Luke Taylor

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I hope to continue the excitement of that result in the Chamber. As an engineer, former aviation consultant and now chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the future of aviation, travel and aerospace, I know that hon. Members will have become accustomed to me calling for stronger growth in the aviation space, and to my belief that technology and innovation can enable us to do that while achieving our obligations to reach net zero and stop the climate crisis. Aviation is the bedrock of our trade agreements. It enables high-value cargo to move along supply chains in a way that no other form of transport can. It makes it feasible for businesses to operate across borders and make connections with other businesses that drive economic growth forward. It has meant that the last three generations of Brits have been able to take advantage of affordable foreign holidays, with massive benefits for them, their mental health and their ability to expand their horizons and make enriching memories in unfamiliar settings. It has been so transformational for Governments, businesses and individuals that it can be safely hailed as one of the most influential technologies in history. But aviation has come at a cost. Consumer and commercial aviation has, without a doubt, contributed to the climate crisis we face. Estimates suggest that annually aviation accounts for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. However, it has contributed around 4% to global warming to date. As the MP for a constituency halfway between Heathrow and Gatwick, and given my former life in the aviation industry, I know that the politics of airports is fraught with complications. The impact on communities, if not handled properly, can be deeply challenging. It is my hope that the Government will listen and engage with the points I make about how we upgrade and improve civil aviation in this country for consumers, communities and the planet, and that they will have understood that events like those we saw yesterday serve only to underline how crucial this mission is, and how, following the third major failure of our airspace management in the past three years, it is imperative that this Bill is amended to include measures to stop that happening again. NATS is quite clearly not fit for purpose. We cannot suffer a major air traffic outage once a year. Following the outage yesterday, I am told by industry contacts that, again, communications with airlines were poor. I gently suggest to the Minister that whoever briefed the media that the disruption was akin to “a day with bad weather” should be found another position far away from the media team rather sharply. In the Lords, amendment 65—submitted by Lord Young—would have required NATS to hold responsibility for compensation for disruption caused by its failure, rather than airlines that were not at fault for these delays. The Government declined to accept the amendment, and Lord Hendy responded in a letter to Lord Young in July that he was satisfied that, following the 2023 outage, “the Government was able to place considerable pressure on” NATS “and appointed the person who led the review into the outage. This helped ensure that NATS took the necessary steps to prevent a recurrence of those particular circumstances.” For the benefit of Hansard, I raise my eyebrow and glance at the Minister knowingly. I invite him to address this issue directly in his response and seriously consider the merits of that amendment—a change supported by the International Air Transport Association and airlines. That specific challenge aside, the Bill needs to address three broader challenges, and I hope to work with the Government to ensure that it does. The first challenge is the generational risk of decarbonising aviation, which will require short, medium and long-term solutions as we work with researchers and companies to develop the breakthrough fuels that could reshape the industry. That is how we enable sustainable growth to drive our economy. The second challenge is the more procedural, but equally important, task of updating and upgrading our aerospace infrastructure to keep it competitive, while keeping communities impacted by these changes informed, engaged and fundamentally in control over what happens to them. Here we must secure our infrastructure at the same time as empowering communities. The third challenge is rebalancing the power mismatch between airlines and passengers, giving power to people and not the big airlines, so that the passenger experience can be as positive as possible, and not continue to allow airlines on some occasions to scam passengers like cheap fairground hucksters. We need serious measures that will allow the airline industry to decarbonise. That will require the same collaborative work across the public and private sectors that informed the passage of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Act 2026, on which I was grateful for the chance to work with the Government in passing. Such enormous industrial transitions take a very long time, and moving existing fleets and fuel infrastructure to green alternatives while they are still in use is outrageously difficult. Contrary to what some would like us to believe, however, it is not impossible. The interchangeability of sustainable aviation fuels and fossil-based aviation fuels, mixed and fed into the same pipelines and engines, makes this a transition that is unusually straightforward compared with other decarbonisation challenges. However, the sheer scale of the challenge and the existing infrastructure is the real difficulty. That, as well as the laws of physics and Breguet’s range equations, which I have mentioned in the Chamber before, mean that by sheer necessity the industry may be among the last to transition away from fossil fuels fully. We should not be afraid of that—it is the reality of achieving the growth we need—but we cannot ground aerospace or regulate it into submission, because to do so would have a catastrophic impact on our economy. We hear from neo-Luddites that we should effectively do that anyway—that we must constrain our horizons, put up with constraints and self-enforced recession, and tell families and businesses that they must put up with penalties and restrictions that their peers and competitors around the world do not put up with. The intention of protecting our world from catastrophic climate change is absolutely right, but these solutions are utterly wrong. Aviation is a Pandora’s box technology—once invented and tasted, it cannot be put back into the box. Like the internet or artificial intelligence, the only valid pessimistic question ought to be about how we transform it to regulate the externalities and make sure it continues to serve people, communities and the planet. The positive question concerns how we grasp the opportunities it offers to keep pushing progress forward. That means backing decarbonisation technology, which is the only way to achieve the future we need. There are great examples of this being done in practice: I spoke about Operation Blue Skies as merely a concept in the SAF Bill debate almost a year ago, but it is now funded and ready to be trialled this winter. That is concrete proof of the progress being made. However, there are things that we are failing to do as a state to remove roadblocks to this progress and there is a need for real leadership from the Government to continue to drive these opportunities forward. Yesterday, I chaired a roundtable discussion about sustainable aviation fuel to allow MPs to hear from the industry about the progress being made and what roadblocks remain. We heard how the pipeline of SAF production is not progressing at the rate needed to achieve the SAF mandate targets over the next few years, and that further Government action is needed to ensure that we do not plateau and then fall behind the target of 10% SAF by 2030 and of 22% by 2040. At the Farnborough international airshow earlier this summer, I was fortunate to witness the first flying demonstration by a fully electric aircraft, and the exhibition halls showed the huge progress on hydrogen and electric aviation that will be the future of travel. Last week, the Hydrogen in Aviation Alliance released its report, “Hydrogen-powered aviation: a pathway to delivery and growth”, which set out a clear set of steps towards harnessing that exciting new technology. Particularly interesting was news of trials led by the Cryogenic Hydrogen Optimised Systems for Aviation—CHOSAN—consortium to be based at Bristol airport, which hopes for the first hydrogen-powered flight from a UK commercial airport by 2028. That is hugely ambitious and gives hope that solutions are available, but it also reminds us that the Government need to play their part in speeding up development and roll-out even more. Whether aviation decarbonisation ends up being achieved by SAF, hydrogen, electricity, methane or some other pathway not yet discovered, it is a huge opportunity for us to grasp in order to continue our great British global leadership in aviation technology. The Bill does not bring forward specific measures on these decarbonisation goals, other than through improvements in efficiencies delivered by airspace modernisation. I see that as a huge missed opportunity, and I will look for chances to bring forward such measures in Committee. Turning to the second task on infrastructure, I greatly welcome the elements of the Bill that will help to deliver the airspace modernisation that will improve the efficiency of the UK’s airspace, reduce nuisance noise pollution around airports and facilitate the decarbonisation I have just spoken about. Far from being change for change’s sake, airspace modernisation is a vital step forward in upgrading our essential infrastructure, which has not been maintained and developed to keep up with changing and growing demands, and is at risk of periodic and then more consistent failure, as we all witnessed yesterday. Airspace modernisation should be done as part of a wider project of renewal across our transport and otherwise critical infrastructure. The lack of modernisation is visible in the chronic and consistent mismanagement of our roads and bridges, in certain aspects of public services and even in the political infrastructure that sits beneath everything else in this country. That is why, to unlock safe and sustainable growth and drag our infrastructure not just into the 2020s, but into a state of readiness for the future, airspace modernisation is utterly essential. However, my support for this Bill is not without reservations. In particular, I am disappointed that, in its current form, it does not guarantee communities a meaningful say over the impact of these changes on them. Progress and improvements in route efficiency will inevitably have negative impacts on many, with new flight paths and concentrations of disturbance taking shape over communities previously not impacted by noise. Those impacts must be considered carefully, and the communities impacted must have a genuine and meaningful say in the changes that will be delivered. As I have said before, my approach is a desire to get to yes on delivering these changes, but doing so requires buy-in from the communities that will live with the decisions for decades, so my response to this Bill has to be yes, if: yes, if we build meaningful community involvement that actually changes options; yes, if we can ensure that the scheme is able to benefit from public scrutiny; and yes, if it can be done in a way that is sustainable and not likely to be unpicked years later because it did not achieve some level of consensus. While the moving parts in aviation are aluminium, steel and carbon, these are ultimately human systems. It cannot be that changes are made that deliver what might look good on a spreadsheet or on the maps that I used to draw in the aviation industry; this must be about how the human situation is impacted by those changes. On Monday, I attended a meeting of the APPG on airport communities. We heard how the airport night noise effects study has shown the huge impact of aviation noise on families living near airports. While aircraft types have become considerably quieter over the years, the more we learn of the health and psychological impacts of noise disruption, the more it is clear that the science is consistent and the impact is real. As such, we must demand that programmes to mitigate those impacts are made available to all those affected. It is also true that as airline traffic approaches capacity and demand continues to grow, airlines are likely to upgauge their aircraft fleets, which typically leads to higher noise signatures from larger, heavier aircraft. We should also remember that the very constraints we put on air traffic are creating an increase in those disruptions. The parts of this Bill that will make airspace modernisation easy to deliver must not be allowed to cut scrutiny of the impact of that modernisation on residents or limit their voices over the options considered and how final flight routes are designed. I am particularly concerned about the impact on communities in my neck of the woods in south-west London, at Heathrow and further afield at Gatwick, which have already been sounding the alarm about the impact of night flights, particularly on their wellbeing. I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) have worked on this issue for many years on behalf of their constituents, and this Bill needs to do more to protect the interest of their residents. I expect to hear shortly from my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) on a similar issue. The Civil Aviation Authority and The BMJ have both demonstrated that living under night flights not just harms mental health, but will inevitably damage a person’s productivity the next day. In extreme cases, it can increase the risk of stroke. If it is done properly, airspace modernisation can improve many of these issues, but, where it cannot, we must insist on mitigations through soundproofing programmes or respite periods. Airspace modernisation has the potential to shift flight paths to less densely populated areas and lower the noise impact on take-off and landing with more efficient, steeper approach and departure paths that balance emissions with noise reduction, but there is no guarantee that it will do any of those things if those living in the communities affected are denied a seat at the table, either through badly designed consultations or top-down diktat. Let me turn to my third and final challenge—I am sure Members will be glad to hear that. It is important to remember that the first two challenges will affect the planet and communities near airports, but the third challenge—passenger rights—is the one that will hit passengers most directly. In the Lords, the Liberal Democrats tabled amendment 36 to implement a passengers’ charter for air travel, with various targets for minimum service levels that an airline can deliver. Lords amendments 10 and 11 would have prohibited airlines from separating passengers on the same booking to force them to pay for assigned seating, or from forcing other passengers to sit next to an unaccompanied minor. Lords amendments 2 and 20 would have stopped the UK from implementing lower standards and diverging away from existing international standards. All of those are good things, and I hope to convince the Government of their wisdom in Committee. However, my favourite amendment, which I hope to push for and convince the Government of the merits of in Committee, is Lords amendment 13, which would have required airlines to standardise the maximum dimensions for permitted cabin baggage across all air carriers in alignment with recognised industry standards. Who here has a Ryanair bag, 55 cm by 40 cm by 20 cm; a Wizz Air bag, 55 cm by 40 cm by 23 cm; an EasyJet and British Airways bag, 56 cm by 45 cm by 25 cm; and an Aer Lingus bag, 55 cm by 40 cm by 24 cm? Each one is subtly different in size, and each one is liable to set someone back a hefty penalty if the check-in agent does not like the look of them. No, I did not think so; we do not have that number of bags—or we do not have all four. It is absolute madness. This is 2026; we have universal phone chargers and universal electric car chargers, and we have had standardised shipping containers for nearly half a century. There are also universally sized overhead lockers on aircraft, so Lord Hendy was not correct when he asserted: “Aircraft have different overhead and under-seat storage capacities. Setting a standard size would necessitate using the smallest aircraft capacity, resulting in many passengers needing to use a smaller case or bag.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 June 2026; Vol. 857, c. GC71.] That is incorrect and frankly insulting to the intelligence of the passenger who has just been stung for £75 by an over-zealous Ryanair boarding agent due to having an oversized bag, because they picked up the wrong one that morning, and that 5 cm difference cannot possibly fit into the overhead bin of a Boeing 737 but could slip smoothly into that of an A320. Passengers need protection from predatory practices; we need the BSS—the British standard suitcase. That is the well-regulated market that the Liberal Democrats believe in, and I hope I am able to make the Government see the benefit of that during the Bill Committee. In summary, the Bill really is a huge opportunity to take meaningful action to improve our airspace infrastructure to reduce emissions, to improve safety and reduce noise and to improve passenger experience and make flying less expensive and stressful. Those are good aims, but they can only be achieved with careful and clear leadership that listens to the voices of industry, communities and those of us who believe that they must be delivered in the context of a wider rethink about how we maintain and upgrade our systems in this country. I thank the Minister for bringing forward the Bill, and I congratulate him on making a strong, if incomplete, start. I look forward to helping him fix the Bill in Committee.