Julian Brazier (Shadow Minister, Transport; Canterbury, Conservative)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

This new clause seeks to establish a point of contact for members of the public who are concerned about noise and movements that deviate from the established plans. The Bill does a great deal for designated airports, but relatively little for non-designated airports. There is currently little control over the expansion of flights at such airports. The Campaign to Protect Rural England makes the point that the Bill will not help to tackle the problem of increasing flights eroding tranquillity. It should include provision for penalties to be levied on low-flying aircraft. We are calling here for something much more modest: simply a point of contact. On Second Reading, my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) made the point that even Members of Parliament get the run-around when they try to establish whether a flight was grossly away from its flight path, much too low, or flying at completely the wrong time of day. He said:

“If I want to know who is flying over Hungarton in Leicestershire at 4 am, where the plane was coming from and going to, what height it was at, what sort of plane it was and the airline to which it belonged, I would just get the run around. The Civil Aviation Authority, the National Air Traffic Services and NEMA”—

the airport itself—

“all bounce responsibility from one to another, so none of us can readily establish the facts.”—[Official Report, 27 June 2005; Vol. 435, c. 1053.]

I am certain that the Minister will tell us that in its present form the clause is unworkable because NATS does not have all this data. The purpose of the probing amendment is to get to the bottom of who does. NATS appears to hold data for flights when they are not in the   immediate environs of airports. The non-designated airports hold the data for their own airports. I am not quite clear who holds the data for people coming into designated airports, particularly those around London.

The point that my hon. Friend made on behalf of his constituents around NEMA applies to a small number of my constituents who are close to Manston and many other people close to non-designated airports. Let me give an example from Mr. Steve Charlish, who heads DEMAND, the NEMA pressure group. In a letter to NEMA dated 4 July he wrote:

“The flight I am complaining about was at 0240 hours (local time) on Saturday 2nd July 2005 in the morning over my home at Kings Norton. The noise was similar to a low-level military fighter jet transit it was very loud and it had passed by in a matter of some seconds.”

It is possible that it was an emergency flight.

As we get more and more flights and as we might lose the night caps and more and more planes fly at night, it becomes ever more important that there is some redress for the public, either directly or through their MPs, although most of us are reluctant to increase our postbag. A central point is needed that people can go to if they believe that flights into an airport are regularly abusing the system and not abiding by the schedules. Under the present arrangements, if even my hon. Friend, who is one of the most energetic people I know, is unable to find out the details about a particular flight, one can imagine what it is like for an elderly lady who has been woken up for the third night running.

My hon. Friend said that he wrote to the then Minister last year to ask whether we could establish a single focal point to respond to inquiries designed to ascertain facts such as what plane was where and when. The Minister undertook to do so but wrote to me just before the election to say that she could not do so after all. Residents affected by night flights thus had the injury of nuisance compounded by the insult of bureaucratic abuse. In an overcrowded country with increasingly crowded airspace, we need a method of redress for the ordinary member of the public to discover when the flight paths are being abused and when ordinary individuals are suffering as a result. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Transport; Southport, Liberal Democrat)

On Second Reading, a number of Opposition Members said that they had regularly sought information but had not been able to find where it resided, even though it was obviously somewhere in the system. Where there are thought to be breaches of, for example, air traffic orders there is an obligation under freedom of information legislation to place the information fairly promptly in the public domain. Therefore, I am sympathetic to the general thrust of subsection (1). However, I wonder whether subsection (2) is not drafted too widely. Some test or hurdle ought to be set, so that people who want information have to state what their purposes are. Otherwise, it will become a plane spotters’ charter—anybody could ask for any information at any time.   There are people in the country with a mania for collecting information who will use the process to no good effect. Equally, there are those with legitimate concerns who need information before they take further action.

Julian Brazier (Shadow Minister, Transport; Canterbury, Conservative)

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s points about the drafting. This is designed as a probing amendment. That is why, although I am always reluctant to make the MP the gamekeeper, because of the consequences that that has for all of us, one very easy way of filtering to a small number of specifics is to do what we do with the ombudsman: that is, given that it is expensive to look back over radar tapes, to make the Member of Parliament the gatekeeper.

John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Transport; Southport, Liberal Democrat)

I am not sure that an ombudsman is necessarily the most elegant solution. Perhaps there should be some sort of formal consultation body for non-designated airports through which inquiries could be filtered and assessed, with that proviso. I have no objection to the probing nature of the new clause, or its thrust.

Karen Buck (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Regent's Park & Kensington North, Labour)

I start by expressing an enormous amount of sympathy for individuals who are disturbed in the middle of the night by loud noises, which they think are made by aircraft that are off course. As Members of Parliament, we are constantly asked to take up issues of that kind—they vary according to where we live—and it is extremely exasperating if we are unable to pin down the cause and, if there is a question of liability, to hold people to account.

Having said that, a number of balances have to be struck in respect of the issues, including allowing for our extreme difficulty in relying upon the kind of information that is often presented to us by constituents.

Adam Afriyie (Windsor, Conservative)

I have had a meeting with Janice Kong of BAA, who told me that there is a scheme for Gatwick airport whereby members of the public can go to a website and look at the flight paths and information on incoming and outgoing flights. They can then, if they wish, visit the operations room and look at background data. Will the Minister look at what is going on, and encourage other airport authorities to introduce similar schemes?

Karen Buck (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Regent's Park & Kensington North, Labour)

I shall be interested to know more about that. We should, of course, encourage good practice at airports, spread that and ensure that the airports do everything possible to address the legitimate concerns of our constituents. For reasons that have been mentioned, I fear that the amendment will not take us forward satisfactorily by providing the kind of option for redress that the hon. Member for Canterbury has outlined.

The effect of the new clause would be to place an additional regulatory burden on NATS, in terms of the retention of flight data for flights operating in controlled airspace. One of the unintended consequences of the drafting would be that that would not be imposed on other air traffic service providers. In   the UK, NATS is responsible for providing en-route air traffic control services, en-route flights being those in corridors of 5,000 ft to 24,500 ft and 20 miles from the airports of arrival and departure. However, at airports where air traffic control is provided by a local provider, NATS operates in a competitive market for air traffic control, and it holds the contract at only 14 airports. There is an issue in such cases about where liability would lie.

Secondly, NATS and other air traffic control providers are responsible for providing an ATC service for controlled airspace—that is, airspace made up of terminal control areas surrounding the major airports and the airways that links those control areas. They may retain radar records for 30 days to facilitate the investigation of incidents.

However, flights in uncontrolled airspace are not compelled to receive an air traffic control service, nor are they required to notify the flight for the purpose of receiving permission to fly in such airspace. Consequently, flight data is often not available for such flights.

Thirdly, the hon. Gentleman’s proposal to require NATS alone to release information within two weeks of an inquiry being made is more onerous than the current freedom of information regime, which requires disclosure within 20 days.

There are, therefore, a number of practical difficulties, although I have considerable sympathy with the problem, and would wish to see everything possible done to ensure that individuals have some form of redress. Promotion of best practice has to be the best way forward, within the general context of the noise measures that are proposed in the Bill.

Julian Brazier (Shadow Minister, Transport; Canterbury, Conservative)

We have had a good debate. I particularly welcome the comments made about best practice at Gatwick. I think it is likely that my hon. Friends and I will seek to return to the matter on Report, having established some aspects of it in the debate. I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.