Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 39. We had a very interesting conversation about this issue in Committee, but I will repeat it a little bit. Essentially, aviation is dangerous. There is a phrase that people in flying training always come across, that if God had meant men—and women, of course—to fly, He would have given them wings. And He did not, so flying is an uphill battle.

It is perhaps more accurate to say that flying is potentially dangerous. A failure in aviation safety can become a catastrophe. Very few passenger aircraft take off with fewer than 100 people on board, so any crash kills 100 or more people all in one moment. Simply flying the aircraft, of course, is quite straightforward. But the challenge in aviation is flying the aircraft while taking account of all the other issues—principal among these is weather. Weather in England can occasionally change very dramatically. The other issue is failure.

The essential issue that binds all these things together to make the pilot’s job very difficult is that you cannot park. With virtually any other sort of transport, if something is going wrong, you can stop and sort it out. The key imperative of flying an aeroplane is to make sure you do not become a glider. That really weighs on your soul as it approaches. It is that inability to take the problem away. You have to fly the aeroplane while accepting a weather forecast, which is very marginal. You are then listening for what is going to happen, and you have to think about your fuel. It is about bringing those things together for when you have a failure—an engine failure, for instance.

Pilots are very difficult to describe, but they certainly do not have a brain the size of a planet—they are reasonably ordinary people. How do they cope with this difficult environment? Through procedures and training. I have never flown an aeroplane with an engine on fire. In particular, I have never flown an aeroplane where the engine was on fire just as we took off. But when I was a professional pilot, I had to prove that I could do that twice a year in a simulator. That was just as a mere co-pilot. Training and procedures are what have turned something intrinsically dangerous into something that everybody now assumes is routinely safe.

What we are facing with this airspace reorganisation is really dramatic. The total concept is not to have navigation aids on the ground. The total process is to use GPS to know precisely where the aeroplane is and how high it is. That gives you a whole new set of flexibilities, which are mutually beneficial. Of course, the CAA and the airlines are doing it to achieve greater capacity, through the aeroplanes getting closer together, because you can now pick routes that are closer together and know that the aircraft is going to follow them. It is really very exciting.

The key thing is: who will have to cope with this when it goes wrong? The pilots. They are the ones who are best equipped to do so—not solely them; lots of people are involved, particularly on the technical side and in proving the integrity of the stuff. But the pilots will be at the centre of anything going on. While my amendment does not say “pilots”—it says “safety-critical professionals”, because I am told that it what it has to say—the whole point is that, just as consultation for people on the ground is important, it is important to take on board this group of people during the development of this.

I am reasonably confident that I will not move my amendment because, as many others have said during the passage of the Bill, the Minister has kindly spent time with me and colleagues debating this. Although it could be voted on, I think that before we get to that, the Minister will have said enough to satisfy me, to satisfy the other people who are concerned and to satisfy professional bodies—particularly those for pilots, but I have no doubt that the air traffic controllers will also want, properly, to give their two pennyworth. I believe that his words will be sufficiently helpful that I will not be forced to move the amendment.

[Baroness Bray of Coln (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to stress the importance of establishing a meaningful consultation with those communities directly affected by the likely expansion of flight paths and airports as a result of the Bill. I hope the Minister will give us an assurance that this important issue is recognised by the Government and can outline what plans they are developing for a genuine process to achieve this.

The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, contains some important proposals, and I will add a brief comment specifically about the necessary quality and depth of the consultation process. It should not be a one-off procedure to take place after expansion plans have already largely been settled. Communities need to be engaged from the outset, when options are still genuinely open. To be clear, while the expansion of flight paths is perhaps the main concern, there is also the likelihood that more flight paths will lead to busier airports, attracting more traffic on surrounding roads and greater pressure on local transport and public services. This must also be part of the consultation process.

There will of course be occasions when, having weighed up all the competing considerations, the Government, or the relevant authority, decide that an expansion should proceed despite local objections. That is always a possibility. But those affected communities will still deserve a clear explanation of why their concerns were outweighed by other considerations. This is essential if public confidence in the process is to be maintained. I look forward to hearing what assurance the Minister can give us today.

Railways Bill

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be the last Back-Bench speaker. We all know that at least it is almost over.

I am totally in favour of the Bill. It will create a much better situation and a much better structure than the one we have at the moment. There is a wonderful myth going through this debate that privatisation was a great success. It was not quite said in so many words but somehow, by involving the private sector, things changed massively and those were wonderful days. Of course, what they really were was an opportunity for financial manoeuvring. Privatisation, essentially, was a financial and operational failure.

If we go back to when it started, there was a company called Railtrack looking after the track. It started operating in April 1994 and initially had very good results. It borrowed money and the Government gave it various guarantees. It was sort of a proper company, in its legal structure, but it eventually fell apart in 2002. Out of it, we created another company called Network Rail in 2002. I do not think anybody actually got to the bottom of what sort of company that was. It clearly was not a proper plc and we lost sight of worrying about that, for some reason. But we were still in the European Union at that point and part of an organisation which I believe was called Eurostat.

On 1 November 2014, Eurostat said, “That’s a nationalised industry. All the money is guaranteed by government; all the subsidies come from government; all the rules and what it is supposed to do come from government. It’s a nationalised industry”. So we nationalised it and that was fascinating, because it was one of the biggest nationalisations ever. It cost the country £34 billion to transfer the guaranteed debt that Network Rail had at that point to the Treasury, and barely anybody noticed it. That is the sort of money the privatised railway consumed.

On the train operating companies—all those so-called wonderful companies—let us not lose sight of the fact that many of them failed. The state of play in May 2024 was that four of them were being operated by the Government through an organisation called the operator of last resort. I believe that one of the things this Bill will produce is much more clarity over money.

That may not be a happy experience, but I believe we will be in a much better place, because the best brains in the so-called privatised railways compete against each other to win the point on who is to blame or how to get the best paths—the debates on the timetable used to go on for 18 months or so. We will have a situation where the top people in Great British Railways will all be trying to achieve the same thing, and the top teams will share those objectives. I know, because I have done it: I spent 17 years in the railway business. You can have a publicly owned railway, and you can manage it. Obviously, you have to break it up into manageable chunks, but you can transmit a common objective throughout the organisation, and we did. Not only will the teams see the value of working together but workers will see the value of working together. My prediction is that everybody, particularly passengers, including disabled passengers—I am very sensitive to the case that has been made for a better handling of disabled passengers—will get a better deal, as well as the taxpayer.

I have two concerns. One is the level of consultation and involvement. If you go through the whole document from cover to cover, you will discover 34 clauses where the Secretary of State has decisive authority, 11 clauses where the Office of Rail and Road has decisive authority, and 10 where Great British Railways has decisive authority. There are six clauses where the Office of Rail and Road has consultative rights, and two where GBR has them. There are four clauses where GBR is expected to originate action, and at least one where ORR is similarly expected to do so. The whole consultation process is incredibly complex. It is possibly necessary, and perhaps inevitable, for it to be that complex, because of the multiple stakeholders, but it will create friction and noise. The most important set of skills that will be necessary in this new organisation will be for managing that diversity of consultation, and some of the best people in Great British Railways will be needed to manage those various relationships. Consultation is not a bad thing, but it needs to be very carefully managed.

Another problem with this organisation, which I put to the House, is that the money will become very clear. Operating railways is expensive. The only way for a railway to pay for itself is through very high volumes, and high volumes will work. Everything else, virtually everywhere in the world, has to be subsidised. We need to have a debate about what the railway does for us as a society, and we need to look at the real value it produces. We need to get away from the best speech and getting the best chunk of money out of the Treasury and get back to a consensus on the criteria that we need to measure that debate. With that hard financial reality on the one hand, and a unified organisation that can see the whole operation, with an absolute commitment in the top team to the passenger and to society, I believe this will be a success.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for his comments on my Amendment 61. I will speak to it only briefly, because it is pretty self-explanatory.

The legislation rightly gives some power to the Government to intervene and, in effect, act as arbiter when it comes to airspace redesign. Airspace redesign has taken much too long. It started when I was Secretary of State and now, nearly eight years later, we are still not close to bringing it to fruition, yet it is fundamental to the future of the aviation sector in this country. It will unlock extra capacity and use next-generation technology to enable us to provide more respite to communities that are affected by aircraft noise, even though the level of aircraft noise, in the world in which we live, has dropped enormously over the past generation.

The Government rightly believe that they need some degree of arbiter powers in this, but I do not think that they should have those powers just to say, “Right, that’s the decision”. There is an obligation there—nothing at great length, because we know that government consultations can last for ever, take months to be responded to and all the rest, but with a simple process saying, “Look, that’s what we’re going to do. Is there anything we haven’t thought of? Is there something we’re not quite getting right here?” I say to the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that the wording of the amendment is what it is, but I would expect pilots’ organisations, air traffic organisations and all the rest to be able to input a view on this point.

I would see this as being not an isolated consultation but a standard government consultation—a short, snappy one—simply so that the organisations and communities that have a vested interest can come forward and say, “There’s something you haven’t thought of. This is going to have an adverse effect that you haven’t thought about. You really shouldn’t be taking this decision”. It would be improper for that process not to exist where the Government have what is, in effect, a pretty absolute power of direction under the legislation as it is at the moment. I very much hope that the Minister will take that on board and perhaps look to include something of this kind on Report.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 60 to 62; I express a specific concern in my Amendment 62. I thought that I knew about the technology in this debate until I decided to brush up on it yesterday; I have spent most of my working hours since then getting up to date, to some extent.

The essence of the technology, which would allow a much more holistic review of airspace use, is that it is dependent not on aids on the ground but on global positioning systems. That gives great benefits, in terms of what it does for aviation, but I put it to the Committee that it also gives great benefits to those who are concerned about the environmental impact. If your route does not fit with that bit of society and there is a route that can fit with that bit of society, then, with the overarching technology, it can be changed. Up to this point, changing where aeroplanes go close to the ground has been totally dominated by the ground-based aids that they use to land.

The essence of my amendment—as an ex-BALPA shop steward, I thought that I had better represent my old team—is to get pilots involved in this consultation. They are going to face dramatic differences. One of the first things that I would say relates to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made the other day, which is that the planes can fly themselves. Normally, you have to drag the plane into the air then tell it to fly itself, and, when you get to the end, you actually have to make a few decisions. It is a very good theory; hopefully, when you press “flight nav” or something like that, that will happen.

The problem facing the modern pilot is that one of their most important tasks is to cope when there are system failures. There will be system failures. There are no big computer systems in the world that do not have system failures, as we all know to our cost. The problem is that the level of knowledge needed by the operative to cope with a system failure is very large but it is not often practised. It will, I am sure, follow the pilot’s standard of continuous checking. I have never flown an airplane with its engine on fire, but, when I was an airline pilot, I flew a plane with its engine on fire many times in a simulator. It was dramatic and great fun, but the whole essence here is that the systems delivering this will intrinsically and inevitably have failure modes early on. The crew are there to look after that, among all the other safety issues that they have to care about.

All the literature on the impact on pilots of a very different system says that it will require if not an almost completely new licence then certainly a substantial licence endorsement to equip pilots to look after these systems. How can their views and their wisdom be taken into account? They are the only people who can envisage the situation, together with a very dramatic change in standards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have a lot of amendments in this group, but I assure noble Lords that a number of them are duplicative, because they seek to replace “document” with “guidance” wherever it appears in the clause. None the less, it will take me a moment to go through my amendments.

We are dealing here with the CAA’s rule-making powers. It is worth reminding noble Lords that the first part of the Bill is about consumer protection and the CAA’s role as the direct enforcer of consumer protection powers. This is a very different part of the Bill. It is about making rules. It gives the CAA huge, unprecedented powers to make rules, including ones that may have criminal penalties, and it does so with practically no supervision—certainly not by Parliament and, as far as I can make out, very little by the Minister either. That is what these amendments are intended to deal with.

The first one probes why it is necessary for the Civil Aviation Authority to have rule-making powers at all. Until recently, the rules it made emanated from the European Union; in fact, they often came through from the ICAO, trickling down in that fashion. But, for all their faults, regulations made by the European Union were not made in secret. One could see what was happening. We had, here in your Lordships’ House, a committee that reviewed regulations and statutory instruments relating to European Union legislation.

All these rules were made under air navigation orders, which are a form of statutory instrument—again, it is a parliamentary process. In future, neither will apply. There will be no scrutiny whatever. But, since these rules have been made by statutory instrument and similar in the past, a question arises: why should they not be made in that fashion in the future?

The Minister said—or I may have read this somewhere in some of the supporting documentation—that there is a backlog of 100 or so of these that have to be got through, and that using parliamentary time for this purpose is not appropriate. It is disturbing to think that there is a backlog, but that is not an excuse in itself. After all, we are all being made to sit here in Grand Committee for five hours rather than four, and for three hours on a Tuesday morning. There is no lack of parliamentary time for considering statutory instruments. We are all being held to the last, and we work very hard. There is no excuse that there is no room for them when the Chamber is full of debates on subjects such as tackling child poverty, rather than legislating, which is what it should be doing while we are in here. We will carry on in here; we will do the statutory instruments and put the time in, so there is no problem there.

At an earlier stage—I cannot remember whether it was on our first day in Committee or at Second Reading—the Minister said he had a trump card. He said that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee thought that it was appropriate for this regulator-led rule-making approach to be adopted. But he did not read the next sentence:

“Inherent in the proposition is that CAA made rules would be highly technical in nature”.


But this Bill does not limit the CAA to making rules that are highly technical in nature. It does not limit it simply to implementing ICAO powers.

In fact, this has caused concern to another committee of your Lordships’ House: the Constitution Committee. The chairman of that committee, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, has written to the Minister saying among other things that:

“This Bill strengthens the secondary law-making and rule-making powers of both the Civil Aviation Authority and the Secretary of State”


and that this

“will, by the nature of negative parliamentary approval of secondary legislation, be subject to minimal parliamentary oversight. We are concerned that this will result in a scrutiny gap”.

We will wait to hear, but so far the Minister has had no answer to that.

So my first question is: why should we make such a dramatic change at all? Secondly, if there is going to be a rule-making power of this character, the Secretary of State should publish the underlying principles. It is not all given to the Secretary of State: it is for the Secretary of State, following the enactment of this Bill, to decide which rule-making powers are given over. There is no limit in the Bill on what those powers are. The second amendment, Amendment 77, would require at least a statement of principles, in advance of enactment of the Bill, as to what basis the Secretary of State is going to use for deciding which powers should be transferred over into this new process. Amendment 79 would require consultation by the Civil Aviation Authority when making rules. There is no requirement for consultation in the Bill.

Amendment 81 in my name probes why the Secretary of State’s priorities and objectives statement is described as a “document” rather than “guidance”. As I said at Second Reading, this is the oddest part of the Bill. It says that the Secretary of State is allowed to issue a document that gives guidance to the CAA on what the Government’s priorities are in relation to rule-making. The word “document” is used and the word “guidance” is avoided. I fear that that is a deliberate choice. The word “guidance” has a legal weight to it; we understand what guidance is in relation to the action of public bodies and how they are bound to it, but we do not understand what obligation a public body has to pay attention to a document issued by the Secretary of State. Does it have the weight of guidance? What weight does it have? I am trying to replace it with the word “guidance” so that we have clarity.

Then we come down to this further point: the Bill prohibits the Secretary of State from issuing this “document”, which I would change to “guidance”, without the agreement of the Civil Aviation Authority. This is truly remarkable. I do not think that I have ever come across an example where a regulated body acting on behalf of the Secretary of State can refuse to accept the document or guidance that the Secretary of State is going to issue. I raised the point at Second Reading, and the Minister made no defence, although no doubt he is better prepared now—but what could it possibly be, and how could your Lordships possibly agree to such a thing?

There are other matters here. For example, on Amendment 98. The Bill states that the Civil Aviation Authority “may” publish a consolidated set of rules so that people can look at them. That is a good idea, but it would be a better idea if the Bill said that it “must” publish a set of consolidated rules. How could this be left to the discretion of the Civil Aviation Authority? Then the Bill has the cheek to say that anybody who is so impertinent as to ask for a printed copy of that set of rules can be charged a fee, with no limit placed on the fee or on how that might be used. My amendment would take away the fee.

This whole section gives new and unprecedented powers. There is no justification given for them and it is very difficult to understand why the Government would want to do this. I have respect for the Civil Aviation Authority because, as a safety regulator, it is of the highest quality. It is in the box of good regulators; there are bad regulators, but the CAA is not a bad regulator. I do not like to say something disobliging about the CAA, but it seems that this Bill has been written as an enormous power grab by the Civil Aviation Authority. It muscled its way into the digital markets Act in relation to consumer protection, and now it is taking over a whole swathe of rule-making powers. I just remind the Minister that, when we voted for Brexit, one thing we voted for was that rules should not be made by unelected bureaucrats. This Bill moves from a system where there is some scrutiny and understanding of the process and some parliamentary scrutiny of how these rules are made, to one where they are all being made by unelected bureaucrats, without supervision. It is a retrograde step, and not one that we should support. I beg to move.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 78 in this group. I shall only say a few words, and I suppose the very few words I could say are that, if we are to get new powers that may affect pilots, we wish to be consulted. In many ways, it is as simple as that. Hopefully, the Minister can give us a better feel for what this piece of legislation will be used for. I find myself almost agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. If we are to have powers where we are not clear what they will be used for and what their extent will be, there are two sensible outcomes: either you do not bother with the powers, or you have an appropriate set of checks and balances to make sure that the powers are sensible.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Moylan has done the Committee a service by bringing to our attention some of the conflicts within the Bill in terms of rule and regulation-making powers. I should add that I am a member of the Delegated Powers Committee. I have previously been a member of the Delegated Powers Committee, but I was not a member at the time that its report on this Bill was made, for reasons that I explained on Tuesday—I was not a Member of the House at the time.

This a highly complex subject and complex field, and it is very easy to get tangled up in it. Some of the principles that my noble friend has elucidated are extremely valid. The other point is that one perhaps needs to be careful what one wishes for, because I could see hundreds of very technical regulations—technical in the technological sense of the term—coming before your Lordships’ House for scrutiny. None the less, my noble friend has made the particular point around the Government choosing which regulatory process to utilise, and I think there are some real difficulties in that.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for his very interesting take and amendments in this area.

I want to come to pilot training. I support the noble Lord, Lord Barber, who, as a former trade union negotiator for British Airways cabin crew, worked very closely with our BALPA colleagues for many years—and that continues. I agree with what he said.

My ex-husband trained at Hamble—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, will remember—and when I joined the airline industry, our pilots had come from the RAF or the schemes run by BEA, BOAC and then British Airways. Other pilots went to Oxford Flying School, Prestwick or various other places. It was always a costly venture for any pilot not part of the state-owned airline industry as such. But we have moved on, and the noble Lord is right to say that it is fine to complain but we need some action.

As the noble Lord said, it costs in the region of £100,000 to train somebody up to be a commercial pilot. That is an extremely good investment for an airline but, as has been mentioned, British Airways and Jet2 appear to be the only airlines prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

These loans, if they come as loans, guarantee that those pilots will pay them back over the years. Unlike certain students, perhaps, I do not think they are going to disappear into the long grass. So it behoves government to start to look at a student loan-type scheme. Industry and the airlines need to step up, and those complaining of a shortage of pilots coming forward need to look at the schemes run by BA and Jet2 and start to provide some incentive and some action to deal with a possible shortage over the next few years.

This is a fantastic profession and those young men and women who go into it will have a rewarding career until their mid-60s. I think it behoves all of us to do everything we can. While we encourage youngsters to go to university, this is a profession that really needs to be supported. We now need to get outside the box and start to look at ways to get in those young, enthusiastic people who will be our brilliant pilots of the future.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

I will go next because of the generality of the subject. I find myself in the peculiar position of agreeing with people for once. I, broadly speaking, share the general direction of the noble Lord, Lord Barber, the specific objection of the noble Lord, Lord Davies—I remember well the joys of the instrument rating—and the general direction of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster.

I have a particular interest in this because I was in the airline industry for 22 years. For about eight of those I was a pilot and during that time, thanks to Norman Tebbit, of all people, I was a pilot shop steward. So I am used to this debate but, peculiarly, my future career in the airline industry was as an airline manager, and I was involved with pilot recruitment. Pilot recruitment and numbers since the Second World War have been chaotic. There was not really any serious civil aviation before the Second World War. The expansion of aviation during that period created a situation where there were pilots and aircraft available after the end of the war. Along came, thanks to the Soviet Union, the Berlin airlift, which was a great provoker of civil aviation in the UK, as small firms all over the place set up and participated in that operation between June 1948 and May 1949.

That was the beginning of a period where the Great British public discovered that the sun in Benidorm was actually rather better than the sun in Skegness. There was, generally speaking, a boom from the early 1950s onwards. The nationalised airlines, BEA and BOAC, woke up to the fact that this pool of free pilots was going to run dry and they created the training facility at Hamble. It trained 2,000 pilots over the 24 years it was in operation, including me.

More recently, we have a shortage, and we have worries about how we are going to solve that shortage. It has been funded in the sense of creating pilots by self-funding pilots. People talk of £100,000. Frankly, I do not think you get a lot of change out of £130,000. That has meant it has been an occupation for people who have access to £130,000 pounds. I hate to tell the Committee this, but a lot of people do not have that access to funds. BA has come forward with a scheme over the past couple of years, and we are right back to where I came from—that is, the airlines paying for pilots. I am slightly narked, because its programme is entirely free, whereas I had to pay back £1,000 after being employed ,and that is about £24,000 in today’s money, but good luck to them.

We just cannot have the chaos of the marketplace, including how rich your parents are, determining the supply of pilots. We need a holistic analysis of where we are, what the demand is and what the training capability is. We need to worry about the components of it, the specialist training that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, talked about, and the fundamental training, of which general aviation is such an important part. We need to at least have a situation where somebody sees the total picture, and that should be the CAA.

The amendments in this group basically say that the CAA should pick up that responsibility and create a report every year, or whatever. When see the whole picture, the industry can more sensibly react to it—the CAA can push these things, to an extent, and British Airways can help with this—which could lead to a smooth situation that we have not had since 1945. That is why I support the two amendments that have been spoken to, as well as my own amendment, which says that we should charge the CAA with creating the data picture that will become the basis for future pilot supply.

Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [HL]

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been a Back-Bencher for two years, and in that period I have rather assumed that I bored enough people during the previous 14 years, so I have not been making too many speeches. I have a Select Committee and I do my duty there, and most important of all, I vote as my Whip instructs me. However, it was put to me when this Bill came up that, given my background, I had better participate, so the real reason I am speaking now is, frankly, just to say that I am going to participate.

I will give just a little information on my background. I spent 22 years in civil aviation. I spent about eight years as a pilot—not a captain, I am afraid, but a mere co-pilot; status matters in that industry. I spent 16 years as a manager, and very early on in my career I spent three years as a pilot shop steward. Since I spent the rest of my career in one management role or another, it was fascinating to listen to managers talking about strikes, and to recognise that they did not have the faintest idea how trade unions work and the emotions involved in making decisions. But enough of that. That was a fun career.

I have read the Bill and the notes from cover to cover, and frankly, I think it is a pretty good Bill. Generally speaking, I will be supporting it, and perhaps in places defending it. I received a briefing from my old trade union, BALPA, and three points stood out which I intend to explore. Unfortunately, however, the noble Lord, Lord Barber, got the same briefing, so I do not have a lot of original things to say. I will also make a point or two about some of the issues the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised in the debate on the King’s Speech.

Flying is relatively straightforward. I am not talking about the disastrous sort of dangerous flying that the noble Baroness, Lady Antrobus—I think it was her; I am not good with names—does. I admire her doing it and am deeply jealous, but, in civil aviation, the flying of the aeroplane is pretty straightforward. This does not mean that it is not fun. Racing down a runway at 200 mph and gently pulling back the control column, persuading 320 tonnes of aeroplane to follow you into the air, has a rather special excitement about it that is matched only by getting the damn thing back on the ground eight hours later.

One thing that has not come up in this debate is that flying is dangerous. It is very dangerous, for a series of reasons. Perhaps the single most significant one is that you do not have little accidents in aviation. When they happen, they are very significant. We have not had any in the UK for several years, but, in the rest of the world, things have not been going well. Aeroplanes have been crashing.

It is important to understand why flying is dangerous. It is not about getting the aeroplane into the air or getting it back on to the ground in those final few feet; it is about all the other things that get in the way. One of the most important hazards is the weather. Way back, I was a private pilot. That is great fun but, if the weather is bad, the key skill of a private pilot is deciding not to fly. In civil aviation, you want to fly right up to the edge of what is possible. You want to fly when there are thunderstorms, when there is fog and when there are gale force winds. But there are other aircraft, and those aircraft have lots of people in them. You have to not fly into them.

Then there are technical problems. It is no good saying, “They’re all right now”. They are all right only because of the considerable efforts that regulators and airlines put into assuring that those technical problems do not become disastrous. There are also communications problems. London has been mentioned. One of the privileges of London is that it is an international centre, but this means that communications are not always that straightforward—and when they go wrong, they can go very wrong.

Lurking in the background is the terrain, especially when you cannot see it at night or when it is covered in fog, in snow and so on. That is the challenge. That is what makes airline operations important, and that is where the pilot comes in. The pilot is in the business of flying these wonderful, modern aeroplanes and coping with all these hazards, which, as we have seen in recent years, all crop up sooner or later.

As my noble friend Lord Barber said, in essence, the three areas that BALPA brought out were: pilot involvement in airspace design; the CAA rules; and the issue of pilot numbers. The first two—airspace design and the pilot rules—must involve pilots and other critical workers, but especially pilots because, without being there, it is almost impossible to appreciate not only each problem individually but how they crowd together. Accidents happen usually—almost exclusively, I would say—when two or three of the issues come together; then a lot of people die. So it is crucial that workers, particularly pilots, are involved in a consultative fashion in airspace design and in the whole issue of the rules so that the redesigned airspace and the rules are workable and acceptable.

BALPA also raised the issue of the pilot workforce, which has been pretty chaotic ever since the Second World War. Broadly speaking, in the early part of that period, the Royal Air Force produced pilots. For many years, the Royal Air Force was a pilot-rich environment. Of course, there are fewer and fewer pilots in the Royal Air Force now, but there are more and more technologies. We are talking about fighter aeroplanes and jet fighters, which carry a swarm of drones with them. Twenty years ago, they tried to carry a swarm of aeroplanes with them, but no longer. It is about single people, and fewer pilots are being produced. When BEA and BOAC had a monopoly, they saw that coming. It was their job to create pilots, and they did so. I was a product of that creation. It all happened in a place called Hamble, and then in larger places.

Then came the issue of who should pay. I was lucky in my university career. We had to pay a mere £1,000. In retrospect, that does not sound like a large amount of money but, if you apply inflation, it is around £27,000. More recently, though, individuals have had to pay. The real cost of achieving the qualification that will make a pilot employable by an airline is £115,000-plus, and there is no scheme of loans. Whatever you think of the student loan scheme, at least it is there and is automatically available. Frankly, if you wanted to become a pilot in recent decades, it was a good idea to be born to an affluent family. More recently, I have to commend my old employer, which has at long last gone back to training its own pilots.

I want to pick up the issue of secondary legislation. Concern has been expressed that there will not be enough parliamentary involvement once the Bill has been passed. I have seen the other side of that, I am afraid. For 14 years, I was Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition’s odd-job Front-Bench Peer. I used to pick up transport, defence, Treasury matters, and so on. You would batter away at Bills, and the one thing you went for was, “Let’s get some more affirmative orders. Let’s get the Government to come back and get involved in this piece of legislation”. Over and again, I was punished for that. I would end up in the Moses Room with three other Peers: the Government Minister, the Government Minister’s sidekick, and a Lib Dem. Is that really involvement by Parliament?

The problem with our secondary legislation processes is that, in the Commons, the Government always have a majority, but, in this House, there is a constitutional crisis when we vote down an affirmative resolution. It is much more important to get the involvement of the people who know what they are talking about—the trade unions, the owners, the operators, and so on—as well as, of course, customer representation, especially in the important area of disability.

I will be looking out, as this develops, to see that we use secondary legislation, affirmative secondary legislation in particular, only where it will add real value, because I have to tell noble Lords that, in my 14 years of experience—including 40 or 50 appearances in the Moses Room in a year when we were going through Brexit—secondary legislation adds no significant value. We must look for a much wider view of how to input things and have checks and balances.

I hope that we have a good time working through this Bill. I hope that we do not spend too much time on it, going late into the night. The Bill in general is sound. I hope that we fine-tune it, rather than ruin it with unnecessary amendments.

Open Access Rail Services

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has a good point. The regulator necessarily needs to give a successful open access application sufficient time to recover the significant costs of rolling stock. Many of these arrangements run for at least 10 years, and it would not be right to curtail those activities. Serious investment has been carried out to allow them. What happens in the future we can debate during the passage of the railways Bill, but for the moment those open access operations that have 10-year or similar periodicity will continue.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I spent 32 years of my career working in the public sector and came to understand that the objective was the needs of the customer, value for the taxpayer, protection of the environment and having regard for society in general. Open access, on the other hand, tends to create conflict, encourages gaming the regulator and inhibits evolutionary change. Will the Minister exercise extreme caution when considering open access bids?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I listened to my noble friend with care and respect because he has significant prior experience in running railways. He is right that we should be careful, because we are dealing with only 1% of the passengers and the rest of the network has 99%. We should be careful to allow people to innovate where innovation is a good thing and where there is space for it. We should not allow innovation where it is not a good thing, costs taxpayers money and cannot be accommodated on a very constrained network.

Great British Railways

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for tabling this debate. Much of his involvement took place in the mid-1990s. At that time, he was my ultimate boss, and I became the ultimate student of this operation, in which, on the basis of the somewhat bizarre writing of an excellent letter, we could have been involved as well.

My simple answer to the Question is that open access should be phased out as quickly as reasonably practical. It is a bit of a shock to be informed that I am agreeing with the RMT on that matter. Rail privatisation was a product of the political doctrine of the day: that private ownership and competition would solve all our problems. My personal view is that privatisation as a generality has failed. Rail privatisation has failed, at best, bizarrely, and, at worst, disastrously. The bizarre part of it comes from the track being given to Railtrack, which is a sort of private sector company which went broke and then turned into Network Rail, which is a pretend independent company that was nationalised not by the Government of the day but by the ONS, which said that so much of it was tied-up with the Government that it was really a nationalised company. It dumped £34 billion on the national debt, which virtually nobody seemed to notice.

There was little pure competition in the railway throughout this process; open access was the closest, and was therefore pursued. There was some slack in the system and some open access operations emerged. It is my view that they undoubtedly cost the taxpayer money and that there was not much benefit. In future, they will inhibit total system optimisation.

Any operator of open access will need long-term stability of their rights, whereas the great thing about Great British Railways is that it will eliminate all the conflict in optimising the railway. There will be a single guiding mind. The only disputes in future are likely to involve open access operators, since they will be the sole source of external commercial pressure. This will absorb a disproportionate amount of management effort. The only case for open access is doctrine, and it is a doctrine I do not share.