Airports (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Rogan Excerpts

Friday 16th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogan]

My Lords, I absolutely emphasise to your Lordships’ House that this Bill is not particularly about connections to Northern Ireland, although I fully concede that it has the most effect in Northern Ireland, as we are the most affected. Someone once quipped that if providence had really intended man to fly, it would also have made it easier for him to get to the airport. Who among us has not fought through traffic and timetables to reach a gate in time, or felt the burning frustration of security, misplaced tickets or passports? Yet these are the misfortunes of the few—the trials and tribulations of modern life.

We are debating the plight not of the individual but of millions throughout the United Kingdom regions who are in danger of being debarred from the UK’s only hub airport at Heathrow by the vagaries of geography and aviation horse-trading. I admit that this threat is felt particularly keenly in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom’s most peripheral region and the one with the least access to Heathrow: no direct motorway link, no direct rail link and definitely no talk of a brand new high-speed rail link. No, the only practical way to get to Heathrow from Northern Ireland is a direct flight connection, something which the Bill seeks to protect in the interests of safeguarding national—national—air infrastructure.

Now, some, usually those trapped within the confines of the M25, have a tendency to suggest that we good folk banished to the fringes of the UK may like to access Heathrow via one of the south-east’s other airports: Gatwick, Stansted or even Luton. While I have nothing against any of the said airports, they are designed and geared to bring people to London, not to Heathrow. Providence may also have made it difficult for man to get to the airport, but to get from airport to airport is truly a task of Herculean proportions.

Getting to Heathrow matters, and here I speak from personal experience of my life outside this House. For the past few decades, I have had the pleasure of travelling the world on business, often to the Far East and further afield. Direct flights from Belfast to Heathrow make that possible. Without that connection, impediments to business start to mount, both in time and cost. Just how do you make a connection in Heathrow if you have first to locate and collect baggage from some other airport such as Gatwick, and then journey by cab or coach to Heathrow? That is not a pleasant prospect, but is one that I suppose I could endure—although I must admit it would probably hasten my retirement and deter me from taking every business opportunity that came my way that involved overseas travel.

More importantly, however, I am a creature trapped to some extent by habit. My ties to Northern Ireland are not purely rational. Emotion clouds my business judgment. Such influences do not weigh upon international business people looking for investment locations. Will they make the effort to visit locations in Northern Ireland when they are required to break their journey with, say, an overnight stay, and then onward travel to another regional airport before hopping on to another flight to Belfast? Some may well persevere, but some—indeed, many—will not.

Simply put, unplugging Northern Ireland’s connectivity with Heathrow disconnects the entire region from the global business community. Business people in Northern Ireland are all too aware of the pitfalls of losing access to our only hub airport on the mainland. The Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce has recently examined the benefits of that link in developing our regional economy’s benefits in three key areas from an international hub: trade, foreign direct investment and, increasingly, tourism. With reference to investment and trade, it is clearly no coincidence that employment hotspots in foreign-owned companies tend to be beside airports. In Northern Ireland, which is a small open economy that is dependent on external sales, one in 10 jobs rely upon foreign investment, and half of those companies can reach their home market only through a hub airport.

Increasingly, our economy is looking towards emerging markets for growth opportunities. However, the evidence is that UK business trades 20 times as much with countries that have daily flights than those with less frequent or no direct service. If we cannot access Heathrow, we will have difficulty accessing these markets. The corollary is that business leaders in the world’s fastest growing economies are being put off from investing in the UK because of a lack of direct flights. Two-thirds of business leaders in emerging economies believe that better air connections from their home countries to European hubs mean that they are more likely to do business there rather than in the UK. If we are having difficulty attracting investors to Heathrow’s natural hinterland, what chance the regions?

My noble friends Lord Laird and Lord Maginnis have alluded to the fact that tourism also remains a key growth area for the province, much helped by the recent and continued successes of Northern Ireland’s three golfing champions, and golfers worldwide now and in the future wanting to play more than ever on our world-renowned links courses that produce such winners. However, our tourist industry is still recovering from the shock and the sights of the Troubles, and has significant ground to cover if we are to match Scotland or the Republic of Ireland in tourism numbers. Over 11 million additional visitors to the United Kingdom are expected by 2021, and many of these will travel from emerging markets. If there is no direct link from our only UK hub airport, how many of these visitors will make the jump across the Irish Sea?

Central government rightly tells the regions that the days of handouts are over and the day of the hand-up has arrived. I am all in favour of that, but it is a two-way process. The Government need to do what they can to create a level playing field between the centre and the periphery. They need to interject to redress market failure. A national hub does not serve the entire nation. By that definition, it is no longer a national hub. That, to me, is a market failing, and I commend the Bill to the House as a means of redress.