Clause 1 - Aerodrome charges: noise and emissions
Civil Aviation Bill
11:30 am
Julian Brazier (Shadow Minister, Transport; Canterbury, Conservative)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for a good intervention, and I hope that we will hear from her in a longer speech. She made clear on Second Reading the extent to which she is championing her constituency and other interested parties around Heathrow, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie).
New clause 6 specifically concerns aircraft noise limits and the target of reducing perceived external noise. I have no doubt that the Minister will say that it is too ambitious, and I am well aware that it would create problems with some of the international agreements that we have signed. It has been pointed out that operators from some of our new European partners have aircraft that would have trouble meeting the limit and are likely still to be in service by 2020.
I do not intend to push the new clause to a vote. However, I want to try to tease out from the Minister what progress she is hoping to make on maximum noise. We shall come later to some of the issues concerning how noise is measured, such as whether we have night caps, or whether noise can be spread out, so I shall leave those for a later debate. However, maximum noise, which the new clause addresses, must surely be a crucial issue.
Over the last generation, it would be churlish of any speaker not to acknowledge that the suppliers to the airlines, the aircraft builders, including our own British Aerospace as part of its consortium, and the engine maker Rolls-Royce, have made huge progress. Aircraft are less noisy than they were a generation ago, although the number of flights has grown enormously.