Drones: Consultation Response

Henry Smith Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the rhetoric we have heard today is many miles away from reality: his rhetoric! Let me restate the point that this was a crime. It was an illegal act, and it had nothing to do with the laws that are in place. Somebody deliberately decided to disrupt Gatwick airport. It was a crime that will carry a sentence of up to life imprisonment when that person is caught, and I put it to the House that that maximum penalty is, in my view, appropriate to the crime. This is not a question of the laws not being in place; it is a question of catching the person who did this, and Sussex police, amply supported by the Met and our security agencies, are working very hard to achieve that.

The hon. Gentleman’s second point was about technology. Let me gently explain that the technology that was deployed with the help of the Ministry of Defence, for which we are grateful, to tackle the problem is new and unavailable elsewhere in the world. This country is at the forefront of developing systems that can combat this kind of issue, and a huge amount of work is ongoing to find out what is on the market and to assemble new kinds of systems, but there simply is not an off-the-shelf solution available to airports that they could buy tomorrow to provide protection against such attacks. A huge amount of work will now take place to ensure that that can happen, but he is simply ill-informed if he believes that there is some magic solution that was not put in place.

The third point is that other airports are now placing a huge amount of focus on ensuring that such things cannot happen again. Above all, however, we have put in place a mechanism to redeploy the MOD capability should such an event occur again. I hope that it does not, but we know how to deal with it if it happens again, and other airports around the world are coming to us asking, “What do we need to do?” That is the reality of what is happening, not the nonsense we have just heard from the Opposition spokesman.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

As the Member of Parliament for Gatwick airport, I extend my thanks to everybody who worked so hard on 19 and 20 December to mitigate the deliberate criminal act that the Secretary of State correctly identified. One of my concerns is that the Ministry of Defence was not brought in until some 18 hours after the incident started on the Wednesday evening, so will the Secretary of State assure me that the deployment of the military technology will be more rapid if further such attacks are forthcoming?

[Chris Grayling]

I am grateful for the opportunity to reiterate my thanks to all those in and around Gatwick who worked so hard at an extremely difficult time for the airport. As for the deployment of the technology, the first thing to say is that it was not immediately apparent that we were dealing with anything more than irresponsible drone usage close to an airport, which has happened many times over the past few years. By the time it became clear that this was a malicious attack, the Government machine and the Ministry of Defence moved as quickly as possible to deploy a new kind of response to deal with the issue. Clear protocols are now in place that would enable the system to be deployed quickly, but I hope that that will not have to happen again.