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Laura Moffatt (Crawley) (Lab): It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude). Gatwick is wholly within my Crawley constituency, and I must be one of the few Members to travel through an airport every day to work at the House of Commons. It is a fantastic airport that not only provides air travel but offers an excellent interchange for a fast and efficient bus service, coaches and trains. It is therefore a valuable resource that we very much treasure in Crawley.

I have not come to these issues lately, as I grew up with the airport and the new town of Crawley.

I have been a member of the consultative committee for some nine years and chaired the environment committee that put in place noise and track-keeping schemes and penalty schemes to make sure that our airport functioned properly and did not cause enormous trouble for the people around it. I consider myself to be a critical friend of Gatwick airport and continue to be so.

It is important to recognise what a valuable asset the airport is, particularly as development goes on. The new bridge that has just been erected is a wonderful feat of engineering. Gatwick supports 26,000 people on the airport and many thousands more around it. The
 
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conclusions that I reach differ from those reached by the right hon. Member for Horsham. On expansion, there are serious concerns about the way in which Gatwick has been left on what Sussex Enterprise inventively calls the subs bench.

Listening to the debate, I thought how poignant it was that hon. Members were speaking about consultation. We as Members of Parliament have a crucial role to play. That is why on two occasions I have held major consultations with the people of Crawley—not just those who come to me to complain—about what they feel about expansion. In the first consultation we had a large seminar in our town centre that brought together all sorts of people who had an interest in our airport—in noise issues, employment and all the features that make an airport part of a community.

The debate in Crawley has been much more finely balanced than elsewhere. It was important that people were able to express their views about airport development. As in the debate today, there was complete consensus that the use of our airports must be maximised at each site. It is good to hear that. I am keen to pursue surface transport issues, because with a fast efficient service between Gatwick and Heathrow, we would get much more out of those two airports. We could use the two airports as a combined London hub, as is done in the United States, although I entirely understand that the principle of a single hub is the only one that succeeds, sad as it is for me to admit that.

The continuing success of our airports is vital. The outcome of the consultations, e-consultations and debates around my constituency was finely balanced. A small majority felt that there should be no further development. Many of those people were closely associated with the airport. It is important that we take on board the views of those who will bear the brunt of expansion. In other parts of the town, the views were different. People wanted Gatwick to be part of the development of air transport.

If we had time, we could have a long debate about whether the aviation industry should grow. I firmly believe that it should, and that Gatwick should be part of that growth. I want it to be at the heart of future plans, but it is clear from the White Paper that we are in a difficult position. If there were to be expansion at Gatwick, my preference would be for a close parallel runway, because that would mitigate noise and disturbance for many more people than would a wide parallel runway.

We are faced with the enormous dichotomy of environment v. expansion.

It is no good MPs saying that the environment is important, but that we should move ahead and ignore it, and it is no good their saying that the industry is important, but that the environment is paramount. We must find new ways in which to move forward, and I have no doubt that the series of debates on the subject in the House will continue. New technologies can be used—they have been implemented at Gatwick, and I have seen how they can reduce noise in simple ways, such as ensuring that pilots fly their planes properly.

Few people in Crawley criticise the Government's approach, which is a brave move forward on one of our most successful industries. Wherever I go, people
 
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acknowledge that the Government have tackled the issue. Under the last Government, who ducked the issue, I sat through endless debates on the development of runway capacity in the south-east and on the south-east and east of England regional air services study.

I understand the White Paper's objective. I want the Minister to tackle issues such as air passenger duty and fuel, but I also want him to think carefully about how we can ensure that all air passengers travelling abroad receive the same protection as those who travel as part of a package.

The White Paper contains a raft of interesting and vital issues. The debate will continue, and, as MPs, it is our duty to ensure that our constituents understand that point—I will certainly ensure that the views of people in Crawley are brought to the House. The debate will continue until we reach a conclusion, but at last we have a Government who are tackling it.

4.12 pm

Mr. Peter Ainsworth (East Surrey) (Con): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt), whose constituency borders mine.

As the Minister knows, the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am the Chair, yesterday published the Government response to our report, "Aviation Follow-up". In doing so, we took the opportunity to take issue with the Department for Transport about numerous aspects of its response, which we considered superficial and inadequate. We are therefore happy to invite the Government to have a second go. Next time, I hope that they address some of the issues that we have raised, rather than seeking to avoid them.

In particular, I hope that the Government will resist the temptation wilfully to distort the Committee's views on aviation. For example, the Government response implies that we advocate that the growth of aviation

"should be stopped in its tracks",

which is simply untrue. For the record and for the benefit of the Minister, our position is neither that the Government should halt the expansion of aviation nor that they should set out to satisfy inflated predictions of future demand, but that, bearing in mind aviation's impact on the environment, which nobody doubts, and the current and likely future state of the industry, it would simply be responsible to plan for a reduced rate of growth. If that course were adopted, the Government would save itself a major headache, which they are hearing about this afternoon, and millions of people would be spared from blight and environmental degradation—it would also help to reduce the disturbing acceleration of climate change.

As I said, the environmental impacts of aviation are hardly disputed. Equally, I do not dispute the economic benefits that aviation can bring, and I listened carefully and with some approval to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) on that point. My constituency borders Gatwick, which is an important source of jobs for thousands of my constituents, and Gatwick is generally recognised as a key driver for the local economy. Although the overwhelming majority of my constituents are broadly content to see Gatwick reach its maximum use, they emphatically do not want another runway.
 
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Turning to the White Paper, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) and I were delighted by the unequivocal rejection of the frankly ridiculous proposal to turn Redhill aerodrome into an international airport, but I share the concerns expressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham about Gatwick.

The White Paper creates the invidious position whereby after 2019, Gatwick's fate is left entirely dependent on circumstances beyond its control—namely, whether pollution at Heathrow can be reduced to acceptable EU levels. The uncertainty of that was demonstrated when the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said that there was no chance of Heathrow meeting those targets and the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Mr. Marsden) suggested that it was likely to do so.

Where does that leave people who live around Gatwick, whose future environment depends on the decisions that are being taken? Gatwick has been given a conditional sentence but left with no control over how or whether those conditions can be met. That is a classic recipe for blight. Local people are rightly concerned about that. They are also extremely anxious about the profound and irreversible impact that a second runway would have on the local environment. Their concerns extend beyond noise and pollution to embrace the huge demand for extra housing that would be entailed, the loss of more countryside and the massive extra pressure on our infrastructure. Those concerns are not only for hon. Members and other people located around Gatwick—they apply equally to Stansted, to Heathrow and to every area where new runways are proposed. I regret that the Government have so far failed to place a monetary value on the impact of their plans on the landscape, tranquillity, heritage sites and biodiversity; they should do so as a matter of urgency.

I hope that I can bring hon. Members some good news. The approach advocated by the Environmental Audit Committee is very clear and offers a solution to problems such as those described by the hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington, for Brentford and Isleworth (Ann Keen) and for Putney (Mr. Colman) and by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk)—even by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham, if I could persuade him to be slightly less Kyoto-sceptical.

We need to look again at whether expanding runway capacity on anything like the scale proposed in the White Paper is really necessary, bearing in mind the existing underutilised capacity. I urge hon. Members to look carefully at the Government's forecasts. Two critical interrelated assumptions underpin the White Paper and all that follows from it. The first assumption is that demand for air travel will continue to grow at an average of 4 per cent. a year to 2030. That implies a threefold increase in air travel over the next 30 years, which must be highly questionable. There is every reason to believe that at some point, probably quite soon, the industry will conform to the usual law of economics and mature into significantly lower growth. It is important to understand that that 4 per cent. per annum increase over the next 30 years would lead us to a position in which by 2030 we will need a new airport the size of Heathrow every three years. That is a ludicrous proposition, but the White Paper asks us to accept it.
 
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The other basic assumption in the White Paper concerns the cost of flying. The Department is assuming that the cost of air fares will fall by around 40 per cent. over the next 30 years. That was hard to believe even before the recent rise in the price of oil. We should note that for forecasting purposes, the White Paper assumes that the price of oil will remain at an average of $25 a barrel—right now, it stands at more than $40 a barrel. That seems challenging, to put it mildly.

The Government also appear to believe that the voracious competition at the low-cost end of the industry will be sustained. It is more likely that many of the competitors will disappear from the market and that the industry will consolidate and gradually try to increase fares. Some hon. Members have also referred to increased landing charges. All that is supposed to happen without any new fiscal measures, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green) was right to mention as a possibility.

It is beyond doubt that a policy that predicts a massive increase in demand for aviation and subsequently sets out to provide for it is a predict-and-provide policy. The environmental consequences are potentially devastating and I urge the Government to think again.

4.20 pm

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