Open Skies Agreement (Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord McNally Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 26th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. We recently worked together, with the Minister, on the Space Industry Bill and I am pleased to return to aviation matters. Quite a few years ago, I visited Atlanta in the United States. That city was booming at the time and I met one of the chief architects of its success at City Hall. I asked him what had promoted Atlanta’s tremendous resurgence. He confessed that it helped to have the world headquarters of Coca-Cola there, but the really big decision they took was to campaign for, and succeed in, getting Atlanta made one of the United States’ airports. He then said something which has always stuck in my mind. Airports are a bit like the railhead in the old west. Wherever the railway came to an end, a town grew up and economic activity took place. That is what airports do today: they are engines of economic growth. The future of our airports and the traffic they can carry is extremely important.

I want to put this debate in context. Some 60 years ago, the late, great Peter Sellers mocked the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, with a speech that consisted completely of meaningless clichés. The most famous of these was,

“this is not the time for vague promises of better things to come”,

and then proceeded to give vague promises of better things to come. Today, that is not an amusing piece of satire, but the standard response from Ministers. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, will forgive me if I take for an example the reply which she gave to a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, about how we intended to assure equivalent air safety standards with the EU in the event of discontinuation of membership of the European Aviation Authority. She said:

“The Government is considering carefully all the potential implications arising from the UK’s exit from the EU, including the implications for continued or discontinued participation in the European Aviation Safety Agency. It is the Government’s intention to maintain consistently high standards of aviation safety once we have left the EU. As part of the exit negotiations the Government will discuss with the EU and Member States how best to continue cooperation in the field of aviation safety and standards”.


As I say, vague promises of better things to come.

On Monday, Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the CBI, called for a greater sense of urgency in the Brexit talks to give clarity to companies that will otherwise need to trigger alternative plans, including moving jobs and investment offshore. Earlier this week, I attended a future technology showcase promoted by Rolls-Royce, where similar pleas for certainty were made.

Earlier this week, the CEO of JP Morgan warned that the lack of certainty and direction threatened jobs in financial services and a similar warning has come from the creative industries sector. We are too near the precipice for vague promises of better things to come to be a response to these cries of distress from almost every sector of industry.

We all know why the Government continue with the meaningless mantra of Brexit means Brexit, because if the Prime Minister ever tries to put flesh on the bone of her Brexit strategy, the choke chain on which she is held by the hard Brexit fundamentalists in her party is quickly yanked, Mr Rees-Mogg is wheeled out and talks of a leadership bid are reactivated. In any kind of rational world, the Government would rush to embrace this Bill as a means of getting ahead of the curve by giving certainty to this very important sector.

The excellent House of Lords Library briefing for this Bill cites IATA that in 2015 the aviation sector contributed £55 billion to the UK’s gross domestic product and that it supports nearly 1 million jobs.

When I was a lad, I worked at Blackpool Tower circus. However, I will not tell noble Lords what my job was. The Government’s Brexit negotiations look more and more like one of the acts I used to see at the circus where a performer would spin more and more plates on the end of a stick. Keeping the plates spinning is difficult at the best of times, but it becomes almost impossible when parts of the Conservative Party and the Cabinet are quite happy to see them come crashing to the floor.

A successful aviation policy is crucial to Britain’s economic future. My noble friend has made a practical suggestion in this Bill, which shows a way forward for this important sector. If we can keep this plate spinning, it will benefit us all.