Aviation Sector

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

Three minutes—gosh! I am glad the high-speed rail Minister, the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), is on the Front Bench to inspire me to get a move on.

I welcome the new Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), to the ejector seat role of aviation Minister. He is the fifth in two years; I was No. 3. Such is the turnover that who knows how long he will last. Will he still be there to bring us in to land? I do not know, and that is part of the problem. The sector does not have the continuity in the Department that it needs for long-term decision making. He has fantastic officials, but he certainly has not got enough of them. In the past year, they have had to deal with the collapse of Thomas Cook, the slow, prolonged agony and death of Flybe and now covid-19. They are absolutely frazzled, I have no doubt, which means they cannot do the longer-term work, on issues such as slot allocation, that I think are so important for the Department to grapple with.

I agree with everything everyone has said so far—there is no point repeating it—but on testing, let me make a plea to learn from Italy, which now has obligatory pre-departure testing. There is no environment more conducive to the transmission of the virus than that on board an aircraft. We have a chance to test people before they board, and we should oblige all UK-registered airlines to do just that. Passengers would check in half an hour early, as they do in Italy at the moment, and if they test positive, they would not be allowed to board. That would stop the importation of the virus into the UK. To me, it stands to reason.

May I assist my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) by making a few pleas on behalf of regional airports, in case he does not get the chance to do so? The Government need to move faster on regional airports. They were having an existential crisis already when Flybe collapsed, and it is currently a case of apocalypse now. There was a regional airport review, it had conclusions and there was a 10-point plan. I know because I wrote it, and left it in my in-tray, so I know what it is going to say. The Department knows what it wants to do on public service obligation flights, and that can easily be changed. They are all domestic routes and there is no quarantine angle at all: we can make the changes now.

The Minister may have heard—in fact, I doubt he has heard yet—that Southend airport has, just this week, installed its new £400,000 security scanner. It is one of those that allows passengers not to have to remove liquids from their baggage, and it is part of our overhaul of transport security. They are immensely good news across all airports, but they cost an incredible amount of money—£400,000. In many smaller airports, they require a complete redesign of the terminal layout. Just go and ask the chief executive of Leeds Bradford. Can the Government do more to consider better use of capital allowances to facilitate that sort of investment?

My mantra as Minister was that we were the aviation nation and had to remain so to be ambitious on behalf of the UK sector, but we risk becoming a flightless nation, stuck on the ground and unable to go anywhere. There was a flightless bird called the dodo, which is now extinct. Do not let UK plc’s aviation sector become extinct, please.