Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, Amendment 109 in my name aims to remedy a manifest injustice whereby the airlines have to pay for customer compensation when the fault lies not with them but with NATS. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Kirkhope, who trailed this amendment in his Second Reading speech, but, in the time available, the Minister was not able to address it. The problem manifested itself on 28 August 2023, when the air traffic system, managed by NATS, failed. An independent review was set up and its report gives the scale of the debacle: “From CAA estimates, over 700,000 passengers were affected by cancellations and delays ascribed to the incident, including approximately 300,000 impacted by flight cancellations, approximately 95,000 by long delays (over three hours) and at least a further 300,000 by shorter delays”. It went on to say that “the incident on 28 August had substantial negative impacts on a large number of passengers, not only on the day of the outage but for several days afterwards, as it took until the following weekend for all the re-routed journeys to be completed”. The review estimated the costs involved: “Based on the information provided by the airlines most affected by the incident, the Panel has estimated that the costs to airlines were approximately £65m. In addition, substantial costs were incurred by passengers, airports, tour operators, insurers, and others. The Panel was unable to accurately quantify these costs. It is likely that the total cost was in the region of £75m to £100m”. Finally, it said about passengers: “Many passengers incurred costs which they could not recover, for example, the loss of pre-paid holidays, lost income from work to which passengers were not able to return, and other consequential losses. The total costs of this large group would be very difficult to calculate but is likely to have been many millions of pounds”. However, when one reads the NATS annual report for that year, it puts a slightly different spin on the incident: “A technical flight handling system issue in August necessitated a considerable reduction in flight capacity for a short period in order to ensure the skies remained safe”. Noble Lords would expect that the guilty party, NATS, rather than the innocent parties, principally the airlines, would have to bear the costs—not a bit of it. The only cost to NATS was £1.8 million. In the words of the review, that was a “relatively modest penalty associated with not meeting some of its performance … targets”.