EU Asylum Reform Package

Debate between Robert Goodwill and Kirsten Oswald

Monday 19th December 2016 General Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

We do not expect any funding that has already been agreed to be affected by our not opting into the regulation. The UK has already been allocated funding from the asylum, migration and integration fund through to the financial year 2019. In any event, the UK may have left the European Union before the regulation comes into effect. No EU funding has been allocated to the Syrian vulnerable person resettlement scheme, which is our primary way of delivering our obligations for resettlement, since the scheme’s expansion.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. The Minister has made it clear a couple of times that he does not think he will change his views, but will listen none the less. He emphasised that his view was that, on these matters, we should be sovereign, and that his Government would not wish to opt in, and he asked for retrospective agreement again. We also have the matter of premature approval and a logjam to deal with. Even though we have not finished this debate, he seems confident that he will not change his views. How can we hold the Government to account if this is how the procedures and systems work?

[Mr Goodwill]

I repeat my apology, but I would certainly be interested to learn, perhaps from a supplementary question from the Scottish National party, whether it believes that we should have opted into any of the four measures.

We in this House have the power to pass legislation, so even if we do not opt into measures, we can take our own approach to some of them. Indeed, looking at our successful roll-out of the Syrian vulnerable person resettlement scheme and the other schemes in the area, as well as our long-standing gateway and mandate scheme, I believe that we are stepping up to the mark with our responsibilities. EU legislation would not add anything in that regard.

Cabin Air Safety/Aerotoxic Syndrome

Debate between Robert Goodwill and Kirsten Oswald

Thursday 17th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Goodwill]

As I said, the inquest has not been finalised and no verdict has been reached. In many ways, the precautionary principle may have prompted the coroner to issue that advice at that time, but the case is still before the courts. Similarly, if the case was before a criminal court, one would not want to comment before the verdict. It would be inappropriate for the Government to do so and my legal advice is that we should not comment before the verdict. In at least one of the cases we will not have long to wait for the verdict, and we will look very carefully at the scientific evidence brought before the inquest and how that is interpreted.

[Kirsten Oswald]

I am interested to hear the Minister say that the Government want to look carefully at the evidence; I appreciate the sentiment behind that. Would it be useful to also look very carefully at the responses to the report referred to by British Airways and the Civil Aviation Authority, because this information will help us to decide how best to move forward?

[Mr Goodwill]

Certainly the CAA is involved in this. I meet regularly with the unions involved, particularly BALPA, so it is not something that we are trying to shuffle away, but we need to wait for the result of the inquest before we report on these particular cases. I will go on to present various pieces of evidence and show where we are on this important matter. I will talk about what work has already been done and what work we believe needs to be done.

The safety of cabin air is an issue that has been a matter of public debate over several years—in fact, over a decade now. This continues to be the case, and I, together with my noble Friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, have received a considerable amount of correspondence and responded to several parliamentary questions on cabin air quality. As background, some crew and passengers have expressed concerns that they have suffered long-term health impairment, which they contend is due to exposure to organophosphates present in small amounts as additives in aviation engine oils and hydraulic fluids.

As ever, we have to be careful to have regard to whether there is evidence to support the link between the illnesses and cabin air. That is why the concerns have been investigated at length over a number of years. In 2006 the previous Government arranged for the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment—an independent advisory committee of toxicology experts—to review evidence from the British Airline Pilots Association. At the time, the Committee on Toxicity considered that it was not possible to conclude whether cabin air exposures in general, or following incidents such as fume events, cause ill health in commercial aircraft crews. It recommended further work to ascertain whether substances in the cabin environment could potentially be harmful to health.

A second inquiry was held by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, which looked into this issue as part of a wider inquiry in 2007, and published its findings in a report called “Air Travel and Health”. In that report, the findings of the Committee on Toxicity were supported. Following the recommendation in 2007 by the Committee on Toxicity, the Government commissioned a series of scientific studies as part of a research programme on cabin air. The principal research study, which was carried out by Cranfield University, was published in 2011. It found that, with respect to the conditions of flight experienced during the cabin air sampling, there was no evidence of pollutants occurring at levels exceeding health and safety standards and guidelines. Levels observed in the flights that formed part of the study—I stress that they did not include an instance of an oil seal failing—were comparable to those typically experienced in domestic settings. No higher levels of exposure were found than, for example, we would experience in this Chamber.

In addition to the principal study, three further research studies were commissioned and published by the Government. Those four published studies were formally submitted to the Committee on Toxicity for consideration in 2012. The Committee considered the research reports, as well as other research published in the scientific literature since 2007, and subsequently published a position paper on cabin air in December 2013.

I have recently written to several Members of Parliament regarding the findings of the Committee’s position paper. In that letter, which was also placed in the Libraries of both Houses, I summarised the advice the Committee gave and its conclusions. In short, the paper recognises that contamination of cabin air by components or combustion products of engine oils does occur, and that episodes of acute illness have occurred shortly after such episodes. However, it found that levels of chemicals in bleed air would need to occur in far higher concentrations than those found during the studies to cause serious toxicity, and that the symptoms that have been reported following fume events have been wide-ranging, and less specific than those that typically occur from chemical toxicity.