Clause 2 - Penalties
Aviation (Offences) Bill
Mr Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North, Labour)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Miss Widdecombe. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw on introducing the Bill. I wanted to speak on Second Reading but was unable to; I might have said what I am about to say at that time. I want to make some important points.
The Bill dovetails nicely with the Railways and Transport Safety Bill, which received a Third Reading on Monday following a debate. I was a member of the Standing Committee of the Bill. We dealt with drunkenness among staff and aircrew, while this Bill deals with problems with passengers. It is right that they should be dealt with closely together. I have already regaled my colleagues on that Committee with my experience of travelling back from Plovdiv 15 years ago, when all the aircrew drank vodka all the way to Gatwick—a terrifying experience. I thought at the time that we should have had some laws to deal with such behaviour, let alone to deal with passengers.
Most people who travel by aircraft are perfectly peaceful, well behaved and law abiding, and go about their holiday or whatever in a relaxed way. We are dealing with a small number of people who sometimes have personal problems relating to alcohol or personality traits. A difficult minority of people cause such problems.
In the previous Parliament—before my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) became Under-Secretary of State for Transport—I was in correspondence with other Ministers in the Department about the problem of air rage. I put it to them at the time that we should introduce a penalty forbidding people to fly. Prison sentences and fines are well enough, but not being able to fly—taking away a person's licence for a prolonged period, and perhaps for life for a second offence—would be a serious deterrent.
I put that case. The only argument that came back was from my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South. She made the point that international co-operation would be needed. It might be easy to do that on flights from Gatwick to Edinburgh or Luton to Glasgow, but on flights from Plovdiv to somewhere else it would be more difficult. International agreement would be necessary. I believe that bans on flying for passengers who seriously misbehave should be discussed, and I ask the Minister to consider that for future legislation, if not for the Bill.
Mention has been made of hon. Members flying and behaving themselves. Some years ago, I spent a long flight with my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South. Luton is rather over-represented on the Committee. No one could have been more peaceful than we were. However, I have flown with an hon. Member who was less well-behaved. [HON. MEMBERS: "Name them."] It was many years ago and I cannot remember the name. The behaviour was well short of an offence, but it caused stress. Stress is a serious problem on an aircraft. There are children, the elderly, people who have not flown very much or are frightened of flying. If they see aggression of any kind, such as a shouting argument, that can cause problems that have to be addressed seriously. We are not all relaxed and laid back about flying at 500 mph at 35,000 ft. Some of us take it in our stride, but others do not, and they get agitated.
On another occasion, I travelled with a young man in our party—not an hon. Member—on a very long flight. I imbibe myself, but he was drinking excessively and became very agitated to the point that I thought that he might commit an aggressive act. As it happened, he was sitting next to me, and I spent the night—it was a night flight—talking him down. He told me his life story, which had a certain amount of tragedy in it, that being one reason why he was so agitated, and he calmed down over a period of time. I did not get any sleep but I felt that I was helping him out with his problems. People can get very agitated on flights. Some get to the point where they become aggressive.
Mention has been made of ordinary people and the average working person going on a holiday flight, but we have heard stories recently of wealthy pop stars misbehaving extremely badly on aircraft, although they might get away with it in the subsequent court case. Abusive pop stars with plenty of money are not going to worry about fines, because they are such wealthy people that they can just click their fingers and £1 million appears. They might worry about prison sentences at the end of the day; but I think that it would affect such people very much if the possibility of their ever flying again were threatened. Their livelihood and way of life would be seriously affected by that.
I have seen in restaurants, trains and elsewhere that it can be the wealthy who misbehave, not ordinary people. The wealthy are, perhaps, used to ordering people about and getting their own way because they have money and power. Perhaps we should be looking at deterring those people. They would be seriously deterred if they were banned from flying. We might suggest a scale of penalties, such as five years for a first offence, 20 years and then a lifetime ban—although I hope that it would not ever get to that. A series of penalties, which involved banning people from flying by stamping their passport, could quite easily be arranged within the European Union and with other developed countries, such as the United States. It would be harder to arrange with some smaller and poorer countries, or with countries where the sort of regulations that we are used to are less common.
We have to look at the matter seriously because it is very frightening when someone starts to get aggressive on an aircraft. We cannot pull the communication cord and stop the train; we cannot stop the bus and ask for people to get off. An aircraft is in mid-air, flying at high speed, and nothing can be done until it can find a place to land and the person can be dealt with. If people who misbehave like that know that they might be banned from flying, possibly for life, I think that they would either not fly or not behave in that way. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to think for the future about slightly higher penalties than those in the Bill. The Bill is excellent as far as it goes, but I should like to see stronger penalties and I hope that consideration will be given to that in due course.