Clive Soley in the House of Lords on the Civil Aviation Bill
01.11.06Lord Soley: My Lords, I have an interest to declare as the campaign director of Future Heathrow, which is a coalition of trade unions, airlines, businesses and professional organisations. I also have another interest to declare: I am a long-term resident of west London and for 30 years have lived under the flight paths of Heathrow. Like everyone else, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when Trident and Concorde were flying, we would have closed the airport the next morning if, and only if, personal interests about noise were put above the prosperity of the area. Most of us who live in west London or, I suspect, near most airports know that they are amazing generators of wealth, prosperity and jobs. Heathrow employs 70,000 people, and probably well over 100,000 indirectly. If it ceases to be a hub airport, we will pay a terrible price in west London and the Heathrow region, but the country will also pay a high price. So we need to get that right. I am not here to speak predominantly about that issue. I am here to speak about the Bill, which I welcome, and to raise a couple of issues in the debate. Obviously, I will not ignore the importance of noise and so forth, because I suffer that and I know what it means, but it is important that people understand the balance. As an MP, people used to write to me and I would write back saying, "Yes, noise is a problem, but there are advantages. Would you kindly tell me how many times you have flown this year?". It is amazing how many people would not reply. That is like people who say, "I am fed up with the traffic jams. I have just got back from driving my kids to school, and it was horrendous". We have to address that. There is a problem about how people perceive their own behaviour in relation to a wider social economic problem. I do not want to turn to the Bill before I address the really big issue of climate change, which several noble Lords have addressed. It is so enormous that we cannot ignore it. In the nightmare scenario of climate change, it will not be a matter of discouraging people from flying or driving. If scientific evidence evolves in the coming years that is so serious as to suggest really drastic action, people will be stopped from flying, driving and doing many of the things that they take for granted in our society. Frankly, in those circumstances, the economic consequences would be so severe that it is difficult to imagine what our society would look like. That is the nightmare scenario and let us not ignore it, because it could become real. The other way of looking at the problem, which we can do at the moment, is to say that the evidence is alarming and we had better start bearing down on carbon emissions generally, which means that we have to address that issue across a very wide field. That is 1 Nov 2005 : Column 158 not totally new. Indeed, I rather na-vely wrote about the issue in my first ever election address as a prospective councillor, which must have been about 1960. It was the only election that I ever lost, so it was very good training. I complained about the dangers of population growth and what that meant for the world. I am sure that one of the reasons that I was rejected was that local residents thought that having me in the town hall trying to impose limits on population growth might have implications for the locality that they had not planned on from their local councillor. I am sure that they were quite right in rejecting my candidature at that stage. How we provide standards of living for large numbers of people without polluting our environment has always been a difficulty. It is not a new problem; it goes back a long way, but is now particularly serious. If we want to bear down on carbon emissions, many of the provisions in the Bill are very good and I welcome them. Charging extra for aircraft that are particularly dirty is important, but we also need to understand that modern airports and aircraft actually reduce emissions as they are developed. I know that that does not answer the question of more people and more aircraft flying, but it does mean that the aircraft industry, which is as aware of this problem as anyone sitting here today, knows that it has to bear down on noise and pollution. It is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that technology and science are part of the answer to that problem. I am not complaining about what is in the Bill, but I have a suggestion for my friend on the government Benches about something else to include in it. A few months ago, a British company, Arup, a developer and designer, won the award to design and build a city for 1 million people in China—the first city designed to be carbon neutral. The Minister should consider a provision to require airports to operate within a carbon neutral basis on the ground. They cannot do that in terms of aircraft emissions, because we do not have an alternative to the propulsion fuels for aircraft, but we do have biodiesel for all vehicles on the ground, the opportunity to tow rather than taxi aircraft and a number of opportunities to design the buildings to be carbon neutral. I know that the Minister takes global warming seriously like the rest of us, but the way to bear down on this problem is to use every department of state and private company to bear down on carbon emissions. Simply pleading with people not to fly or drive will not work. People do not behave like that. Things will only happen in a crisis and heaven forbid that we get into that situation. Something could be included in the Bill—probably in Clause 5—where the Minister could consider a requirement on airport operators to impose an aim of achieving carbon neutrality on the non-aircraft operations of the airfield—or aerodrome, to go back to the days of Biggles, when I am sure pollution was significantly less, unless he was machine-gunning you. The issues are profoundly important on the wider level, but this Bill is a small but significant step in the right direction. As a west London resident who was an 1 Nov 2005 : Column 159 MP for the area for 26 years, I am inevitably concerned. I do not want to see areas that depend on major airports go down the tubes. I am particularly worried that Heathrow is in decline relative to major continental airports. It has already been overtaken by Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam and it will be overtaken shortly by Milan, Munich, Rome and Madrid. That process will continue, unless Heathrow gets its third short runway. So I make no apologies for my belief that we must have that third, short runway. That does not mean to say that I want it done in a way that ignores the noise problems or emissions problems or whatever. We do not do it that way. My view is that, actually, at the moment Heathrow is a pretty unpleasant experience as an airport. We could make it infinitely better. One of the things that we need to get better in this country is the way that local authorities work together with airports, to stop seeing airports as problems and to start to see them as possibilities: what they provide in terms of employment, what they provide in terms of prosperity, what they provide in terms of training and education for young people. Heaven knows what would happen to many of the high-tech jobs in my area if Heathrow became a point-to-point airport. We would probably lose about 20,000 jobs. If we had to produce another hub airport somewhere else to replace Heathrow, and Heathrow disappeared entirely, which is not totally impossible, the consequences would be horrific. That is why I have often made the analogy with the London docks. I was one of the people stupid enough to say that the London docks would never close, that no one would want to go to Felixstowe or Rotterdam. They did, they went and 50,000 jobs went with them. East London has only recently recovered. People need to be careful about this issue overall. My argument is a plea to the Minister. Will the Government include in the Bill a provision requiring airports to operate towards a carbon-neutral basis on the ground? There is no reason why we cannot do that. It would send out a strong signal that we are serious about the issue and at the same time recognise that the threat from the continental airports to places like Heathrow is enormous. People do not know it, but you can fly to far more British regional cities from Amsterdam and Paris than you can from London's Heathrow: 21 from Amsterdam; 19 from Paris; and just nine from Heathrow. If you want to scare yourself about this, go home tonight and, when you type into your computer, book yourself a ticket somewhere. Try to book a ticket from Newcastle to Tokyo or from Edinburgh to Beijing—places that have links, like with the Toyota car plant or the medical school. You used to go via Heathrow. Now you go via Amsterdam and Paris. That will go on very dramatically. People who say to me that Heathrow is safe and that Heathrow will always be there are saying exactly what I said about the London docks. It is a dangerous complacency. We need to make sure that local authorities and airports work together to develop airports in as sustainable a 1 Nov 2005 : Column 160 manner as possible. If we include a carbon-neutral provision in the Bill, I say to the Minister that many people will remember him as one of the people who took a very important step on the road to sustainability for air travel. 5.13pm.
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