Air Travel: Disabled Passengers

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to see the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, in his place fulfilling his duties as a Government Whip, having so recently been introduced to the House. We look forward to seeing much more of him.

What we are talking about here is a fundamental issue of equality and we clearly have to do something about it. I shall not speak for long on the issue; we have heard moving contributions from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Ludford. The question is: what are the Government doing about it?

In the case of air travel, this is obviously primarily an international issue, so there is the difficult question of how one enforces standards across the EU, with the US and across the world as a whole, but there is no excuse for the poor treatment of people with disabilities on public transport in our own country. We have to do better than we are at present. The numerous reports of problems are really unanswerable.

What are the Government doing to monitor compliance with the relevant domestic legislation? In the case of airlines, is this something that they regard as the CAA’s responsibility and therefore the department does not have to do much, or is the department itself taking these questions seriously? If it is, what in the near future is it planning to do about it?