Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill [HL]

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 27th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to speak at Second Reading and to follow my noble friend Lord Kirkhope, who is to be congratulated on the report he produced, having conducted the inquiry into airspace on behalf of the all-party group. I declare an interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on General Aviation and as a user of airspace as an aircraft operator and general aviation pilot.

I speak in support of the Government. Frankly, I am relieved that they are taking swift action to tackle the problem of airspace reform, which is becoming urgent. UK skies are some of the busiest in the world, due to our geographical positioning—a situation that will get only worse as the global aviation industry grows. As a country, we should not be afraid of a growing industry; we should embrace it. Technological advancement is bringing us quieter, greener and more efficient commercial aircraft, with the eventual goal of full electrification.

Today’s jet aircraft are 80% more fuel-efficient than they were in the 1960s, when they first came into widespread use. Some 80% of aviation CO₂ emissions comes from flights of over 1,500 kilometres, for which no other practical mode of transport is available. By 2036, it is forecast that aviation will directly contribute $1.5 trillion to world GDP.

However, industry growth is beside the point; our skies are already overcrowded, even under current traffic levels, and current UK systems are struggling. Therefore, it is right and proper that measures be taken at a strategic level to ease congestion and bring UK airspace in line with modern international standards. It is important that the Secretary of State has these powers to move the modernisation programme forward.

It must be recognised that the Bill does not go into detail about how a strategic modernisation programme should be undertaken by the CAA; it simply gives the power for the Secretary of State to direct that a change should happen. Airspace should be considered a limited common resource. Diverse user groups all compete for the same volumes of sky, and the right of access for everyone must be protected as a central principle of airspace strategy. I always think of it as akin to the right to roam in the countryside. Government, and by extension the CAA, should be the neutral arbiter of airspace, actively protecting the rights of all users to access common airspace resources.

Currently, a worrying attitude exists among airport operators that the size of controlled airspace around a facility is linked to the value of that facility—almost treating it as land attached to a property. This attitude has incentivised bad airspace change proposals based on bogus projected traffic figures. More must be done to prevent airports seeing their controlled airspace as linked with the commercial value of a site. Decisions made on individual airspace change proposals in isolation must be put in the perspective of overall strategic worth and reviewed.

For example, the extremely controversial introduction of class D and E airspace around Farnborough, which comes into force on 27 February, has been sought by the operator based on predicted traffic numbers but was seemingly made without due appreciation for other users. Both the thriving Lasham Gliding Society—incidentally, the world’s largest club of its kind—and the many GA operators in that area will be negatively impacted by the reduction of their “right to roam” in the area. Yet, under previous rules there would be no way to challenge a decision once it was made. Should these ambitious traffic numbers fail to materialise, nothing could be done to return the airspace to common use. I therefore welcome the very important provision in the Bill to introduce a mechanism to review airspace changes once they have been activated, which, astonishingly, is not an option currently available to the CAA.

Controlled airspace in the UK, especially around London, is currently very complex and not fit for purpose. Much of the basic structure managing the skies above our heads was created in the 1950s, as has been said, and is designed to accommodate the performance of, for example, DC-3s, the old Stratocruisers, Constellations and similar aircraft. Current high-performance jets are a world away from these legacy airliners, and our airspace must be updated to reflect it. Many of your Lordships will have seen the article in the Times today detailing a new report, commissioned by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which suggests that aircraft noise is blighting the lives of more people than the Government admit. Clever airspace design, facilitated by the new review mechanism in this legislation, could be used to address this problem and take many more people out of aircraft noise zones.

Modern jets are capable of rapid climbs and descents. It is even advantageous for them to do so, as at higher levels jets are both more fuel-efficient and further away from communities on the ground. This performance gap means that large chunks of controlled airspace are not used at all, with airliners using tight corridors in and out of airports. Large chunks of the air are, therefore, absurdly left with no traffic at all but remain under control. It has always seemed strange to me that large zones, such as in the London area, have angular corners—areas restricted to GA but never used by commercial traffic.

The utterly enormous London Terminal Manoeuvring Area, which covers most of the south of England, in some places restricts light aircraft to flight below 2,500 feet, while jets fly many thousands of feet above. It seems not just bonkers but wrong that light aircraft users are denied access to this airspace for the sake of a decision made decades ago. I see no compelling safety case for zones around London to be as large as they currently are. What is worse, our large zones force traffic that cannot access the zones into tight corridors, where the risk of a mid-air collision is made higher. New powers to review and reduce airspace must be used with vigour to cut down redundant controlled airspace that is never visited by jets. It is right, proper and justified to open up areas of this common air for use by general aviation.

While the Bill is a valuable step towards airspace reform, allowing the Government to direct necessary changes, it does not address the fundamental problems with the CAA’s airspace change process. CAP 1616, the current guidance on the regulatory process for changing notified airspace design, needs to be reformed to improve the way the CAA considers proposals. Process needs to come more in line with principles of planning, moving from an individual to a corporate process, including mechanisms for objection before a court stage, and potentially measures akin to Section 106 agreements for airspace increases. When regulating lower airspace, there must be recognition that some risk is unavoidable. Processes must be altered to ensure that the responsibility for risk in an airspace change does not fall on individuals to facilitate more reasoned decision-making by regulators.

One aspect not considered by the Bill is who will shoulder the cost of airspace changes directed by the Secretary of State—I would very much welcome comment on this by the Minister. Some airfields may be directed out of necessity to submit changes but will potentially not have funding or resources to do so. Care must be taken by the Secretary of State not to impose airspace change processes on businesses that can ill afford to spend resources on such an undertaking.

The Bill also introduces important and necessary measures to allow the police to enforce regulations on drone use. It must be recognised that 99% of drone operators in the UK do so in accordance with the rules and cause no nuisance to the rest of aviation. However, it must also be recognised that drones have the potential to be used against aviation maliciously; it is good that police will now have the powers to manage such incidents swiftly.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said about training, to accompany this new law, the Government must make provision to train police officers on the operational use of these new powers to ensure that they are effective in what the Government intend them to achieve, both practically and technically. Evidence-gathering is especially important if drone incursion incidents are to be investigated properly. Police need to be aware of the specific challenges that an aviation environment brings in this process, where a drone can be out of the operator’s line of sight.

Overall, the Bill is a great step forward and brings in much needed powers for the Secretary of State to direct a programme of modernisation. I hope the Government will take this forward—keeping, I trust, a principle of maximum access to lower airspace as a key priority when directing air navigation service providers to make changes.