Drones: Consultation Response

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her repetition of the Statement. I see it promises further action but unfortunately when I look at the detail I see no clear action specified, except the five-kilometre rule. It seems to me it merely says that there will be more meetings and discussions; there is no specific action in the Statement.

Does the Minister accept that the Secretary of State has a personal responsibility for the safety of operations, particularly at Gatwick, Heathrow and the other major airports? The whole concept of a good safety environment is where one individual can be held personally responsible. In the case of aviation, we have several safety systems but, at the end of the day, somebody has to be responsible. Is it her view that the Secretary of State has this personal responsibility? Does he also have a personal responsibility to the many passengers disrupted because of this incident? I believe that in excess of 100,000 passengers had their travel disrupted by this event.

The present regulations in relation to 400 feet and one kilometre are pathetic. When I was both a private and a professional pilot, if I got within one, five, 10, perhaps even 15 kilometres of Heathrow or Gatwick without direct permission to do so, I would have been prosecuted, paid a hefty fine and had my licence removed. The idea that a kilometre is of any value is absurd, and there has to be a serious question mark over five kilometres.

I note that the Statement acknowledges the wider challenge with prisons and infrastructure, and I am pleased that account will be taken of that—but we have known about this risk for many years. I believe there was an incident at Gatwick as far ago as July 2017 and BALPA, the pilots’ union, has been pointing out the potential hazards of drones for a number of years. Why was there not a plan? Why was there not legislation? The noble Baroness and I spent many happy hours together at the beginning of 2018. We did space; we did ATOL; we did vehicle technology; we did lasers. There was every opportunity to squirrel some legislation on drones into those Bills, and indeed I made an informal offer to her predecessor that we would co-operate if the Government had something to bring forward. Some basic legislation could have been introduced.

Is it the DfT’s view that Gatwick Airport Ltd met its responsibilities? Does it not have a general responsibility for the safety of its passengers? Does it not have a general responsibility to plan in some depth for when things go wrong?

For part of my career, I was responsible for the passengers on the London Underground. We would respond to any risk by making plans immediately to see how we could mitigate those risks and then we would develop those plans. The mitigation, where practical, would be introduced straightaway. Indeed, in the early 1990s we developed plans to evacuate the Underground very quickly. When in 1992 we found incendiaries on trains, we were able to get the people out within something like 10 minutes. I have to admit that we did not have a plan to then restart the Underground, and it was not a good day for our passengers—but at least they were alive and well. Does the Secretary of State accept that he should have had in place, or caused to be in place, a plan? Does he accept that, if a plan does not exist, it should now?

I assume that the new powers will increase police activity and responsibility. Will there be sufficient police resources to make this practical?

The issue of drones has been with us for years, and in my view it has been handled chaotically. This is symptomatic of the whole of HMG at the moment. When will this Government get a grip?

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, at last we have some sort of response from the Government on the issue of drones, which, as the noble Lord emphasised, we have discussed repeatedly and urged the Government to take action on. The only positive thing that can be said about the Gatwick incident is that it involved massive economic and personal disruption but not death or injury, which it could have.

There are now millions rather than thousands of drones in the UK. The Gatwick incident ruined travel plans for 140,000 people. In 2017, there were 93 near misses between drones and planes, and 3,500 incidents involving drones were reported to the police, concerning people’s safety and their privacy. These are large figures: this is not a marginal activity. It paints a picture of a big problem, but the Government have been horribly complacent and have dithered and delayed. The consultation that the Minister referred to finished in September, but we have the response only now and—if I dare suggest it—had we not had the Gatwick incident, I do not think it would have come out now.

I understand that action was deferred because of the pressures of Brexit, but the Government have allowed themselves to be distracted from a very important issue. The new regulations that were introduced last year proved in the Gatwick incident to be inadequate, ineffective and unenforceable. The police clearly did not have the right equipment, and I suggest that the dramatic tension of the Gatwick incident turned to farce when the police suggested they were not even sure that there had been a drone, or that it could have been their drone that people were seeing.

The Government’s proposals today are welcome, but they are far too vague. We need action beyond legislation because, as the noble Baroness said, the legislation—whatever it was—was ignored. I would like to press the Minister on the timescale for these proposals. When does she think new legislation will get through this House, given the very crowded schedule?

The Gatwick incident indicated that both the police and the Army did not have the right equipment to hand to deal with drones. That is despite the fact that some of the equipment we are talking about was invented and manufactured in Britain. Will the Minister assure us that this equipment is now being rapidly rolled out to both the police and the Army? I read that it is being purchased by airports but it is important that the police and the Army carry out the appropriate exercises so that they know how to respond—they clearly did not know how to respond prior to Christmas. Obviously, that will require additional resources. I would like some reassurance from the Minister that the Government will provide those.

For satirists, the Department for Transport is the gift that keeps on giving. Over the Christmas break alone, we had the ferry company with no ferries, the drone incident with possibly no drones and today we had the traffic jam with not enough lorries. The Secretary of State said on television with unconscious irony before Christmas that the drone incident was the first time this had happened in the world and the first time there had been disruption for days at an airport. That is because the action was not taken, because the equipment was not there and the police and the Army were not prepared. It is not the first time that a drone has disrupted an airport across the world. Unfortunately, this was our world first and it is not one that we want to see repeated.