Severe Winter Weather

Lord Snape Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, yet again a noble Lord rightly raises the importance of Heathrow Airport and the fact that most of the time it is running at 98 per cent efficiency, along with the fact that we are not going to have a third runway at Heathrow. What we will do is to make Heathrow Airport more effective and more efficient.

[Lord Snape]

My Lords, will the Minister pay tribute to those staff, many of them manual workers and low paid workers, right across the transport industries, who have spent the past week or so working in extremely inclement weather to try to maintain some sort of service. To follow on from the point made by his noble friend Lord Dholakia, does he agree that the most irritating aspect of the delay and dislocation is not the fact that things go wrong, because we can all accept the case that they do, but the lack of information to passengers or customers, or whatever the industry likes to call them? Will he accept that industries such as the railway industry—I suspect that this is true of the aviation industry, too—whether publicly or privately owned, are overmanaged and undersupervised? The largely junior staff who have to face the ire of the public are no wiser about what is going on than the people concerned. Would he knock a few heads together to ensure that senior managers are there to make decisions and to face the travelling public when things go wrong?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, first, the noble Lord talked about manual workers working in the cold. These people are working outside in absolutely freezing conditions to keep transport equipment working, and I think we should all be very grateful to them. Yet again, another noble Lord has raised the issue of the lack of information about what transport services can do. Ministers are acutely aware of this problem; we are not happy about it. I also stress the point that we must not interfere at the moment but, when it is all over, we will be talking very closely with the transport industry to see what can be done in future so that passengers know what can be done.