Lord Berkeley
Main Page: Lord Berkeley (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Berkeley's debates with the Department for Transport
(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The issue that the noble Baroness raises will be covered when the CAA completes its review of the outage in upper airspace that NATS suffered recently. I will await the independent regulator’s views on that, and we will obviously take action if needed. The noble Baroness said that the penalties are inadequate, but I also want to stress that when it comes to Gatwick tower control, the Government have no oversight of or insight into what those penalties are. They may well be adequate, as they are negotiated on a commercial footing.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, the Government seem to have a problem with people, because there is a shortage of people in this, as we have heard from many noble Lords already. It is a similar problem to what we will be debating later: a shortage of drivers on the west coast main line. Both those problems involve businesses which the Government say are commercial but in fact, behind the scenes, they make very sure that nobody is allowed to recruit enough people to ensure that there is a contingency. What are the Government going to do about that?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The noble Lord conflates two of my favourite topics. As he knows, both those companies are privately run and can recruit as many people as they like. However, they suffer the same thing: during the Covid pandemic, it was very difficult to train traffic controllers and train drivers. To a certain extent, there is a bit of catch-up going on. As I say, for train drivers as for air traffic controllers, training takes a very long time. It is at least 18 months before that person is operational.