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2.15 pm
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): It is a great pleasure and privilege to follow the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), as it is to serve behind her on the Transport Sub-Committee of the Select Committee on the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs. She and I do not always agree, but we enjoy our exchanges across the Committee Room table. I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) to the Front Bench. His Back-Bench colleagues very much look forward to hearing what he has to say in an important, if slightly ill-attended, debate.
The debate is important because aviation in the United Kingdom is at present 100 per cent. safe. It was interesting to hear the hon. Lady raise the difference between perception and reality. We must say as clearly and frequently as we can that there is no lack of safety in the UK. The aeroplanes, pilots, airports and air traffic controllers display no slippage of safety. We probably have the safest air travel in the world, as several people who gave evidence to the Committee acknowledged.
None the less, two points must be made. Perception may differ from reality. As the hon. Lady said, that is certainly true of the railways. We must pay as much attention to ensuring that the travelling public know that travel is safe as we do to making it so. A good example of the difference between perception and reality is the Y2K problem. I understand from airlines that there has been a significant decline in air travel scheduled for the millennium evening and the next day. People are concerned about Y2K even though anyone who knows anything about it is convinced that there will be no danger of any kind to the travelling public on 1 January 2000.
Secondly, in saying how safe air transport is, one must leave no room for complacency. If some of the changes recommended in the report are not made, British aviation may not remain as safe as it is today. It is important that the Committee held its inquiry and produced a valuable
report in which nearly every word is eminently sensible. Like the hon. Lady, I have large reservations about the quality of the Government's response, and I look forward to hearing the Minister explain the thin and disappointing nature of some of his responses.
I shall focus on two or three air safety issues rather than the generality of the report. As the hon. Lady said, air traffic has increased hugely during the past few years. Over the next 10 years, it is predicted to increase by 50 per cent. That prediction applies particularly in the south-east of England. When I worked at the former Department of the Environment, there was a constant cry of Rucatse--runway capacity in the south-east. The subject continually appeared in the Secretary of State's red box, and there were constant discussions about what we could do about runway capacity. That problem remains to be dealt with. We must find more capacity, or our high safety standards will, without question, be compromised.
A related matter to which the hon. Lady made little reference was the future of the National Air Traffic Services. Without a vibrant and successful NATS, our high standards may be compromised. Already, there are signs that overload on controllers has grown. The volume and complexity of traffic has increased overload to 49 incidents this year--double the number in the previous year. Overload is increasing, and if Swanwick is not in place in good time, that increase will continue.
It will interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about Swanwick. His predecessors offered dates for when Swanwick would be up and running, but these dates always slipped. The latest date given, I think, was April 2002, and it would be interesting to hear the Minister confirm that, although he would doubtless be putting his job on the line by doing so. He looks as if he may be about to intervene to confirm that date, or not.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Mr. Chris Mullin):
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Many of my predecessors were members of the Government whom he supported, and many of the problems at Swanwick arose during their time in office. I hope that he will bear that in mind when he deals with the problem, and that he will do so in a mature and responsible way.
Mr. Gray:
I am grateful to the Minister for pointing that out. I try to do everything in a mature and responsible way, so I shall follow the precedent.
I acknowledge that the situation is as the Minister describes. When the project was launched, the completion date was set for 1990 or thereabouts, and it has gone back and back. That has happened under both Governments.
I always try to avoid party political splits and divisions on the Select Committee, as my colleagues across the Floor will doubtless agree, and try to address the issues in as broad a bipartisan way as we can. I prefer to leave out the party politics for the moment, although one or two of the topics that I shall cover later may contain a small element of party politics.
We need to know when Swanwick will be up and running, and what effect that will have on air safety in England. What will happen to NATS? The Government claim to have come up with some clever public-private
partnership. The truth is that no one has the remotest idea of what it is or how it will work. It seems that 48 per cent. will be in the private sector, 5 per cent. with the workers and the balance with the Government.
Who will control the company? Who will run it? Who will have responsibility for employment matters? Who will take the risk if the company goes down? Who will benefit if the company makes a large profit? Who will make the decisions? All that is unclear. The Government display a split personality with regard to privatisation, as in the case of DERA--the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. They cannot decide whether to privatise it or not--apparently not, at present. On the future of London Underground, one moment the Government are doing complicated deals with Railtrack, and the next minute they are not, for reasons best known to themselves.
I am puzzled by the figures that the Government produced in the explanatory notes to the Transport Bill, which will receive its Second Reading on Monday. According to paragraph 233 on page 40, the partial sale of NATS
Mr. Mullin:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene again. He is probably aware--but perhaps he is not--that I and my right hon. and noble Friend the Minister for Transport attended the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee last week. We were grilled on that topic very ably, as one would expect from my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). The hon. Gentleman was not present, nor was any member of the Conservative party. That would have been the place to get the answers to some of his questions.
Mr. Gray:
The Minister has not answered the point, but no doubt he will do so when he winds up. On that day, we had an Opposition day debate on transport in the Chamber, in which I spoke. I took the view that my duties in the Chamber overrode my duties to the Select Committee. If the Minister cares to consult Hansard for that day, he will discover that I made a reasonable speech on that occasion. That is the reason why we were not present in the Select Committee. An Opposition day debate in the Chamber seemed to be an occasion of some importance, although perhaps the Minister does not recognise that. [Interruption.] I asked him a direct question--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin):
Order. The Minister does not have licence to shout across the Floor. He may not do that.
Mr. Gray:
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The House will have noticed that I made a particular point about the net take from NATS. The Minister intervened, apparently to give me the answer, but all he could do was to make a cheap party political point about the fact that I was not present in the Select Committee because I was doing my duty in the Chamber. That is a strange way for a junior Minister to behave, but the House will have noted what he did.
Because of the way in which the risk transference may or may not occur in the proposed privatisation, my reading of the explanatory notes to the Transport Bill is that the net take to the Treasury will be £15 million. If that is an incorrect reading, the Minister may care to explain what will happen to the £300 million debt, who will take that debt on, how it will be transferred and what the net take to the Treasury will be.
All of us who are considering the privatisation of NATS will be interested to hear that. If the Treasury will achieve a large take and spend the money on something useful--in the transport sphere, I hope, as is claimed--perhaps that will encourage us to go along with the Government's rather muddled proposal. If, however, the Treasury take is only £15 million, we must ask why the Government propose to carry out the privatisation. I expect that some Labour Back Benchers may ask the same question.
The privatisation of NATS is the first issue on which the Government must be straightforward. The Minister will come up with the notion of the golden share. He will tell us how important the golden share is, that it means that the Government will not lose control of NATS, and that we can be certain that NATS will remain a British organisation. Will he tell the House what he makes of the European Commission's current challenge on the ownership of golden shares in other companies, particularly BAA?
Will the Government be able to have the golden share? Will they be able to guarantee that, for example, the French and German companies currently looking at NATS will not be allowed to take control of Britain's airspace? Before the general election, the Labour party went to great lengths to assure us that one thing that was not for sale was Britain's airspace. Like many of their other early pledges, that one seems to have gone down the tubes.
NATS is the first matter of concern to me. The second is Europe. There are various aspects worth examining. We wholly support the notion of co-operation with other European states on air traffic control. We would be mad if we did not. Of course we want to make certain that all 28 European countries that take part in Eurocontrol co-operate in controlling our airspace.
That is quite different from doing what is proposed if the European Union becomes part of Eurocontrol. That is not co-operation, but integration. It implies that a European body has integrated control of the airspaces. That means giving up BAA-NATS control of British airspace to a European organisation--a sort of federalism of the air. Many commentators on the proposal have said exactly that. One of them said that, if European countries have given up control of the land borders, they should also give up control of the air borders.
I am sorry to introduce a party political point, but the Conservative party firmly believes that we should keep our land borders and our air borders, not least because our standards of air traffic control are in many respects a great
deal better than those of some of our European partners. Like any other such integration, the lowest common denominator will be the standard. There will be co-ordination across Europe at the lowest level of any European country. If there were such co-operation across Europe, there would unquestionably be a lowering of British standards.
A similar argument applies to the Joint Aviation Authority, which seeks to ensure uniform safety standards across the member states. At present, its decisions are not legally binding on the member states, although there is a suggestion that that may become the case. The House will be aware that the UK Flight Safety Committee gave evidence to the Select Committee and described the JAA as a camel train which is
My greatest concern relating to Europe involves the proposed European Aviation Safety Authority--EASA--which would operate using qualified majority voting. If that happened, debates such as this in the Palace of Westminster on the subject of air safety would no longer have any purpose. Parliament would no longer have its say over air safety across Europe. That would be handed over to a European organisation with qualified majority voting, and we might find ourselves, as we so often do in a European context, in a minority of one. I am happy to be in a minority of one so long as we have a veto. However, qualified majority voting would prevent us from vetoing our European partners' proposals.
The Select Committee considered that the UK aviation industries proud record might be undermined by full JAA membership and possibly by EASA, and recommended that the Government should clarify whether EASA would have legal powers to impose its proposed standards. It was disappointing that the Government's response to the report did not answer that point. I hope that, when the Minister replies today, he will say whether EASA will have such powers.
I have several concerns about non-European operators in the air. Responsibility for inspecting foreign-registered aircraft which land in the UK--ramp checks--lies with the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Only 59 ramp checks were carried out in 1997-98 and 63 in 1998-99. The Government have generously said that the number of ramp checks must be increased and that 200 foreign planes coming into the UK will be checked. Recently, planes landing at Heathrow were found to have insufficient fuel on board, and that is the sort of thing that would be found by a ramp check. However, set against the 1,762,820--nearly 2 million--air transport movements through Britain in 1998, those 200 ramp checks are wildly insufficient. That is a matter of great concern to my constituents in Wiltshire and even more so to people in the capital.
"could raise in the region of £350 million."
Of that, £300 million goes to pay off NATS's debts. That leaves a balance of £50 million. Of that £50 million, as I understand paragraph 233--if the Government are wrong again, perhaps the Minister will correct me--an astonishing £35 million goes to my former colleagues in the City of London in fees of one sort or another, apparently leaving a net figure of £15 million for the privatisation of NATS. If the Minister wants to correct that, I dare say he will. It will be interesting to know how much money the Treasury intends to net from the sale of NATS.
"as quick as the slowest camel in the train."
That is quite a good description of the averaging down to the lowest common denominator that I described with regard to Eurocontrol. It is unfortunate that the UK's excellent record in aviation safety may be forced lower to fit in with that of our European partners.
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