Aviation: UK Civil Aviation

Lord Soley Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, in congratulating my noble friend Lady Gibson on securing this important debate I want to move on to make a prediction, if I may, which is that in due course the Government will reverse their position on airport expansion in the south-east. It is a matter of time. I do not expect the current Minister to do it today because he will stick rigidly to the government line, which I have discussed with him a number of times, but increasingly the Government are concerned about it. They ought to have been concerned about it before making that foolish promise before the election not to expand Heathrow, as the problem for Britain is now acute. Amsterdam, in effect, is our hub airport. Frankfurt is taking all the work from India and China. Madrid is taking it increasingly from South America and will increasingly move it from North America, which is why British Airways will eventually move more of its operations there than it has already. The situation is really serious.

I would simply say to the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who to my mind has always had her head in the sand on this, that when I spoke at a meeting in her then constituency there were a couple of hundred people, mainly from the Green Party, the Liberal Party and the Conservatives. As she will know, I was not given a welcome when I was speaking in favour of the expansion of Heathrow but the chairman, to his infinite credit, suddenly asked everyone to indicate who had flown from Heathrow that year— and everybody put up their hands. That is the hypocrisy which lies behind this. I say to the noble Baroness and to other people, yes, we have to address the environmental issue—I will touch on that in a moment—but remember that all the polling in the 12 local authorities around Heathrow shows a much more divided opinion about whether people are in favour of or against expansion. Why is it divided fairly evenly? Precisely because so many people work at Heathrow: 76,000 on the airport and another 100,000 dependent on its remaining a premier hub airport. However, it is no longer a premier hub airport. It is great that Heathrow can fly you to seven British regional cities, but Amsterdam will fly you to 21.

People say to me, “Well, we are going to have the high-speed link”, but remember that the high-speed link is not coming until the end of the 2020s. Tell me what is environmentally good about producing millions of tons of concrete to create that line, each tonne requiring the production of one tonne of CO₂, and what is environmental about knocking 20 minutes off the journey time to Birmingham. I am in favour of the high-speed rail line, but do not kid yourself that it is an answer to the environmental issues or to the problem of airport expansion.

Let us come to the environmental issue. Aviation was slow to respond to the pressure. One of the things I said when, many years ago, I took on the job—which I no longer have—of campaign director for Future Heathrow was that unless people upped their game on the environmental issue, they would not win on this case. They needed to up it and they have. As I have reminded people before, we would not know half of what we know about climate change if it were not for the aerospace industry. How do your Lordships think we measure it, and why is Britain so advanced in climate change science? Because we have the aerospace industry, the second most advanced in the world, producing the technology that tells us about it. What is the answer? It is already happening. Most of our new airliners coming on-stream are better not only environmentally—much better in terms of fuel efficiency—but in terms of noise. I still have a room in London, not far from Kingston. When the A380 flies over my old constituency, where I have lived for 30-odd years, why is it so much quieter? You can hardly hear the A380 when it goes over, whereas you could really hear the old ones. They are getting quieter and more fuel efficient.

This is my final point. As the Minister knows, I referred him to the new developments in fuel. Algae is a hopeful one. Virgin airlines, New Zealand airlines, American Airlines, British Airways and a host of others are flying now with a fuel mix. They do not use kerosene. The noble Baroness is out of touch on this. Most of the United States Air Force in Afghanistan uses algae as a fuel in its aircraft. Why? It is because it has strategic needs for it. There are scientific answers to this problem, and if we do not use them we will throw thousands of people out of work just to satisfy some people who will want to go on flying and still complain about the noise or the pollution.