Airports Act 1986 (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Friday 19th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Empey, on his perseverance and I apologise to the House for not putting my name down to speak. I spoke against his Bill before and I speak against it now. It is sheer protectionism by the noble Lord. I understand the reason: he wants to be able to fly into Heathrow from Northern Ireland. I remember bringing the 1986 Bill before your Lordships’ House. I also remember the long discussions we had—that it would be the end of the world when the Inverness-Heathrow flights stopped, but it was not. There is an Inverness-Luton flight and an Inverness-Gatwick flight that work very well.

If we force private operators to bring uncommercial flights into their operations at Heathrow, it is a very bad trend for operations and a bad signal to send out to the private sector, which is there to produce growth and improve the economy of this country. There are plenty of international airport links for people in Scotland. I could not agree more with the noble Lord, Lord Reid, about the links to the south but the links exist and they work perfectly well. A lot of people I know in Scotland actually fly to Schiphol because they get better connections there than at Heathrow. Do not let us impose this on the private sector. I congratulate the noble Lord on trying hard again, but I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will have no truck with this Bill at all.