate domestic connections”. What does that promise to other parts of the UK? The Government expect,

“up to £2.6 billion … compensation”,

to be paid. They expect not at least £2.6 billion, but up to that figure. They,

“expect … a six-and-a-half hour ban on scheduled night flights”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 170.]

What exactly are the guarantees, not the Government’s expectations, on compensation and night flight bans?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I will attempt to get through all the questions, but if I do not I will follow up in writing. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked about the consultation adviser Sir Jeremy Sullivan. He reviewed the Government’s consultation process and provided challenge to Ministers and officials to ensure that it was of a high standard, and produced two reports, which have been published. However, the role was on the government consultation, so it has now been completed.

On the Transport Select Committee comment on approval of the NPS, noble Lords debated the draft NPS on 15 March and the formal scrutiny period ended on 23 March. The proposed airports NPS needs approval by resolution of the House of Commons before it can be designated. This House has an agreed process for national policy statements, which is laid out in the Companion, and that is what we are following. Any further debate in this House will, of course, be a matter for my noble friend the Chief Whip.

On the Transport Select Committee’s recommendations, as the noble Lord pointed out, we agree with what it is seeking to achieve in 24 of the recommendations. Several of those recommendations will be addressed at a later stage through the development consent order, for example, or by other means, such as the regulatory framework. We have published a detailed response setting out our approach for each of those recommendations.

The noble Lord was right to point out that for long-haul flights there are net additional emerging market destinations by 2050, and emerging markets are a subset of the long-haul group. It is often more helpful to consider destinations served on at least a daily basis, as that frequency is especially important to business passengers. The north-west runway scheme would lead to an additional 14 long-haul designations being served daily by 2040.

Our analysis demonstrates that the scheme can be delivered without impacting on the UK’s compliance with limits set out in the EU ambient air quality directive. However, it is not for the NPS to set out the legal obligations in detail.

On community compensation, particularly for noise insulation, the current public commitment is to contribute up to £3,000 for noise insulation. That commitment will be examined during any planning process which follows the designation, if it happens, of the NPS. The NPS makes it clear that the Secretary of State will consider whether the applicant has put the correct mitigations in place, at least to the level committed to in the Heathrow Airport public commitments, before finally agreeing.

On community engagement, Rachel Cerfontyne has been appointed to the Heathrow community engagement board. She was previously at the Independent Police Complaints Commission—the chair has no powers, per se. The role is as more of an advocate. Although independent, she will obviously have connections with senior levels at DfT and will help to influence where necessary. I met her recently, and I believe she will do an excellent job of holding Heathrow to account.

I turn to the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. On the question of hub status, we think it gives us the best of both worlds. A large hub airport can compete for transport passengers to provide the connectivity that the UK needs while at the same time enabling growth for other airports around the UK. On timing, obviously we will be working closely with the developer should the NPS be designated. We have had the timing independently and expertly appraised, and as things progress we will be working very closely on that. On costs for surface access, the applicant would pay in full the cost of any surface access required purely for airport expansion. If there are other benefits, the question of how those schemes are funded will be discussed.

To return to air quality, we have always been clear that development consent will be granted only if the air quality obligations are met. The environmental assessment and mitigations proposed by the airport will be carefully scrutinised, independently and in public, before any decision is made on whether to grant the development consents. The NPS outlines some of the measures that Heathrow may adopt to demonstrate these requirements, including the potential emissions-based access charge, the use of zero-emission or low-emission vehicles and an increase in public modes shared by passengers and employees.

On domestic connectivity, one of the reasons why the Government chose the north-west runway is that we fully recognise the importance of air services to everyone across the UK. The Secretary of State set out his ambition for 15% of slots from the new runway to be used for domestic routes, and we expect the majority of those domestic routes to be commercially viable. I know Heathrow is already in discussions with many airports across the country on that. We think that in the first instance it is a commercial decision for airlines, and we will hold the airport operator to account on how it has worked constructively with airlines and regional airports to protect and strengthen the domestic connections. Heathrow Airport Limited has already set out a number of pledges to support domestic connectivity, including financial support for the new routes, but if those measures do not meet our expectations, the Government can take action where appropriate to secure routes through the public service obligations.

I hope I have got to every point. If I have not, I will follow up in writing. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, referred to the Labour Party’s four tests: meeting climate change obligations, protecting air quality, supporting growth across the country and addressing noise issues. I hope the noble Lord and his party, once they have read through the documents, will agree that the revised NPS meets them.