New Clause 1 - Responsibility of airlines for health, welfare and well-being of passengers
Civil Aviation Bill
9:00 am
John Smith (Vale of Glamorgan, Labour)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
May I say what a privilege it is to be a member of a Committee chaired by you, Mr. O’Hara?
A first appearances, new clause 1 appears to contain complicated additions to the Civil Aviation Act 1982. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, as it would introduce a relatively simple change in the law. It would include a number of new sections after section 84 of the 1982 Act. Proposed new section 84A covers responsibility for health, welfare and well-being of passengers, new section 84B deals with supplementary provisions to that responsibility, and liability is covered in new section 84C. Finally, and crucially, new section 84D proposes amendments to the Carriage by Air Act 1961.
New section 84A simply sets out a general duty of care for airlines and air carriers in relation to the health, welfare and psychological well-being of their passengers. The Committee might wonder why that is proposed. The reason is that, believe it or not, airlines currently have no duty of care for the health and welfare of their passengers. They have considerable duties of care for their passengers’ safety in relation to accidents caused by “events” on aircraft, the most obvious being an air crash, which can be pretty risky for airline passengers. However, they have no duty of care for their passengers’ health, and section 84A would place it on them.
I stress that there is nothing unusual about that general duty. It is exactly the same duty of care that any other passenger carriers have to bear. Whatever form of public transport someone travels by—ship, train, coach or even taxi—the carrier has an implicit duty of care for the health of their passenger. Rather bizarrely, since 1929 under article 17 of the Warsaw convention, airlines have no such responsibility.
One could not imagine a more contrived environment than an airline cabin. The air that passengers breath is controlled by the airlines: the ventilation, level of oxygen and its temperature. The food that passengers eat is controlled, as is where they sit, how they sit and, importantly for those of us who have travelled frequently in economy class, the amount of space they have to sit in. The airlines control the exercise that they can take—whether people can stand up and walk around on airlines—the amount of alcohol and water that they can drink, and what people eat on airlines. Indeed, there is a big issue about the salt content of airline food. The pressure in a standard aircraft in 2005 is equivalent to the air pressure 6,000ft above sea level.
My point is that all of that is controlled by the airlines, but they have no responsibility for their passengers’ health. That might sound counter-intuitive, but it is accurate. It is an anachronism that should be removed, and I believe that the Bill might be able to do that. New section 84B sets out the specific areas of responsibility for the health of airline passengers, new section 84C sets out responsibility for passengers and new section 84D sets out, crucially, the area of liability. However, it is important that the Minister and members of the Committee appreciate that, in placing a general duty on the airlines, we are not placing any penalties on them. We are not placing a general statutory duty on airlines and then saying that if they fail to deliver those responsibilities they will be fined or penalised by the state or by any privatised airport authorities.
The point is that airlines will be held to be liable if they fail in their duty to safeguard the health of their passengers. In other words, airline passengers or their families will still have to go into court, which is not an easy thing to do, and prove that the airlines were responsible for damage or injury to their health or, indeed, death, as we believe may be the case in many instances. The families will still have to have their day in court and argue that it was due to the actions of airlines—or indeed the failure to act and negligence—that their loved ones were killed, before the airline can be held liable or required to pay compensation for its actions or failure to act. The fact is that, in 2005, victims of air health incidents cannot even go to court to argue that the airlines are responsible for the damage to their health. That is an absurd anomaly. In the 21st century, when air travel is the fastest-growing mode of public transport in the world, when more than 60 million British passengers fly long haul out of this country every year, their health is not protected by the airlines that carry them.
New section 84D amends the Carriage by Air Act 1961. It would override article 17 of the Warsaw convention. At the time when it was agreed, the Warsaw convention was a well thought out, well balanced piece of international legislation. Air travel was quite a novel activity; most countries wanted to promote it. Very few people participated in air travel and, at that time, it was quite a dangerous activity. In 1929, people were still flying in biplanes and taking great risks. There was no such thing as pressurised cabins. At that time, most advanced countries rightly wanted to promote and develop aviation and air travel, and so they introduced limited liabilities. The major concern at the time was safety—the number of air crashes and the airworthiness of aircraft. Health was not a factor in 1929; one was lucky to survive a flight in one piece, without worrying what the effect might be on one’s health at a later date.
Now, however, health is a critical issue, whereas safety is not. That is because of the effectiveness of much legislation governing the safety of air travel. In fact now, air travel is the safest mode of public transport. People are far less likely to be killed or injured as a result of flying in an aircraft than by riding a bicycle or travelling in a car. It is a safe mode of transport but there is a growing body of evidence that it is an unhealthy mode of transport.
I speak in Parliament on behalf of the Victims of Air-Related Deep Vein Thrombosis Association. It supports me in my effort to amend the Bill, which it generally supports. We have lists of hundreds of victims of deep vein thrombosis. It is considered to be a major public health issue related to air travel. We do not know the full extent of the problem and we have never pretended to know. We do not know exactly how many people are dying or being seriously injured from this condition in Britain, let alone throughout the world, but there is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence and indicative evidence.
The most recent piece of research was carried out by a medical research institute in New Zealand the year before last and published in The Lancet. It showed that as many as one in 100 of all air travellers who travel long haul, which is defined as longer than four hours, suffer not a blood clot but a deep vein thrombosis. We suspect that it is caused primarily by prolonged immobility on an aircraft, especially in cramped conditions, but other factors could be involved.
As I mentioned on Second Reading, research is about to be published by the World Health Organisation and a team of world experts led by Professor Fritz Rosendaal at Leiden university. It is about to show, probably finally and definitively, that there is a clear correlation between long-haul air travel and the incidence of thrombosis. We look forward to that research which is financed primarily by the Department for Transport. It will be an important milestone in the protection of the health of air travellers.
This Bill also protects the health of air travellers. That is why I warmly welcome and endorse clause 7. I congratulate the Minister, her Department and the Government on bringing this forward. It is relevant to my new clause. It places a duty of care on the Secretary of State for Transport to safeguard and protect the health of airline passengers. It places a modest levy on the airlines to finance the running of the aviation health unit at CAA Gatwick which is the first in the world to provide information and support for air passengers, the Government and the airline industry. Crucially it extends the air navigation orders to cover health issues as opposed to safety issues.
When the Bill is passed in full, the CAA will be able to issue air navigation orders protecting the health of airline passengers. For the first time it will be able to cover things like ventilation in cabins. It will also be able to cover the seat pitch of the seating arrangements in airline cabins. The seat pitch is the distance between the front of one seat and the back of the seat in front. Those who travel low cost, long distance, with their knees up under their chin, will know exactly what we are talking about. One of the crucial reasons why that distance cannot be extended is that under air navigation orders it can be extended only for safety reasons, primarily for safe access to and egress from the aircraft in the event of an accident or an emergency.
Such orders cannot be issued for health reasons: in other words, when a person is cramped, they cannot move, their blood does not circulate properly and pools in their ankles. According to at least one eminent researcher in the field, Professor John Scurr, one in 10 people who travel on long-haul aircraft develop clots as a result of that pooling. However, the Government have been absolutely powerless to do anything whatever about that and will remain so until the Bill is enacted. I have tabled new clause 1 because the Secretary of State may end up responsible for providing advice, information and guidelines through the CAA about the health of airline passengers, but, believe it or not, airlines will have no responsibility whatever for the health of their passengers. That could, at some point in the future, result in a serious anomaly: in other words, the Government will have responsibility for aviation health—the first Government in the world to do so—but the airlines will not.
New clause 1 would change that and would place such responsibility on the airlines and allow passengers who are injured, or the relatives of passengers who are killed as a result, primarily, of deep vein thrombosis to pursue their case. Deep vein thrombosis is what concerns me, but without frightening members of the Committee there are a number of serious aviation health issues, particularly those that are of concern to airline pilots, one of them being toxic fumes entering the cockpit and affecting their consciousness, which would be of concern to anyone flying on an aeroplane, 33,000 ft up in the air half way across the Atlantic. There is a range of health issues. Crew are not covered by the normal safeguards in health and safety legislation, including the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, because of the outdated convention that was produced over 70 years ago.
It is a pleasure for me to speak to the new clause, and I hope that the Government will be able to accept it in its entirety. If they are unable to do that, I should be interested to hear what the Government’s thinking is and what their aspirations are for future liabilities being placed on airlines. I am confident that, at the end of the day, as consumers realise the risks to their health and well-being that they take when they board an aircraft—because they are not insured through normal travel insurance when they board an aircraft against damage or injury to their health, or death—the passenger demand for the same protection that all other passengers enjoy will be unstoppable.
When people board an aircraft they see videos giving them advice on healthy living, telling them what to eat, not to drink too much, and to take regular exercise, but that is a relatively new phenomenon. That would never have been seen on an aircraft four years ago, before the launch of the DVT campaign. Among the families of victims of that condition, the reason for putting the new clause in the Bill was the publication of the excellent Select Committee on Science and Technology report on aviation health. It was a well-balanced and well-thought-out research paper, which has resulted in that action. As I have said, I am delighted that clause 7 is in the Bill. I consider it a major step forward in the protection of British air travellers, and the Government should be proud of that.
I finish on a discordant note by expressing one concern. I believe that all Committee members have received a briefing paper on the Bill from Virgin Atlantic. In it, it refers to aviation health issues, and deep vein thrombosis in particular, as merely press scare stories. It also calls on the Government to withdraw the levy, which I think is outrageous because airlines have no liability. Airlines cannot both claim that there are no major health concerns regarding air travel and hide behind article 17 of the Warsaw convention, which prevents them from being held liable. With that unfortunate criticism of Virgin Atlantic, I commend new clause 1.