Lord Berkeley (Lab)

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to introduce this short debate. I have an interest to declare in that I live in the Isles of Scilly much of the time, to which the only passenger access in the winter is by air. There are a few problems there, which I shall come on to. In my short speech, I shall cover the many safety benefits of EGNOS, the benefits for pilots, the history of it and what happened before and after Brexit. I still see the cancellation of EGNOS at the time of Brexit as a very unwise and, frankly, stupid decision, but I shall come on to that. I will first introduce what EGNOS is, because it may be that not all noble Lords understand what it is. It is a geostationary navigation overlay service, which enhances the standard GPS signal and provides accuracy, integrity and other improvements. In simple terms, it is a way of being able to land your plane at and take off from a small airport without all the very expensive, but very good, equipment that major airports have around the country and the world. If you do not have EGNOS, you cannot fly. It is not unique; it is used all the way across Europe. I think there are 700 airports using EGNOS-enabled LPV, and in the United States there is a great deal more of it. Just before Brexit, the UK introduced EGNOS at a handful of airports, including Guernsey, Alderney, Cambridge and others, and many airlines had installed the equipment in planes that would enable it to work. The estimated cost for installation then and, I think, now is about £35 million a year to cover the whole country. In my many discussions with Ministers—including with some colleagues here—we have always been told that the Civil Aviation Authority was dead against this. It was unsafe, it would not work and it would like to see something else. Last week, I had a very useful meeting with the CAA to hear from the horse’s mouth, if one can call it that, what its view was, which I shall try to summarise. It is a technical necessity, not a political concession. All it needs, I am told, for us to rejoin is a service agreement with the European Commission. During those discussions, we had many chats about alternatives. Ministers in the previous Government said that we ought to go for something else: a sovereign UK satellite-based augmentation system, or SBAS. We went to see it, and the only problem was that it would require a £1 billion investment over 10 years—assuming that the Government would commit to 10 years’ funding, which is probably rather unlikely—and the operational costs would be even higher than EGNOS. Many people have asked why we should introduce a new system when we can get the whole EGNOS system for £30 million, which is one-third or more of the price of the other one. It is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. Maybe the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be interested in that after her announcements yesterday. To summarise the benefits, it is not just a “nice to have”; it is an essential safety and commercial add-on to safe flying. I fly as a passenger to the Isles of Scilly. Other noble Lords have much more experience in this. It is quite clear from talking to many pilots that they cannot fly in unpredictable weather because they cannot navigate properly. There are regional airports on coasts in many places, but if you cannot land and take off safely, your businesses are not going to enjoy it very much. Then we have to think about local communities. We have air ambulances around many parts of the country, including Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and I know of many cases where they have not been able to fly because there has been no EGNOS. All in all, there are really good reasons for reinstating it. I shall try to summarise where I think the CAA has got to, which was extremely helpful. It said that it is working closely with the Department for Transport and the UK Space Agency on the operational benefits, airspace modernisation, resilience and future readiness. Basically, from a regulatory point of view, it ticks all the boxes. We all know how good the CAA is at organising safe flights and everything. It really surprised me that, although it had done all this work in the last two or three years—the reports are available on the website—at the end of 2024 it will hand over responsibility for the next phase of the SBAS initiative, which is EGNOS, from the Department for Transport to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the UK Space Agency. It is jolly nice to have the Minister from the Department for Transport here answering questions, but is that the right department? I have put down several Written Questions in the last few months, and they were all answered by my noble friend Lord Vallance of Balham. It is worth reading one out: what is the cost of reinstating our membership of EGNOS? The response from my noble friend was: “The Government is considering options for UK access to a satellite-based augmentation system, following our withdrawal from the EU’s European Geostationary Navigation Overlay (EGNOS) system. This work is ongoing and no decision has yet been made. The Government engages with the European Commission and European Space Agency on space programmes but has not specifically discussed access to EGNOS”. My question to the Minister is: why have they not discussed this and when will they? People are just sitting there while businesses and transport are suffering. We just seem to be getting nowhere. A very interesting comment came from one of my colleagues in the other place, the Labour MP Stella Creasy. She said that it made no sense to separate the EU and the UK from an aviation perspective. She is right because, if you look at a map of the different aviation systems around the world—there are all kinds—one for just the UK would very much be the smallest. Are we prepared to sign agreements of 12 years for fish and four years for produce, just taking EU rules without any challenge? Why do not we not sign one for aviation? I do not know whether it would be for four years or 10, but I suspect that it would be much longer, because once people have got used to having EGNOS again, they would struggle to change it. I hope that, when my noble friend responds, he will say that we are about to start proper negotiations on EGNOS with the European Commission and other agencies in order to produce a service agreement. A service agreement is not a political agreement; it would get us back into the fold and help a large number of people who rely on short-haul or small planes to get around their business in a very sensible way, with minimal delays. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.