Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)

I thank noble Lords who have taken part in this debate so far, not least my friends the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Brinton, who have done so much for disabled people for such a long period of time, despite suffering indignity and discrimination on their own account, often when using various transport modes. It is impressive, and continues to be messaging that Ministers in any and every department should take more than a passing note of. To take one tiny step back—here I am in danger of giving a bit of a Second Reading speech, but I promise noble Lords that it is purely Committee-stage chat—I want to talk about what is possible. So much of what has been discussed with regard to disabled people goes into the “too difficult” file, or somehow health and safety trumps the rights of disabled people. At London 2012 we faced the world’s finest elite disabled athletes coming to London—and, whatever we did at the park, the venues, the stadium or the aquatic centre, imagine if we had not looked at the aviation experience, not least at the port of arrival for air, London’s Heathrow Airport. Noble Lords can imagine that whatever we did in terms of athlete experience in the venue and the village would have been as nothing; if we had not intervened, we would have had the world’s finest Paralympians coming to London, and their first experience of London 2012 would have been being pushed through the airport in an airport wheelchair, because it was said at the time that it was too difficult and operationally impossible to repatriate a person’s wheelchair to the door of the aircraft. We were fortunate that we had the power, the brand and the most immovable of deadlines of London 2012 to make that difference. But the reality is that, no matter how good we planned that golden summer of sport to be, it is as nothing to ensuring, enabling and empowering all disabled people to assert their rights to travel with independence, dignity and respect, or, to put it another way, to have an airline experience equivalent to what a non-disabled person—lucky for them—can just experience and take for granted. I say “experience” because that, I believe, is the most helpful lens to get us to the right position on this. We should think about this experientially before we even make one operational decision in the Bill.