Revised Draft Airports National Policy Statement

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for allowing me to make a short contribution in the gap. I could express a lot of views on airports but today I shall concentrate on the NPS and airport costs. I support everything that my noble friend Lady Jones has said. I too believe that the NPS is out of date because it comes with baggage which dates from when just one company owned all the major airports around London. We still have this anomaly whereby one company seeks to control and regulate Heathrow’s development but none of the others. All five of these airports are now in separate ownership. One could question why they need this type of regulation at all in terms of the detail that the NPS goes into. My understanding has always been that the Government’s policy is that the five airports should compete with one another. Perhaps the Minister will comment on whether there should be a bigger review of the NPS soon to ensure that it sticks to airport policy and does not get into the minutiae of what happens at Heathrow.

My problem, which I want to share with the House, is that, in terms of costs, Heathrow is being regulated as a monopoly in a very similar way to how Network Rail is regulated. The regulator’s role is to make sure that a company stays within its costs and that these are passed on to customers in an equitable way. That is fine but it does not address whether the costs are necessary to produce the outcome that the promoter, or Network Rail, or Heathrow Airport wants. Mr Walsh obviously has a vested interest in the actions of the CAA. He says that the fault lies with the CAA, which,

“rewards the inefficient use of capital : the more it spends on capital projects, the cost of which can be passed on to airlines, the more it makes for its shareholders”.

My solution is to bring competition to Heathrow. Perhaps the Minister would like to consult the CAA and consider whether the five or six terminals that may be built at Heathrow should not be sold off into separate competing operations, and leave the BAA in charge of infrastructure, which should involve not only the runways, the services and the air traffic control, but the access, which many noble Lords have spoken about. The question then becomes: who pays for the access? Can the Minister say who is going to pay for all these lovely new rail accesses that are planned for Heathrow? It now has the worst proportion of passengers coming by rail of all the airports around London, I think, and it would be wonderful if the new accesses happened. But who is going to pay for them? On the same basis, can we have Heathrow Express removed from that structure so that customers do not have to pay £27 for a single journey, as I think it says in the briefing? I am sure that contributes some way to the number of people driving to Heathrow.

There is a long way to go on this, but I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.

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[Baroness Kramer]

I will ask the Richmond Society to forward to the noble Lord the detailed modelling that has been done to show the impact of double noise on a significant section of the population. He may find that rather interesting.

Opposition to Heathrow comes from the overwhelming majority of residents in south-west London living under the flight path, four local councils and MPs of all political colours that represent that area. My party, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens have consistently opposed expansion. When any of us hear of the mitigations, we apply that against our own experience. I lived in the area when Heathrow applied for the fourth terminal and we were assured there would be nothing more. Then came the fifth terminal, and we were assured again that anyone was foolish to suggest there would be a third runway. Then came a third runway and we were told, of course, there would be no sixth terminal. Now we hear of a sixth terminal to go with the third runway. This pattern continues regularly. In the same way, the mitigations—noise is a good example —never live up to their billing. Sitting outside—most people have the right to sit in their garden—is not helped by noise insulation inside a house; that works only provided all the windows and doors are closed, with the consequence that quality of life is severely affected.

[Lord Berkeley]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She quite rightly talked about more and more terminals. Does she have a view on the view expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Spicer and Lord Naseby, that we should be talking about probably four runways, if not five, to keep up with Dubai and Amsterdam?

[Baroness Kramer]

I think the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, was perhaps more honest than most. A lot of the PR that comes from Heathrow and much of the aviation industry suggests that every new increment will always be the last and it never is, because there is always a rationale and always money to be made from continually trying to expand capacity, particularly when the underlying strategy is to strip flights out of other airports in the UK. That ownership is no longer held in common has added great fire to that underpinning strategy.

I hope that the Government will reconsider again the whole notion of a third runway at Heathrow; there are other and better options. I understand that it is in some ways a sop to business because business tends just to assume that a third runway would be good without looking into the detail. This seemed a way to pacify businesses infuriated by Brexit.

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[Lord Young of Cookham]

It is an Act that his Government generously put on the statute book, but I will of course write to him with details of the section that gives the Secretary of State those powers.

[Lord Berkeley]

Will the Minister very quickly tell us who Caroline Low is? From thousands of responses, why did he choose hers?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Because it summarised in one sentence the case for Heathrow. Caroline Low works for the Department for Transport and is obviously a very able civil servant who can summarise an argument concisely, which is exactly what a Minister looks for.

Subject to any revisions to the Government’s proposals in the light of this process, we plan to bring forward a final airports NPS by the end of June. I hope on the basis of what my noble friend and I have said today, your Lordships will feel able to support the airports National Policy Statement.