Regional Airports

Lord Haselhurst Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Haselhurst (Saffron Walden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on securing this debate and on her speech, in which she made many important points. I was a little worried that her speech was becoming slightly political. She sounded somewhat like a cheerleader for Heathrow, so I hope she checked her script with the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I am also surprised that the debate has very much turned to APD—the debate could have been entitled that to give guidance to other colleagues who might have wanted to contribute on that subject. There is a serious problem with what the Scottish Government might do but, by and large, APD has not acted as too much of a brake on the increase in passenger traffic, which is at the heart of the problem of how we provide airport capacity.

Airport capacity is much easier to decide in opposition than in government. Looking back at what has happened over the past decades, the party in government is always the one that is in trouble trying to determine airport capacity, whereas the parties in opposition are freer to comment. The problem with airports, and our country as a whole has never been good with big projects—we agonise over them, and over the consequences in the immediate area where their impact is most felt—is that we struggle because people say, “Of course we want air travel, but we don’t need an airport just near us, thank you very much, because of the disadvantages that come with it for the rest of the year.” It is essential that an island country such as ours has good airport connectivity. Politics does not help, because one party comes in and has to look at airport connectivity more realistically, and then that party goes out. No one is sure whether a policy conceived in one Parliament will be continued in another.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s point about politics, but does he agree that the point of the independent airports commission, which the Government spent £20 million constructing, was to come up with a viable plan for the whole UK? The commission has made that recommendation, so is it not incumbent on the Government to say whether they support that decision?

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

One might think that, but the reality is that it depends on what the commission says. The majority recommendation of the 1968 Roskill commission was rejected by the then Government, and the minority recommendation, which was accepted by the Government of 1970, was rejected by the incoming Government in 1974. Such recommendations do not have a very good record.

I will say a little more about the Davies commission before I conclude. We are beset by the division between the capital city and the rest of the United Kingdom, and I find that the term “regional airports” somehow implies second division—it is like talking about the premiership and the championship in football—and that regional airports are somehow different or less good. I am a northerner, and at one stage I represented a Greater Manchester seat. I was very pro the development of Manchester airport, but we have never yet exploited the regional airports to their full. At the moment, there is an urgent need to do so, because they have usable capacity.

Of course I do not want to decry London’s importance to our country, but I think that we do not extol the virtues of the rest of the country. I find the concept of the northern powerhouse exciting. I acknowledge that Government after Government over the past 50 or 60 years have tried to decrease the emphasis and pressure on London and the south-east, but we have never succeeded. There is a still a net drift to the south-east, and it is unhealthy for our country.

A point that has not yet been covered in this debate is the difference between hub and point-to-point. Where the Davies commission falls short is that it recommends a hub airport in London, but then says, “Oh, but we can’t have a fourth runway.” Even a third runway puts us way behind the competition in the rest of Europe. If we are really to have a hub airport, it must have the necessary capacity. Figures suggest that Heathrow’s domestic connectivity with three runways will decline, not improve, because the more profitable long-haul routes will steadily displace domestic services.

We must make more use of the spare capacity in the rest of the country, recognising that there are aircraft types being developed now that encourage the growth of point-to-point services from many of the airports in our country. I hoped that this debate would concentrate on that more than it has so far.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Vaz. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for securing this debate. Obviously, we are all here to pitch for our local airports, and as usual I am pitching for Prestwick, the UK’s clear-weather airport with a long runway. We have a train station in the airport; what we do not have is a single flight to London. We are obstructed from applying for a public service obligation or the connectivity fund by the 60-minute rule—we are within 60 minutes of Glasgow.

This debate opened with a discussion of Heathrow versus Gatwick. The posters that used to be outside the tube entrance referred to a fantastic surge for the whole of Britain. To us in the very northern powerhouse, Heathrow is almost on the south coast. Therefore, unless whatever airport is chosen has protected routes for domestic airlines, there will be no benefit to the rest of the country.

I would also pick up the mention of point-to-point by the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). Part of the reason for the obstructed capacity in the hubs of Heathrow and Gatwick is that lots of us who live in a totally different place are made to fly through those airports. We do not want to be here; we do not want to go through Heathrow or Gatwick. We want to go point-to-point, but the number of those flights has diminished.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

I thank the hon. Lady for allowing me to intervene on that point, which I was unable to develop as fully as I would have liked within the time limit. The development of the Airbus A350 aircraft and the Boeing 787 opens up the possibility that an aeroplane that can fly distance with 250 passengers rather than 400 could be economically viable. That is an exciting possibility.

[Dr Whitford]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention.

We tend to talk about the business flyer coming into London, and there are certainly plenty of business flyers in my region who would welcome a flight from Prestwick into London, but we also need to start thinking the other way around, as a previous speaker said, about tourism coming in. I would like us to think about the smaller regional airports, which are often in areas of great attractiveness and beauty that are tourism hotspots. For someone sitting in the middle of Europe deciding whether to go for their holidays to southern Ireland, Northern Ireland or Scotland, it is a no-brainer. With 9% VAT and no air passenger duty in the Republic of Ireland, the difference in the cost of a fortnight’s holiday is vast. Unless people are coming to visit family, they will always go to southern Ireland instead of any of us. It is not just Northern Ireland that loses; it is other picturesque areas such as the lakes, Scotland and the mountains in Wales.

It is important that we have some kind of strategy for developing the smaller regional airports. APD is one of the biggest barriers; that is what all the smaller regional airports feed back. Instead of just saying, “It’s not fair if Scotland gets to change it,” we must campaign to cut or remove APD across the country. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggested that the growth in GDP would compensate. I know that there would be a time lag, but it would bring jobs into areas where there are often no other jobs.

Although we suffer from the 60-minute rule for being close to Glasgow, being on the south-west coast of Scotland, we can sell ourselves as a golf area—we have the Open this year—and a coastal area. Sailing is one of our biggest tourist industries. People can fly straight into the area that they want to visit. I am sure that there are other small airports in the UK that would like to offer the same.

While we discuss Heathrow versus Gatwick and business coming into and out of London, it is important that the Government have a strategy to support the development of tourism and the smaller regional airports. Another block to that is our 20% VAT rate on hospitality and tourism, versus 9% in southern Ireland. The areas that are strongest in tourism often do not have other industries; that applies right across the UK. There are Members from all parties who live in more rural areas where tourism is being held back by VAT and APD. They are taxes to raise funds, but they are stultifying the local economy. I call for a tourism strategy for the United Kingdom, and it should include smaller and larger regional airports.