Airports and Airlines: Staff

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I have heard my noble friend wax lyrical about the wonders of Bournemouth Airport, and there are many other airports like that around the country. I encourage everybody to look at those smaller airports; you often might get a better service.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness often says, as she said today, that this is for the private sector. Heathrow is ultimately a monopoly licensed by the state. There is not lots of competition out there; everything that is capable of managing significant international traffic is full. The Government are responsible for Heathrow’s performance. They are responsible for the common good; that is what Governments are for. They seem to agree with me: as of 12 July, the strategic risk group has met five times, the summer resilience group four times, and the ministerial border group four times. According to its chief executive, Heathrow is improving. This shows that the Government have intervened and had a benign effect. I congratulate them, but why did they not intervene sooner and save passengers from the misery they have suffered?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am incredibly happy to accept the congratulations of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. We have worked with the aviation sector incredibly hard to try to minimise the disruption that happened at half-term as we go into the summer period. He asked why it took so long, but we have been working on this for months. For example, we changed the law so that training could start before certain checks had been completed. We laid that statutory instrument on 29 April. Statutory instruments do not just appear in order to be laid; they are the subject of weeks of work. We have been working very closely with the sector, and the Civil Service has been working extremely closely and very hard on all these measures. As he said, they are having an impact.