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

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the three main aims of this legislation, which were well set out by the Minister. The Government are right that the aviation industry has been growing reasonably well and could make a bigger contribution to growth and prosperity in our country. The Government are right that safety is a vital priority behind which all parties in this House would unite. They are right to realise that, as technologies change, aeroplanes evolve and our airspace becomes ever more congested, it is necessary for a Government to accept the prime safety responsibility and ask whether the rules and guidance are still correct, and whether the regulatory authorities are doing their job in carrying out their task of enforcing safety.

We all want to see good conditions for passengers. That has to be a balance, because if you go too far in regulating in favour of super service then the price can go up too much. The Government must form a judgment on what is an appropriate minimum level of service quality to require so that no one is left in a bad way. This is particularly true of disabled people, as we have been hearing. However, they have to be careful not to overdo standards, which then prices people out of the market and it becomes a middle-class indulgence.

Where I have more doubts about the Bill is when it comes to the detail. I found the 316-page impact assessment heavy going. I do not know whether other colleagues bothered or whether they did not get to the exciting conclusion at the end—I must have missed the exciting conclusion at the end. It was repetitious, very generalised and very high-level. It was clearly a piece of work done by officials who were given an impossible task. They were meant to work out what regulatory changes are going to be made and ask the usual questions of an impact assessment, on the costs of these regulatory changes and the benefits of carrying them through, as some things you will have to do because they are for safety but, for lots of other things, you will have to make a judgment about the trade-offs. Are the costs too high or are the benefits exciting enough to go for it?

Remarkably, this impact assessment concludes that there will be just a small net loss, as a result of the legislation, of just a few million pounds for a multi-billion-pound industry, and so this is well within the margin of error. When you try to find out why the figures are so small, you find that there are practically no benefits identified because this Bill will ensure that nothing happens for quite a long time. It is arranging the regulatory furniture but it will not change what will apply to airlines and passengers any time soon.

The Bill has delay built into it at every opportunity. We read in the impact assessment that it may take a year for us and the other place to get the legislation through and finally into effect. Then, apparently it will take another year before the Government come up with changes to use the very large powers that this legislation will give to Ministers and to regulators without further reference to Parliament. We are being asked to sign a blank cheque, but Ministers have no idea who they will want to make the cheque or cheques out to, let alone how much there may be on them.

The House needs to understand that this is what I would call officials’ legislation. This is not a burning desire of a Minister who knows his subject very well to make changes which are soon going to make a difference to aviation and to economic growth in this country. This is “good management-type” official legislation, saying that we may need these powers and need to copy a whole load of EU regulations that have already passed—or, more likely, that are going to come out soon—so let us have these powers and make sure that most of these things can be done by a regulatory body without any reference to Parliament or by statutory instrument with minimum debate, and that way we do not need to trouble people about it. When the House proceeds to investigate the legislation, it will want a bit more from the Ministers on how they would use these considerable powers.

I would like more urgency from Ministers. The impact assessment says that nothing is going to happen before three to five years have elapsed, because of the year legislating, the year thinking about how to use the powers, and then the powers coming into effect. In other words—and Labour Peers should think about this—this legislation is basically saying that it cannot make any improvement to aviation or provide any extra growth in the lifetime of this Parliament. That is disappointing.

I am a bit more ambitious than the Government. I find myself saying there are things that could be done now, on a shorter timetable, which could make life better for the aviation sector, its passengers and its users. Take the prime one of growth—that is my main concern. I have always said how much I admire the fact that the Government want to be a growth Government, but I have been critical about how many of the things they do actually achieve the opposite. Here is one thing that is not actually going to achieve the opposite—it is just not going to achieve anything, according to the papers before us—where more could happen.

The Minister says that we will have an opportunity in due course to discuss the expansion of Heathrow. Heathrow is the dominant airport of the UK aviation sector, and the success and growth of Heathrow will be a dominant factor in how well this sector does. Delaying a debate seems a little odd, because surely this should be the prime concern of the Government at the moment. When I look at the plans, I believe the Government have backed the plan that takes the longest and is the dearest. They have gone for the plan where the M25 needs to move, which adds more than £20 billion to the total cost and I suspect will add quite a lot of delay to the whole thing, as well as the actual cost of building the additional runway—whereas there is a rival scheme, at considerably less cost and to a tighter timetable, where the runway would fit on to the existing land extending more eastwards so that we do not have to rebuild the M25.

Maybe the Government are right. I would be interested to hear their case. But we would need reassurances that the M25, during all those difficult works, would not be disrupted. Look at the important transport infrastructure of this country. The M25 is one of the dominant and most important pieces of infrastructure that we have put in, saving all those journeys through London and allowing so much commerce and passenger traffic to flow around the city relatively quickly on a good day. We do not really need a big disruption of that.

As someone who some years ago had as my main business career offering financial advice to Governments around the world, I had to fly quite a lot, rather more than I wanted to in those days. To me, as a travelling businessman earning revenue for my firm and for the country as a whole in selling overseas services, what mattered was timeliness and accessibility. I was interested in total journey time from my house to the office I was going to advise. Quite often there was disproportionate time, trouble and delay in getting from my house, some 35 miles from the airport, to Heathrow to get on the plane, which might even have been on time. Ministers looking at growth of airports and accessibility to airports have to consider surface transportation. There have been improvements in recent years to get better rail access to Heathrow. It took a very long time for those of us who wanted that to break through with the authorities to get it to happen. That now has happened with both an extensive Tube option and a link to the old Great Western main line. But we need to make sure that road access also works for those who wish to use the airport.

It would be useful if the Minister could give us an update on Gatwick, the second very large airport in the London area. There was a plan to have a much cheaper and faster progress to many more passenger movements, with the idea of having a constant-use second runway. That requires shifting the existing relief runway a little, so there is quite a bill of cost. That was meant to be coming along before the end of this decade, and it would be very interesting to hear an update on whether it is going to happen.

The relevance to this Bill is that, of course, as those airport expansions happen, many more slots will become available. We owe it to those who are thinking of venturing very large sums of money to expand Gatwick and Heathrow to let them know what the rules of the game will be when they come to place those slots, and to look to see how they are going to remunerate the large sum of money in the case of Gatwick and the absolutely colossal sum of money in the case of Heathrow, even in the original budgets. Heathrow has all that additional risk from complexity, which could result in needing to remunerate even more capital than is currently envisaged.

While I welcome the three main aims of the Government and think that this legislation could be improved by telling us in detail how they can do things that will improve all those, we need more on the environmental impact on surrounding communities living close to airports. I speak as someone who used to represent a constituency that was some 35 miles or so out of London to the west, where there were problems with Heathrow noise. There are solutions that could be woven into this legislation or general government policy. A new generation of planes should be considerably less noisy. It is possible to construct flight paths that are less intrusive, and it is certainly possible to increase the angle of ascent and descent, which reduces the magnitude of the area affected by the noise nuisance. The more that can be done to encourage quieter aviation, the better. There are also other environmental issues relating to surface transport; I gently sketched them in relation to Heathrow and the M25, but there are similar issues for other airports.

My final point is that while, if you are interested in UK economic growth, of necessity you clearly concentrate on how you develop Heathrow and Gatwick—the giant two—regional airports well outside London can also be extremely important to economic prosperity and commerce. I would welcome more thoughts on how they can promote themselves with a good network of routes that do not require interchanging in London—or in Schiphol, as happens so often at the moment for people flying from northern and western airports. I urge the Government to look again at why this is all taking so long, why there is no sense of urgency and why there is not a much clearer refrain in this that we can go for growth here. One of the great triumphs of the UK economy over the last decade has been the big, successful surge in the export of services. Above all, services need really good aviation links, in the way I briefly described from past personal anecdote. I urge the Minister to see himself as a growth champion and to say to his colleagues in government that we can do better than this.

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

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Moylan. I do not think that there is a very simple solution. Before we covered all the legislation from the European Union, it was fairly straightforward for many decades in this country, as the CAA as a regulator had sole responsibility for all the technical issues, obviously coming under the auspices of the Government, the Secretary of State and certain experts and committees. We then started to debate and bring in a lot of primary legislation from the EU; that was obviously implemented in all member states, including the United Kingdom.

From when I entered the European Parliament in 1999, all these huge subjects—security, passenger rights, traffic rights, airspace restructuring, mandatory reporting, slots, flight time limitations or anything else related—were all debated by the Committee on Transport and Tourism. It was not a small committee; the committees in the European Parliament are not small. Everything was debated very carefully, with different points of view. Experts were brought in. It would take a couple of years to take through a piece of legislation. It was the same system, where there were at least two or three readings.

That brings me to where we are, because we have a different system. It is clear to me that the CAA is our primary regulator—it is an excellent regulator, in my view. We in the United Kingdom were always seen as one of the paramount countries in terms of regulation for both the maritime and aviation sectors. How is this going to work? On the one hand, we have the Civil Aviation Authority, which is the correct regulator, but, on the other, throughout the Bill there is reference to “the Secretary of State will decide”. Therefore, the Secretary of State decides, but there does not seem to be anything in the middle.

That brings me to the question of how we then bring back very difficult and complex decisions, for example, to the Floor of the House or a Committee. In the European Parliament, when we believed it was a very important issue—such as passenger rights or security—we did not go along with the delegated Acts argument. With delegated Acts, once something was updated, the Commission could then implement those changes without coming back to the Parliament. Therefore, very often, we insisted that, for a number of these subjects, we would have implementing Acts. Therefore, whenever a piece of legislation—for security, passenger rights or slots, for example—needed to come back to be updated, normally within a few years, it would come back to the Parliament and withstand scrutiny by the members of a committee who could call in the required experts.

There is, therefore, a bit of an issue over how we bridge this to ensure that, when we require scrutiny and some of the areas of civil aviation to come into Parliament for more discussion and debate, there is an easy way for that to happen. This is not a criticism of the Civil Aviation Authority; as I have said, it is an excellent authority. I will throw that to our friend, the Minister, who, as he very well knows, I have great regard for, because it needs some clarification.

My final point is on growth. My noble friend covered this issue well already. I do not see anything in the Bill that shows where we can create growth. There seem to be many areas where, as my noble friends said, we want to increase taxation or business rates on the industry. Other Members of this House would like to see the industry restricted, which is not what I would like to see. Again, we need to be bold and forthright. This industry is hugely important to the economy; basically, it is one of the most successful industries that we have ever created in this country, with vectors from around the world from imports and exports, as well as the free movement of people. I would like to hear more from the Minister on how we can achieve growth here, because some of the restrictions that are proposed by others will certainly not lead to the continued success that we would all like to see.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, this is a very strange Bill; it is a Bill in search of a purpose, which proposes and transfers substantial powers to a regulatory body but which gives us no road map for how those powers are going to be used. In the debates we have had so far and in the amendments we are looking at this afternoon, it is inevitable that there will be amendments to try to give the Bill a purpose, to limit the use of the powers, because their use has not been explained, and to get some better regulation directly into the Bill, given the absence of any suggestion for improvements in the legislation that we have before us. That includes some very good proposals that we will come to later to improve the lot of disabled travellers, for example. I can understand why people want to get something worth while into the Bill, which is otherwise this rather strange transfer of powers, in order to be able to trust this independent body. We know that there is no urgency about this because we know from the impact assessment that there will not be any costs or benefits for the foreseeable future, and that the CAA will be given about a year after the successful passage of the Bill, if it goes through, to contemplate and review.

I support my noble friend because he is trying to give the Bill an overriding purpose, which should be entirely at one with the manifesto, the plans and the stated intentions of both the outgoing and the incoming Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I think we all agree, across parties, that it would be good if our economy grew faster than it has been growing since the great crash of 2008-09. Surely we can all see that this requires a sector-by-sector response, as well as changes in general economic policy that are not the subject of this debate.

My noble friend is right to try to make growth and competitiveness the twin aims. I suspect that the Minister is very sympathetic, but he will need to get colleagues and others to co-operate in speeding up work to try to ensure that the aviation sector—which is normally a fast-growing, modernising, important sector, particularly in an island country that needs good transport links—is one of the attractive means of increasing our activity and our growth, creating more and better-paid jobs.

This legislation covers issues that could make a very material contribution to that faster growth. It covers the question of airport slots. Will there be more of them, and is there a policy to try to create more capacity? What is the Government’s view on airport expansion? Will there be more expansion of smaller and regional airports to take some of the strain off the main centre in London? What is the plan for London, and when will we have the very large number of slots expanded? It is clearly under great pressure of demand.

Regulations on charging are mentioned but not detailed in this legislation. We have already heard from my noble friend about the possible tax charges on certain types of business premise, but we really need to hear from the Government what the charging policy is going to be for scarce airport space, particularly in London, where we are becoming uncompetitive against Schiphol, Paris, Frankfurt and some of the other continental airports that are our natural competitors. If you become not very price competitive, you start to lose the interlining and air-switching business, which can be handled by a big intersection airport such as Amsterdam just as well as it can be handled by Heathrow. We need a bit more guidance on how these regulations might develop and be included.

I urge the Minister to take off one or two of the veils and give us some idea of how these policies on improved regulation for the cost of use of airports, the amount of airport space, the allocation of slots and the general conduct of air traffic in our country might be deployed. I find it odd that, two years into a Government with a very strong majority and a strong mandate for quite a limited manifesto, they do not seem to have those burning desires, for example, to get our aviation sector really growing quickly. They are not answering the questions about these very basic things. How much airport space? How do you allocate the slots? What is the pricing? How much support do you give to the industry? What will the regulatory impact be on that industry? We all want safety regulation and good regulation so that the customer gets a decent deal, but we do not want so much regulation that it throttles the industry here and an extremely mobile and fast-moving industry can shift its assets the following day to another hub airport somewhere else, taking a lot of the business away.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for Amendment 1, but I express concern that it and Amendment 3 are in conflict in their proposed new subsections (1)(c) and (1B)(c). The reason for that was amply explained by the noble Lord, Lord Redwood. He started by saying that this Bill is one in search of a purpose, but went on to say that we are going to improve the lot of disabled people, among other things. I am very grateful that he said that, because proposed new subsection (1B)(c) in Amendment 3 asks the Secretary of State to make it an absolute priority to consider the impact of the regulations on

“the burdens imposed on air transport service providers and airport operators in complying with the regulations”.

Part of the journey of disabled people in buying a ticket, going through various airports and actually flying is that most of the providers would say that all provision for disabled people is a burden. They try to minimise everything they can. Does the Minister agree with me on that? Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, also might like to address that when he comments at the end.

--- Later in debate ---

There are very simple solutions. The legislation and the rules are already in place and civil aviation can come down like a ton of bricks. It behoves the Government, and I would support them absolutely, to ensure that the airlines and the airports—it is the airports in a lot of these cases—actually comply with the regulations that are laid down.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, posed an interesting question when she said that she thought that the mixture of amendments in this grouping created a tension and that maybe Amendment 4 was not compatible because it was trying to reduce the administrative and regulatory burden, whereas some of the other amendments were trying to achieve better outcomes, particularly for disabled passengers, by improved regulation. However, I think that these two things are perfectly compatible.

Most of us in this House benefited greatly from learning from the expertise of noble Lords and noble Baronesses with experience of service for disabled passengers, and we would want the regulations to be of the best quality in order to give the best opportunity for good outcomes. However, we have also heard from my noble friend Lady Foster, with her experience of the airline industry, that a lot of the bad cases that have been described are bad practice by a commercial business. They may already be violating existing rules, but they are certainly violating normal standards of good conduct and probably doing damage to the reputation of that business, because not only the disabled people but all their families and friends will be singularly unimpressed by what has occurred. We clearly need a cultural improvement in the case of some commercial airlines, and it may be that some of the proposed improvements in the regulation will help achieve that.

If we look at the whole burden of the cost and complexity of regulation, we can see that that great weight of business and economic regulation, as the CAA and others call it, is exceptionally complicated and is now producing a cost problem for aviation that is using the facilities of United Kingdom airports and trying to build businesses from a United Kingdom hub and headquarters base. That regulation is doing a lot of business damage to our growth and competitiveness and encouraging the growth of alternatives, such as Schiphol. That is what the Minister and his colleagues in other economic departments ought to be most interested in, and it is why I am attracted to my noble friend Lord Moylan’s proposal that the Government should either put their own general target for deregulation into the Bill or at the very least say, in the course of this debate, that aviation is not excluded from what is a perfectly attainable and sensible aim.

For all those noble Lords who think that the EU gets a lot of these things right, the EU is, of course, following exactly the same stated policy: it has come to the conclusion, through a number of reports, that it is massively overregulated and therefore not competitive compared with, say, the United States of America. It too is trying to set itself a target of a 25% reduction in the volume and cost of regulation, because it thinks that would be a good start in trying to restore some of the lost jobs and slower growth that it is undoubtedly incurring as a result of overcomplicated and excessive regulation, in particular business and economic regulation of the kind that afflicts the United Kingdom’s aviation industry. I hope that this House will look favourably upon my noble friend’s proposals and see that they are perfectly compatible with the excellent idea that we need better treatment for disabled passengers.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I will comment very briefly on my noble friend Lord Moylan’s Amendment 4. There are two parts to it. The first part, as he explained very carefully to the House, is the 25% reduction in administrative costs, which is the Government’s own target. We discussed this in Committee and I asked the Minister if he would set out the progress that the Government have made in achieving that 25% cost reduction in the areas that are the responsibility of his department. Clearly, we are two years into a five-year Parliament, so if the Government were on track, other things being equal, one would expect a 10% reduction in cost or an explanation as to why it was going to be loaded towards the back end of the Parliament. We did not get a lot of information, so I would be grateful if the Minister could tell the House what work is going on in the Department for Transport to track progress in reaching that 25% reduction in administrative costs. What information is currently available and published by the department about hitting that target? As my noble friend Lord Moylan said, if we received a lot of that information it would make the amendment unnecessary.

My second and final point is just to reflect on the point that I made on the earlier group. The wording of my noble friend Lord Moylan’s proposed new subsection (1B) is very sensible. It does not rule out the imposition of costs, but it challenge the Government to make a judgment as to whether the cost increase is disproportionate to the consumer benefit. It absolutely would allow some regulations to be introduced that had a cost but it would require the Government to look at the benefit that those regulations delivered to passengers and assess whether that balance was correct—in other words, whether the benefit to passengers outweighed the costs that were levied on the airlines. That is a good test for the Government. We do not want to have costly regulations which have a big economic burden but do not result in significant benefits to passengers. That is a perfectly sensible point and one which I think addresses the perfectly sensible point that the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, made about making sure that the focus on economics does not lead to a reduction in passenger support.