Oral Answers to Questions

Vince Cable Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The first obvious point is that if the hon. Lady voted for the deal, we would go into the revised political declaration, which commits both the parties to uphold high safety and security standards and make arrangements to maintain close co-operation between the CAA and EASA. However, the Commission has already published proposals to extend its contingency measures for aviation until October 2020, were we to leave without a deal.

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

Whatever happens to Brexit, some of us have been greatly encouraged by the comments of the Secretary of State, of the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), and yesterday of the Prime Minister in their lukewarm response to Heathrow expansion. Can the hon. Gentleman help resolve the contradiction between the official Government policy of encouraging airport expansion at Heathrow and their unofficial policy of opposing it?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I believe those arguments are entirely sustainable, and I am happy for the right hon. Gentleman to continue that conversation with the Prime Minister.

South Western Railway Franchise

Vince Cable Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is something of a relief to speak on a subject that is not Brexit, and is not even vaguely Brexit-related, though if there were a people’s vote, South Western Railway would not survive in its franchise very long.

Let me relay a little history. The south western region, which is the Wessex part of the south of England and the south-western suburbs, which I represent, had a little over two decades of South West Trains, which was owned by the company Stagecoach. I do not think that they were regarded with enormous affection, but they provided a workmanlike service, and certainly nothing that could be described as disastrous. Since the change in the franchise, which was announced in August last year, there has been a rapid deterioration. That is the matter on which I wish to speak.

SWR, or South Western Railway, has joined Southern, Northern and Thameslink at the bottom of the league tables on almost every measure of performance. That is of concern to the people who use the eight stations in the area that I represent in Parliament. But it is not just me; many other MPs in south-west London are concerned. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) has established an all-party group that is doing detailed work on the problem and will, I hope, produce a report to enliven this discussion. The concern goes much wider than my constituency.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It has been brought to my attention that the disabled access points on this line are not up to the standard expected by disabled charities and organisations. Does the right hon. Gentleman feel that the Minister should address the need for modern disabled access points that are technically updated and correct for those who are disabled?

[Sir Vince Cable]

That was not on my list of complaints, but I am sure we can add it.

The central concerns that people have are the following. First, there has been a marked deterioration in punctuality and reliability. The consumer group Transport Focus measures satisfaction with punctuality and reliability and it has sunk to 65%, which represents a 12% deterioration in the past year.

The second problem is the ability of the rail company to deal with major disruption. When there is somebody on the line or a points problem, we have been used to recovery within a reasonably short space of time. Now, the whole network is disabled for prolonged periods, due to the apparent inability of either Network Rail or South Western to deal with the problem.

The third problem is a strategy that I would call the concentration of misery. Whenever there is a serious disruption, the rail company has the choice of whether to spread it widely or concentrate it on one or two neglected branch lines. What is happening in practice is that some of the branch lines, including the so-called Shepperton line that runs through Fulwell and Hampton in my constituency, are particularly badly affected. The justification given to me by the company is that that affects fewer people, but the effect is that an already poor service becomes impossible. People are not able to get to work or to school and large numbers of cancellations take place. I had a message yesterday from a constituent who boarded a train and it was then announced that it would not stop at any of the announced stops, but would go straight to Waterloo. That kind of experience is commonplace.

There is then the issue of industrial action. I am reluctant to ascribe blame and I am sure that the rail unions have their share of responsibility, but for almost a quarter of a century we had virtually no industrial action in this part of London. It is now frequent and we have had eight major strikes since the change of franchise. Clearly there is a complete breakdown of communication between the employees and the employers.

Then there is the issue of the new timetable that we were promised. It is probably a source of relief that the company has not tried to put it into practice. We are still offered the old timetable, which the company finds extremely difficult to operate.

Last but not least, there is the promise of a 3% fare increase. That has led to probably the most serious and general complaint about the service: that it simply is not value for money. The surveys recently carried out by Transport Focus suggest that only 36% of passengers judge the service to be value for money, and I am sure that is deteriorating by the day.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who is my constituency neighbour, for securing this important debate on a subject that also affects the thousands of people who use the six stations on South Western Railway’s Hounslow loop line—not only my constituents but the thousands who work at GSK, Sky and so on. I agree with him about the disruption to people’s working, daily and family lives, and I share the concern of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) about what the promise to remove the guarantee of a second person on the train means for people who are disabled. The situation needs looking at urgently.

[Sir Vince Cable]

I thank the hon. Lady for that additional information, which is germane and extremely useful.

There have been a couple of serious and authoritative reports by the Office of Rail and Road. Sir Michael Holden was invited to carry out a study, and he has actually run railways, so we think he can be trusted for technical judgment. The analysis that is now available suggests that the following are the main sources of disruption. The first is that the franchise itself was not properly conducted. The company overbid or, to put it another way, underbid for subsidy and is now financially stretched. It appears to be struggling to maintain payments to its financiers, and the consequence is that passenger welfare is being sacrificed and the promised investment is not materialising. There are serious questions for the Department and the Minister about to how the franchise was allowed to take place and result in a serious deterioration of standards. The Government have plenty of experience of refranchising, and why they were allowed to disrupt what was a perfectly serviceable arrangement with the previous franchisee is unclear.

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

My right hon. Friend is right to say that the all-party parliamentary group that I set up is looking at this matter in detail. We have a draft report called “Passengers must come first” which focuses, among many other things, on the fact that South Western Railway does not have the money to do what is right for passengers. It is looking after the investors first, and it is not putting money in to deliver on what it promised in the franchise. Unless the Government act, either by taking the franchise away from SWR or by imposing a new contract, passengers are going to keep suffering under shocking performance.

[Sir Vince Cable]

That is a helpful intervention that anticipates what I am now going to say. Many of the problems do originate with the franchise and the franchisee, but there is some shared responsibility with Network Rail, which of course is a nationalised industry. Network Rail’s failings have been exposed throughout the network, but they are particularly serious here, because the decision was made several years ago to switch the control centre from Waterloo to Basingstoke. As a result, many staff were shed, and a disconnect was established between the running of the trains and the running of the crews, so at least part of the disruption is attributable directly to Network Rail. I think the common consensus is that the nationalised company suffers seriously poor management and many failures, among which is the fact that Network Rail has not updated any of its contingency planning since 2011. It is important to accept that it is not just the franchisee that is responsible for the many failures.

An additional problem is the lack of integration between Network Rail and the franchisee. Under a previous dispensation, the two things were run together. It would probably have been better if the original rail privatisation had properly integrated the franchise and the network, but that was done informally in the south western area under the previous franchise, and it has now completely broken down. There appears to be no integration at all, minimal co-ordination and just an instinct for blaming each other.

The combination of those all factors has led to the serious situation that we have at present, and I would hope that the Government recognise that. To prevent the situation disintegrating to the point at which we have another Southern railway scandal, the Government might intervene now to prevent the situation slipping further. There are several actions they can take, and my right hon. Friend has just summarised them. In relation to the franchise, there are essentially two options, one of which is to take the franchise away and replace the existing company with another—preferably a public service company, but there is a variety of options—and the other is to impose on the franchise a set of performance-related measures so the company is paid only when it delivers on its undertakings.

There are various ways of dealing with this problem. Unlike the Labour party, I do not believe nationalising the franchisee would necessarily help, but we have to find a mechanism by which it can be properly held to account and rewarded for success, rather than rewarded for failure.

The second area of activity that is needed is within Network Rail itself. It is fortunate that Network Rail has just appointed Andrew Haines as its head. I dealt with him extensively when he ran South West Trains, and he is generally thought to be a good manager. Whether he can personally turn this around, I do not know, but it would greatly help if there were proper integration of Network Rail and the franchise in this section of the system. I would be grateful if the Minister could indicate how he can help achieve all of that.

There are clearly questions for the Department to answer, notably on the franchise, how it has allowed this to happen and the options available to it to turn the situation around. Although Network Rail is a free-standing operation, though nationalised, it would be useful to have some indication from the Government on how they can push it in the direction of better management and better attention to the serious problems in this region.

[Sir Edward Davey]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way a second time.

The point on Network Rail is crucial. Like my right hon. Friend, I have a lot of time for Andrew Haines given our mutual experience of him. However, Network Rail will not be able to get to grips with the challenges of an extraordinarily high level of emergency speed restrictions and temporary speed restrictions across the network. A decade or so ago, there were zero speed restrictions; now there are 70 or 80, which is because of the lack of essential investment. Unless the Department for Transport supports Network Rail with more cash to solve those restrictions, we will get nowhere near the level of timetable resilience that will prevent cancellations and delays, meaning that people’s trains actually run on time.

[Sir Vince Cable]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he leads me to my concluding point on the role of the Department itself.

The national rail review is looking at overall performance, and I hope it is able to look at the role of the Department and not just of the rail companies, but there is the additional and crucial point, as my right hon. Friend has just said, that a lot of this depends on available investment. Some of that, of course, has to come from the franchise company, but Network Rail ultimately depends on the willingness of the Treasury and the Department for Transport to make capital spending available in light of what is necessary.

National Policy Statement: Airports

Vince Cable Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

I start by expressing my respect for the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) for having resigned from the Government over this issue. I, like him and quite a few other Members, am concerned partly about our own residents and partly about the wider national interest. We are being criticised in some quarters for being nimbys, but in this case our backyard is very large indeed. At present, 1 million people are affected by the 51 Leq—equivalent continuous sound level—noise contour, which is a good definition of serious impact, and that number will increase substantially.

The aspect of noise that I want to focus on, however, has already been alluded to by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) and others, and this is the deliberate creation of what our residents now call “noise sewers”: the deliberate concentration of flights along particular routes. The problem is aggravated by the absence of regulations governing the angle of take-off, which is judged by airlines specifically according to fuel savings. Tens of thousands of residents under take-off paths as well as landing paths are subject to extreme and prolonged forms of noise pollution. The question now is: how will the expansion of Heathrow affect that?

The number of flights is to increase by more than 50%, and the NPS says it would like to keep the proportion of people additionally affected to around 10%, so almost by definition those who will experience the greatest hardship and environmental damage will be those under the existing flight paths. I invite the Minister in reply to give some reassurance to those who have to deal with this noise sewage problem and say how that can be alleviated within the overall policy. We do not know the future flight paths or whether the Government will regulate to deal with some of the effects, but perhaps they could give us some assurances.

On the wider national picture, I strongly agree with the analysis of the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I do not necessarily agree with his approach to public finances, but on the financing of the airport he is absolutely right. Heathrow Ltd is an exceedingly dodgy company by any reckoning: last year, its profits were just over £500 million, but it remitted in dividends over £700 million; it extracts rent in the form of monopoly rent from its existing holdings, particularly its monopoly control of carparks; it has very little interest in development; and its balance sheet position is terrible—it has run down its shareholder funds from £5 billion to about £700 million and it has doubled its debt. It has no interest in development and no competence in managing the kind of risky project now envisaged. The only way the Government can cope is by underwriting the company. We know in practice, however, that the regulator, because of the regulatory asset base system of regulation at the airport, will increase landing charges to enable the investment to remain profitable. The worry expressed by people such as Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways, is that passengers—or a combination of the taxpayer and passengers—will pay for the overrun.

The other aspect of cost that the right hon. Gentleman rightly referred to is the complete lack of a definition of who pays for the infrastructure costs outside the perimeter fence. We have a wide range of estimates, from £5 billion, in the Davies report, to £15 billion from Transport for London. The Government say they do not recognise the lesser figure, but what figure do they recognise? The developers have said they will come up with only £1 billion, so where will the remaining billions come from? I know that “the odd billion between friends” might be a good way of looking at this, from the Government’s point of view, but we need some precision and some protection for the public finances. Billions of pounds of public investment are ultimately likely to be involved, and given how the Treasury operates, with the rationing of capital, this will come at the expense of infrastructure projects in other parts of the country.

In my remaining minute, I want to say a bit about that regional impact. The assumption in the Government’s statement is that the regions will benefit, but they patently will not. There will be a rationing of capital and of landing rights because of carbon dioxide limits. Every one of the seven leading regional airports—Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, East Midlands, Bristol, and others—have made it absolutely clear that they oppose Heathrow expansion because it inhibits their own potential for developing point-to-point routes to other parts of the world. In terms of the aggregate picture, we have already been told that the net present value is close to zero, and actually heavily negative if we take out international transfer passengers, and on the specific issues, such as the availability of flights outside Europe for business passengers, only 2% of all flights fall in this category. For national and local reasons, therefore, I oppose the motion.

Heathrow

Vince Cable Excerpts

Thursday 7th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

Transport for London has estimated that there are liabilities of something in the order of £10 billion for public transport provision, which the Government say they do not recognise. Is that because they do not think the public transport improvements are necessary, or because a private party will carry the cost?

[Jesse Norman]

The answer to that question is, because it is a number that we do not recognise, but if there were a better justification for it, it might be that we would. But of course it is perfectly clear that we do expect transport improvements to be made, and we expect the private sector to bear a substantial proportion of the cost.

Airports National Policy Statement

Vince Cable Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend and thank him for his supportive comments. On the mix of rail services that will service this new runway, if Parliament gives it the go-ahead, in the short term there will be the arrival of Crossrail services and the upgrade of the Piccadilly line. The HS2 station at Old Oak Common will also open. In the investment plans for control period 6, we have planned funding to develop a western rail access into Heathrow for connections to Reading and the west country. We are in the process of discussing with private sector investors proposals for the southern rail access which will connect the south-western rail networks into Heathrow airport. In addition, we are beginning work on an option that is very relevant to you, Mr Speaker, which would take the Chiltern line into Old Oak Common—there is already a line that connects into Chiltern—and as we see more development on the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, that will provide an additional route into Heathrow from that important growth area. I think this is a pretty holistic package of planned rail improvements.

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

How does the Secretary of State reconcile his claims about regional connectivity with the fact that Heathrow expansion is opposed by all the largest regional airports—Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, East Midlands and Bristol—as well as those in the south-east, Stansted and Gatwick? Since these communities are represented by Members from different parties, does he agree that it would be appropriate to have a free vote on the NPS when it is put before Parliament?

[Chris Grayling]

It is clearly up to every individual party to decide how they will approach this vote, but my experience is not what the right hon. Gentleman has just communicated to me: my experience is that around the United Kingdom there is huge support from regional airports and, crucially, regional business groups for the expansion of Heathrow airport. We have looked at the projections, and they show growth at almost all of our regional airports, and I do not have the sense of opposition from the regional airports that the right hon. Gentleman is describing.

Community Transport

Vince Cable Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

I strongly endorse the comments of the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), on the potentially enormous impact of these retrograde and unnecessary changes, which will affect hundreds of thousands of people with mobility difficulties.

I should start by declaring an interest. Eighteen months ago, I took on the role of chair of the HCT Group, which I think is the UK’s largest social enterprise. It runs a large number of buses, but also a large number of community transport operations. It is not affected by the changes, because its drivers are already fully compliant with the new standards, but it has deep knowledge of the industry and totally shares the assessment of the Community Transport Association that the changes will do truly enormous damage.

I mention HCT at the outset because it is a social enterprise, and I get a strong sense that the Department simply does not understand the concept of a social enterprise. It seems to believe that a commercial service has to be provided by a commercial operator, but very efficient commercial services are provided by social enterprises that operate efficiently, but make a different use of their profit. The profit is used for a social purpose, not the reward of shareholders, and that distinction appears to be completely ignored in the Department’s evaluation.

I will make two specific points. The first relates to the social impact assessment. Frankly, the Department has done a shoddy piece of work. As the Chair of the Select Committee points out, some fundamental costs are completely ignored. The transport management cost in the industry is underestimated by a factor of three. Most seriously of all, there is a well-developed methodology that people in the industry understand for calculating social impacts. Those are not fully taken into account. The figure of £400 million that the Chair of the Select Committee mentioned is well attested by the people who use the standard methodology.

My second point is on the legal issues. It appears that in every other sector of the economy—local or national—there is now an understanding that the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 can be applied on top of procurement rules, but an exception has been made in this case. What has happened here—it has happened many times in the past over procurement issues—is that officials and lawyers are over-interpreting European Union laws. I encountered that in Government as a Secretary of State, dealing with the Department for Transport over the procurement of railways. Fortunately, the then Secretary of State for Transport—now the Chancellor—listened, changed it, and we had a much more pragmatic approach. We are asking today for a much more practical, pragmatic response, which recognises the real social need in the sector.

Heathrow Airport: Public Consultation

Vince Cable Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered public consultations on Heathrow airport.

It is a privilege to introduce this debate. The whole issue of Heathrow expansion is of course massive and will be debated extensively in the next six months, but I want to focus on the various consultations and ask the Minister how they fit together, how the Government are responding to them, how responsive the Government are to evidence and how far they have committed themselves to fundamental decisions.

I will refer to three specific consultations. The first is the major consultation on the national policy statement—the basic strategy document—which finished in May and was reported on by Sir Jeremy Sullivan. The second is the more recent consultation on the adaptation of the NPS, which finished in December and related to new bodies of evidence on air quality and passenger numbers. The third is the consultation that is taking place at the moment. A glossy document came through my door a few days ago, and it is probably going through hundreds of thousands of others. That raises a fundamental question, because the proposal in it is different from the Government’s. How do the proposals fit together, and how many residents in London are supposed to respond to that consultation?

I will concentrate on the second consultation, and the main document I will refer to is the response of the four councils—Richmond, Wandsworth, Hillingdon and Windsor. It is worth mentioning in passing that those councils between them incorporate the constituencies of the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the shadow Chancellor and me, among others, so they are not totally devoid of political interest. Let me focus on the two main respects in which the questions in December’s revised consultation were framed—air quality and passenger numbers—and how they change our perspective on this subject.

Air quality is important because it involves not just aesthetic considerations but matters that directly impinge on human health and mortality. We start from a position where NO_x emissions and particulates are at dangerous and illegal levels according to internationally recognised standards, and the most recent evidence suggests that emissions are rising, not falling. That is the context in which we have to look at the new evidence on air quality.

Since the original NPS consultation, the Government have produced their own national air quality plan. One of the problems with that is that it does not specifically take into account Heathrow. Will the Minister say how it would differ if it did? It also does not take into account the plans of the Mayor of London, who is in the process of formulating proposals for what I think he calls an ultra-low emissions zone. There are issues with how that will be implemented, given that the Government will not give special consideration to funding it. The arithmetic of London government suggests that the Mayor’s plans for reducing emissions will be almost entirely offset, if not worse, by those originating at Heathrow.

The bigger question is whether those emissions need to be produced at all. On the basis of the Government’s original estimates, it is possible that there might be such a switch to public transport that there would not be any additional cars on the road. I believe the Government used the phrase “no more cars on the road” in the original formulation of their NPS. However, to achieve that, they would have to achieve an enormous change in modal split: something like 70% of vehicle journeys would have to be by public transport.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and apologise for arriving just after he had started. He is right, but does he acknowledge that, according to Transport for London’s own statistics, to accommodate the projected increased traffic to and from Heathrow would cost around £18 billion? That assumes that current trends would continue—in other words, that the same proportion of people would drive to and from Heathrow. Even based on those status quo assumptions, we would require £18 billion of additional investment, which Heathrow will not pay, the Government have said they will not pay, and TfL is unable to pay.

[Sir Vince Cable]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I want to dwell a little on that £18 billion figure which, as he says, is based on rather conservative assumptions. Where that will come from is one of the big unanswered questions. The Government say that they will not provide financial support. The airport itself has come up with £1 billion towards the £18 billion, but it is already a highly leveraged company. Questions have been raised about its balance sheet, and particularly about the large-scale tax-avoidance schemes that have enabled it to finance its debt so far, so how will it raise yet more to fund the infrastructure? The only way that could happen is if the airport very substantially increased landing charges. One of the reasons why major airlines such as British Airways have turned against Heathrow expansion is that they realise that that would be a necessary consequence. The other potential source of funding is TfL, but it is highly constrained by public sector borrowing restrictions and the need to fund Crossrail, which will be a major burden on its balance sheet in coming years.

TfL has spelled out in detail how the public transport infrastructure would have to be provided, and much of it is highly problematic. It would have to go a lot further than some improvements to the Piccadilly line and the Elizabeth line. It would involve, among other things, improving southern rail access. However, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) well knows, that is problematic. The southern rail route runs through my constituency and his. If the route to Heathrow ran through his constituency, there would be serious problems with prolonged closures of level crossings, and the line through Kingston and Wimbledon is already congested. It is not at all obvious how that improvement is feasible— it has not even been sketched out—and there is a big question for the Government about how it would be funded.

The other question that the revised consultation raises is about increased passenger numbers. It is important to stress that the revised figures—the Government’s own numbers, not anyone else’s—suggest that the national economic benefit of airport expansion would be significantly greater at Gatwick than at Heathrow. That is a reversal of the Airports Commission’s analysis. Do the Government accept that conclusion? If they do not, perhaps they will explain why not. If they do, how do they propose to respond? They could say, “Well, we don’t care, because we’re not really interested in national economic benefit. We’ve decided we’re going to have a hub airport.” However, that would raise two big questions: why proceed with a national hub airport if it is less economically beneficial than the alternative, and why not ask or expect Gatwick to provide its own hub facilities, which it is perfectly keen and anxious to do?

The other factual information that has emerged from the new passenger numbers is that Heathrow airport will fill up very quickly. On current assumptions, it will start in 2026 and be full by 2028. That has knock-on consequences. There will be very little resilience, the airport’s authorities will be tempted to switch from domestic routes to more profitable international routes and it will make it much easier, given the monopolistic position, to push up fares even further.

Then there are the consequences of the higher passenger numbers, which are new. There is the impact on noise, which I think is of concern to all the constituencies whose MPs are in the Chamber. The original assurance given by the Secretary of State was that, when Heathrow was expanded, no more people in London or the areas around it would be affected by noise. The current numbers suggest that an additional 90,000 will be. Again, do the Government accept that?

What is important is not simply the aggregate numbers, but how that very large number of individuals—we are now talking about 1 million people—are directly affected. That relates to take-off and landing routes and the trajectory of the aircraft. At the moment, we have no information on flight paths, which is crucial to making an informed decision on how the project will affect our constituencies.

My final point on the data is that, although connectivity is one of the major reasons why Heathrow expansion is being considered, the new data suggests that connectivity to other British cities will decline with Heathrow expansion, from eight major destinations at present to five, and will be smaller than were Gatwick to proceed. I ask the Minister to consider how the Government regard this new evidence, which casts doubt on the feasibility of the proposal.

I will round up by raising the more basic question of how the Government are approaching consultation. Have they come to a conclusion, in which case we are going through a ritual, or are they meaningfully engaging in dialogue, listening to evidence and seeing it as a genuinely iterative process? One important step is how we are to see the consultation that Heathrow airport itself is now engaging in. It is important for our constituents to understand that what Heathrow airport is proposing seems substantially different from what the Government are proposing.

One of the options the airport is looking at is moving and substantially shortening the runway. I understand why it would want to do so, because that avoids all the horrendous problems of tearing up the M25 and rebuilding it under a tunnel, with all the costs involved. If it is changed in that way, that substantially affects the noise contour; I think there are 20,000 people who would face much more intense and intolerable noise levels, many of them in the constituency of the shadow Chancellor. There is a question how that would be dealt with.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. This is a timely debate. I have to confess that I have not received the same volume of consultative literature in the north of the borough of Ealing as he has, for various reasons. I wonder whether, among the data of the passenger and transport movements to and from the airport, there has been a disaggregation that identifies the cargo and freight movements—specifically because the economy of Northern Ireland is almost entirely dependent on cargo freight movements into Heathrow airport. I appreciate that the right hon. Gentleman is talking about passenger movements, but is there a disaggregation that identifies cargo movements to and from Heathrow?

[Sir Vince Cable]

I cannot answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, but I hope the Minister will be able to. There is a specific issue about freight, not just in the air, but on the ground. One of the contributing factors to a lot of the worries about air quality relates to freight on the ground, which is linked to air journeys.

I have one minute left for my presentation, so I will conclude by trying to probe further how the Government see this consultation. The Secretary of State said in July that the Heathrow expansion project, along the lines that were originally identified, would definitely go ahead. We are left with the question of whether that is inevitable if the evidence changes? We now have evidence based on the Government’s own numbers to suggest that Gatwick is a more economically attractive alternative. Does that matter? How much more attractive does it have to be before the Government might consider the fundamentals around the location? If the air quality evidence is so damaging, at what point do the Government reconsider their options?

Fundamentally, going back to the intervention by the hon. Member for Richmond Park, we are potentially talking about large Government subsidy if the airport is to avoid a very large increase in landing charges or funding from sources that we cannot yet identify. Is there a level of subsidy and Government funding that is unacceptable? We have new evidence, which is emerging all the time and is becoming progressively less favourable to the case for Heathrow, so I will leave this question with the Minister: how open-minded are the Government to that new evidence, and how will they progress the project?

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Vince Cable]

I will wind up quickly. I thank hon. Members, who have given their diverse views and argued their cases extremely well. I want to reiterate a few points. As far as the responsiveness of the Government is concerned, I am gratified that the Minister said in his concluding remarks that they still have an open mind. Many past comments cast some doubt on that. I am also grateful that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) said that the Opposition are approaching the issue pragmatically and in terms of tests, and that they have not come to a final conclusion on it. Those responses give me some encouragement that there is a lot more to argue for.

I emphasise the basics of the argument: the NPS revisions—the new round of evidence that has been produced—point clearly to the fact that the Minister’s initial comment is simply wrong. There is no suggestion any longer that this is the best economic option; it clearly is not. The Government’s own figures and analysis show that Gatwick would be better for the national economy. As the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) said in his last intervention, it is not just that Gatwick would be better for the national economy, but that Heathrow would be far more polluting, would have a far more damaging noise impact on people under the flight path and would be very much more expensive for Government and passengers. I welcome the responses that we have received.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered public consultations on Heathrow airport.

Oral Answers to Questions

Vince Cable Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The hon. Lady needs to remember that aviation regulation operates at a global level, at a pan-European level—in which there is an “open skies” agreement—and at a national bilateral level. I have worked carefully with the airlines and all those involved, and I am certain that not only will aviation continue post-2019 but that everyone wants aviation to continue post-2019.

The individual case of easyJet relates to the question of cabotage within the European Union, which is clearly a matter for debate. It will be a negotiation for the whole sector because, although we have successful airlines such as easyJet operating flights within the rest of the European Union, we also have a large number of continental hauliers doing business within the United Kingdom. It is to everyone’s benefit that such liberalisation continues.

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

European competition law will no longer apply after Brexit, so how does the Secretary of State propose to allocate airport slots? By auction, or in some other way?

[Chris Grayling]

Of course, the big question is about the expansion of slots at Heathrow airport in particular, which will be a matter for the Government both to negotiate and agree. Right at the top of our priority list in allocating slots—and we have committed to this in what we have said about the proposed expansion of Heathrow airport—is that we reserve slots for regional connectivity. One of the key benefits of Heathrow airport expansion is the global connections it will provide to cities across the whole United Kingdom. Whatever approach we take, we need protection for those regional links.