Lord Harper (Con)

No, I do not. The question I had to answer was that if you have a status quo and if you are going to make a change, you have to ask yourself, does the change drive an improvement in behaviour or outcomes? I simply was not persuaded that it would. Picking up my noble friend’s point about perhaps having saved the Minister a bit of bother, I thought, when I was listening to him make his case, that there is, of course, the opportunity, when one is now both in opposition and on the Back Benches, to let the Minister do all the work. But since the event happened on my watch, as it were, and we put quite a lot of thought into whether we should make the change that my noble friend set out, and since the answers that he received from our noble friend Lady Vere of Norbiton when she was Aviation Minister were effectively on my behalf, I thought it would be a bit slopy-shouldered of me to sit here quietly, not say anything and not give the Committee the benefit of the thought process at least. Being slopy-shouldered has never really been my style, so I thought it was at least worth giving the Committee the benefit of the effort that went in on behalf of aviation consumers who were disadvantaged by this, the work that went on by the industry and the work that the Government did to try to put things right. My final point is just to say that the industry—NATS, the airlines and the airports—demonstrated a remarkable ability to work together to serve the interests of consumers. The industry has a lot to be proud of in the way that it comes together when there are these difficult circumstances to serve the people who pay their wages.