New Clause 2 - Retention of data by national air traffic services
Civil Aviation Bill
9:30 am
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.