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7 Feb 2003 : Column 590—continued
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough): Once the Bill becomes law, the offences will be arrestable, but who will do the arresting on the aircraft? Does the hon. Gentleman envisage that no extra powers will be given to anybody on the aircraft? As very few aircraft carry policemen, these people will have to be restrained somehow by the cabin staff or other passengers and then await arrest at the airport; in which case, does the Bill improve the situation in the air?
Mr. Roy: As the Bill stands, the people doing the arresting would be the police at the destination airport.
Mr. Swayne: I am interested in the arrestable offences set out in schedule 1A to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. I notice that throughout that schedule references are made to any person being able to carry out the arrest. I would expect that if a passenger is doing something serious enough to be restrained on the aircraft, that would amount to an arrest.
Mr. Roy: Obviously in the situation that the hon. Gentleman describes, there could be a citizen's arrest, or the captain could order an arrest, but under normal circumstances arrests would be carried out by the local police at the destination airport.
The Bill would implement recommendations made by the police and supported by airline trade unions. From the many meetings that I have had, the Bill also has the complete support of those in the airline industry including the Civil Aviation Authority, the UK Flight Safety Committee, the British Air Transport Association, British Airports Authority, the Board of Airline Representatives in the UK, and such airlines as British Airways, Britannia Airways, British European Airways and Virgin.
I hope that hon. Members will agree that this is a sensible and non-controversial proposal. It is designed to protect hard working airline staff and all our constituents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. It is a proposal that may one day save people's lives.
12.57 pm
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr. Roy) has undoubtedly tried valiantly to explain to us why this Bill is desirable and what its effect would be, but so far he has not quite persuaded me. I do not think that he has persuaded my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) either, but we shall return to that.
At one level, as I said briefly about the previous Bill, this is a model private Member's Bill. It is succinct and narrow in its focus and the hon. Gentleman has explained why we need such a measure at this stage. For those reasons, such a Bill would normally be welcome. I am not yet saying that this one is not, but my slight suspicion is that it has that whiff of the Government handout disguised as a private Member's Bill—a practice that I have always deprecated. Because they cannot or will not find time in their own legislative programme to do something that they want to do, the Government wait for the private Member's Bill ballot and find a hapless or willing volunteer to do their work for them. That may not be exactly reprehensible—
Mr. Tom Harris: My hon. Friend is the last person to need my defence, but the right hon. Gentleman should at least acknowledge that his record on campaigning on aircraft safety and other regulations is second to none. This is not a measure that has been forced on him by any Minister. I know personally that he has a long interest in the subject.
Mr. Forth: I am sure that the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw is grateful for the hon. Gentleman's stout defence. I shall not press the point unduly. I am saying simply that when Bills seem to have a provenance such as I am about to describe, one has reasonable grounds for suspicion that they may be Government Bills coming through the private Member's Bill procedure, and I would certainly deprecate that.
Mr. Swayne: I do not know whether this information will assuage or inflame my right hon. Friend's suspicions, but I draw to his attention the remarks of Lord Whitty on 1 September 1999, then a Minister with responsibility for transport, when he said:
- "I shall be considering with the Home Secretary increasing the maximum penalty to five years for endangering an aircraft or its passengers. This increase would be subject to parliamentary time being available."
Mr. Leigh: This is an interesting constitutional point. My right hon. Friend occupies a distinguished place in the House. Is he suggesting that when the next Conservative Government are elected we will see rather fewer handout Bills?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. We are debating the Aviation (Offences) Bill.
Mr. Forth: I certainly hope that we would see far fewer aviation Bills, or indeed Bills of any other kind, that is for sure.
The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw rightly dwelt at some length on the problems caused by what has loosely become known as air rage. Let us redesignate it gross misbehaviour on an aircraft. I fly frequently myself and I fully understand what he is saying. Not only is it a cause of some fear and discomfort to other passengers and to the cabin crew, as has been mentioned, but ultimately, if it is a sufficiently serious incident, it could endanger the aircraft itself and be a danger to life.
Mr. Swire: Does my right hon. Friend believe that this would be a better Bill if it also addressed the behaviour of the pilot and the cabin crew? We recently had evidence of yet another captain of a commercial airliner being pulled off a plane at the last minute because he was allegedly under the influence of alcohol. If it did that, would it not be a better Bill?
Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend raises an important point, to which I shall come later when I start to analyse the Bill. However, I am only at the preliminary stages of my preamble to my analysis of the background to the Bill. I shall come to the Bill itself in due course. I have it here in my hand. In clause 1, proposed new paragraph 11A of schedule 1A to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 refers to
- "specified behaviour by a person in an aircraft towards or in relation to a member of the crew".
Jim Sheridan: The right hon. Gentleman has just said that he is a frequent flyer, and I assume that he means from an English airport. Given his unsustainable and false accusation in the previous debate that somehow England subsidises Scotland, is he aware of the overpricing of flights from Scottish airports compared with those from English airports?
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is going wide of the Bill.
Mr. Forth: I am almost sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you have rightly prevented me from
engaging in that discussion. It may be for another day, but let us park it, as I think they say in modern parlance, and press on.What puzzles me is not only what happens on the aircraft, but what happens before people board it—a point that the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw rightly mentioned—and when they disembark. We need to get it clear in our minds how far we believe that provisions such as those in the Bill will affect those different stages of the journey in relation to misbehaviour, whether brought about by alcohol consumption or anything else. I shall broadly characterise those issues—with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough sitting beside me, I am slightly nervous to do so—as the jurisdictional elements.
However, before we even get to that matter, what puzzles me is whether the number of incidents is increasing. The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said with great conviction that incidents of so-called air rage were increasing, although I do not think that he provided many figures to support that assertion. My figures do not bear that out, and I do not think that the circumstances are necessarily quite so simple. Indeed, I have some figures suggesting that the number of incidents has decreased in the past two or three years, partly because of the measures already taken by the airlines themselves, for which we must give them due praise.
Mr. Roy: The number of incidents did indeed decrease for a while after 11 September, after which they started to increase again.
Mr. Forth: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which is helpful. My figures refer to the 1,055 incidents in the year to 31 March 2002 that I think he mentioned. That represented a decrease on the 1,250 incidents in the previous 12 months. I do not want to fall out with him about that issue, as it is not crucial. There are a lot of incidents, they are a problem, and that is what must be dealt with, so I do not want to get distracted too much by whether the figures are going up or down.
On the seriousness of the incidents, my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) asked whether a significant number were caused by people smoking in lavatories. The figure that I have is 36 per cent., or one in three. That activity may be in breach of the law—for example, United States federal law certainly prohibits smoking on aircraft over the United States—and it may or may not be a hazard, but I would not have thought that it falls into the category with which the Bill is concerned. We must be circumspect about considering all incidents in the same way and threatening to apply similar penalties in respect of each of them.
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