Civil Aviation Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the maiden speech from the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), who gave such an eloquent, thoughtful and intelligent speech, much of which I could agree with. I shall come on to the substance of her remarks about airports and Heathrow in a moment. I am also grateful for the opportunity to echo her remarks of tribute to Alan Keen. I had the privilege of serving for just over a year on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee with Alan Keen. He was a great colleague on the Committee and continued its work as best he could, right through last summer, including taking part in our questioning of the Murdochs and the phone hacking inquiry. He was, of course, present for the launch of the Committee's report on football governance, a topic that was a lifelong passion of his. He is sorely missed, not only by hon. Members on both sides of the House, but by members of the Committee. The hon. Lady demonstrated in her speech that communities that live alongside and around airports are vibrant and have a strong affinity to those airports as a great source of wealth, jobs, income, skills and training for the local economy. Communities that live alongside airports are by no means blighted, but can benefit an awful lot from them. My constituency has a somewhat smaller—in fact, much smaller—airport than Heathrow at Lydd, which works under the name London Ashford airport. It is applying for an extended runway so that it can offer more local and regional services. But the arguments that people in Romney Marsh in my constituency would make about why they support the expansion of that airport are very similar to the hon. Lady's remarks about Heathrow. The economic benefits of that investment in aviation and having a vibrant airport in the locality are good for the local economy and create jobs, rather than turning people away. That is appreciated by many of the hon. Members who have spoken in this debate so far, whose constituencies either contain an airport or are within the economic hinterland of one. I welcome the thrust of the Bill, in particular the remit of the Civil Aviation Authority to focus on the consumer experience and passengers as its primary motivation. That is something that will help the regulation and support of airports. I am especially drawn to clause 1 of the Bill, which sets the CAA's general duty. Subsection 1 provides that it"““must carry out its functions…in a manner which it considers will further the interests of users of air transport services””." Subsection 2 adds a duty to promote competition. I am sure that people will have amendments and ideas that will be discussed in Committee, but I wonder whether those two points may be combined into one, so that the CAA should consider promoting competition as part of supporting and furthering the interests of air transport services, rather than as a separate point. Many of us would see that those two things can be combined, because competition helps to improve the level of quality and service. I have in mind especially issues of capacity, which may be at the heart of the concerns that many air transport users face. It was mentioned earlier in the debate that one of the particular issues that air transport passengers might face is the time delays caused by flights being required to stack because they do not have a landing slot. In my constituency in Kent, that is a particular cause of noise and environmental pollution. One of the best ways to clean up the aviation industry and reduce its carbon footprint would be to reduce the amount of time planes spend in the air unnecessarily. Much of that happens simply waiting for a landing slot.