Amendment 25

Part of Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill [HL] - Committee (2nd Day) – in the House of Lords at 4:30 pm on 12 February 2020.

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Photo of Lord Berkeley Lord Berkeley Labour 4:30, 12 February 2020

I am pleased that the noble Baroness will write a letter. It might be a long one, but that is good. In this debate we have swung between saying, “Most people are just doing it in the garden. They might have the drone under their bed. If they go up, they do not fly hard, it is not going high and it won’t hurt anyone much,” to the other extreme when it could bring down an aeroplane or worse. My noble friend and others commented on the number of drones that may be flying and wondered how many will be flying illegally—in other words, without notification, without a licence or whatever. The question of proportionality is therefore quite serious; for some offences confiscation may be too strong a penalty and for others nothing like enough. In her letter, will the Minister give us some idea of how many constables or whatever we are to call them—the enforcement agency—will be trained to do this work and how many offences might they have to follow up each year? I have not a clue. You can think of every policeman in the country being able to do this—which is stupid—or of it all being done centrally. However, it would be good to have some idea of how enforcement might take place so that people like me, who have no great experience of this, can compare it to what happens on the roads or anywhere else. I will be glad to hear the Minister’s comments.