Heathrow (Third Runway)

There is also tax, and there are all sorts of other issues for those businesses to consider. However, access to a hub airport is clearly an important one. If a company depends on growing business in India or China, having to conduct business via a hub airport in mainland Europe or the far east will add several hours to each journey and cause huge inconvenience, not to mention the impact on carbon emissions of having to take two flights instead of one. That suggests to me that we need a very ambitious solution that will allow aviation to grow sustainably while maintaining our position as a country with an internationally competitive global hub. If there are ways of meeting our climate change goals without rationing aviation capacity, we should seek them out first. The most efficient way of doing that is, of course, through carbon trading. If aviation emissions are appropriately priced—the hon. Member for Lewes made that point well—so that people are paying the full social and environmental costs of travelling by air, they could pay for every household across Europe to switch to low-carbon light bulbs or for energy-intensive industries in other parts of Europe to create a step change in their carbon performance. In fact, people who fly will be paying for the transition to the low-carbon economy that we all want to see. Whether they choose to pay will depend on the personal social value that they place on taking a plane. If they are not prepared to pay the price, the number of flights will fall and we will meet our carbon goals in a different way, with less effort on the part of other carbon-intensive industries. I shall take my argument a step further. Sir Nicholas Stern rightly argued that there would be an economic cost to tackling climate change, but that doing so now would ensure that the cost was less than if we failed to act and instead waited for the inevitable catastrophe 50 years down the line. He also said, in a less noted and less cited part of his report, that the up-front cost could be minimised and made achievable only if we tackled climate change in the most cost-effective way possible, allowing trading between different sectors of the economy. Carbon-intensive industries that could convert relatively cheaply to less carbon-intensive methods would then be funded by industries that currently do not have much choice about how much carbon to emit, such as aviation. If a true cost is put on carbon, people in business will be faced with the true cost of their actions. Forcing polluters to buy permits would mean that emission cuts took place wherever in the economy they were most cost-effective. If we do not allow people to choose how they want to make their sacrifices, and if we force them through rationing to make fewer flights, we will face a tremendous backlash against our climate change objectives and people will not trust the Government, or any party that seeks to be in government, to take the necessary action in future.