My Lords, I welcome the three main aims of this legislation, which were well set out by the Minister. The Government are right that the aviation industry has been growing reasonably well and could make a bigger contribution to growth and prosperity in our country. The Government are right that safety is a vital priority behind which all parties in this House would unite. They are right to realise that, as technologies change, aeroplanes evolve and our airspace becomes ever more congested, it is necessary for a Government to accept the prime safety responsibility and ask whether the rules and guidance are still correct, and whether the regulatory authorities are doing their job in carrying out their task of enforcing safety.

We all want to see good conditions for passengers. That has to be a balance, because if you go too far in regulating in favour of super service then the price can go up too much. The Government must form a judgment on what is an appropriate minimum level of service quality to require so that no one is left in a bad way. This is particularly true of disabled people, as we have

been hearing. However, they have to be careful not to overdo standards, which then prices people out of the market and it becomes a middle-class indulgence.

Where I have more doubts about the Bill is when it comes to the detail. I found the 316-page impact assessment heavy going. I do not know whether other colleagues bothered or whether they did not get to the exciting conclusion at the end—I must have missed the exciting conclusion at the end. It was repetitious, very generalised and very high-level. It was clearly a piece of work done by officials who were given an impossible task. They were meant to work out what regulatory changes are going to be made and ask the usual questions of an impact assessment, on the costs of these regulatory changes and the benefits of carrying them through, as some things you will have to do because they are for safety but, for lots of other things, you will have to make a judgment about the trade-offs. Are the costs too high or are the benefits exciting enough to go for it?

Remarkably, this impact assessment concludes that there will be just a small net loss, as a result of the legislation, of just a few million pounds for a multi-billion-pound industry, and so this is well within the margin of error. When you try to find out why the figures are so small, you find that there are practically no benefits identified because this Bill will ensure that nothing happens for quite a long time. It is arranging the regulatory furniture but it will not change what will apply to airlines and passengers any time soon.

The Bill has delay built into it at every opportunity. We read in the impact assessment that it may take a year for us and the other place to get the legislation through and finally into effect. Then, apparently it will take another year before the Government come up with changes to use the very large powers that this legislation will give to Ministers and to regulators without further reference to Parliament. We are being asked to sign a blank cheque, but Ministers have no idea who they will want to make the cheque or cheques out to, let alone how much there may be on them.

The House needs to understand that this is what I would call officials’ legislation. This is not a burning desire of a Minister who knows his subject very well to make changes which are soon going to make a difference to aviation and to economic growth in this country. This is “good management-type” official legislation, saying that we may need these powers and need to copy a whole load of EU regulations that have already passed—or, more likely, that are going to come out soon—so let us have these powers and make sure that most of these things can be done by a regulatory body without any reference to Parliament or by statutory instrument with minimum debate. That way we do not need to trouble people about it. When the House proceeds to investigate the legislation, it will want a bit more from the Ministers on how they would use these considerable powers.

I would like more urgency from Ministers. The impact assessment says that nothing is going to happen before three to five years have elapsed, because of the year legislating, the year thinking about how to use the powers, and then the powers coming into effect. In other words

words—and Labour Peers should think about this—this legislation is basically saying that it cannot make any improvement to aviation or provide any extra growth in the lifetime of this Parliament. That is disappointing.

I am a bit more ambitious than the Government. I find myself saying there are things that could be done now, on a shorter timetable, which could make life better for the aviation sector, its passengers and its users. Take the prime one of growth—that is my main concern. I have always said how much I admire the fact that the Government want to be a growth Government, but I have been critical about how many of the things they do actually achieve the opposite. Here is one thing that is not actually going to achieve the opposite—it is just not going to achieve anything, according to the papers before us—where more could happen.

The Minister says that we will have an opportunity in due course to discuss the expansion of Heathrow. Heathrow is the dominant airport of the UK aviation sector, and the success and growth of Heathrow will be a dominant factor in how well this sector does. Delaying a debate seems a little odd, because surely this should be the prime concern of the Government at the moment. When I look at the plans, I believe the Government have backed the plan that takes the longest and is the dearest. They have gone for the plan where the M25 needs to move, which adds more than £20 billion to the total cost and I suspect will add quite a lot of delay to the whole thing, as well as the actual cost of building the additional runway. There is a rival scheme, at considerably less cost and to a tighter timetable, where the runway would fit on to the existing land extending more eastwards so that we do not have to rebuild the M25.

Maybe the Government are right. I would be interested to hear their case. But we would need reassurances that the M25, during all those difficult works, would not be disrupted. Look at the important transport infrastructure of this country. The M25 is one of the dominant and most important pieces of infrastructure that we have put in, saving all those journeys through London and allowing so much commerce and passenger traffic to flow around the city relatively quickly on a good day. We do not really need a big disruption of that.

As someone who some years ago had as my main business career offering financial advice to Governments around the world, I had to fly quite a lot, rather more than I wanted to in those days. To me, as a travelling businessman earning revenue for my firm and for the country as a whole in selling overseas services, what mattered was timeliness and accessibility. I was interested in total journey time from my house to the office I was going to advise. Quite often there was disproportionate time, trouble and delay in getting from my house, some 35 miles from the airport, to Heathrow to get on the plane, which might even have been on time. Ministers looking at growth of airports and accessibility to airports have to consider surface transportation. There have been improvements in recent years to get better rail access to Heathrow. It took a very long time for those of us who wanted that to break through with the authorities to get it to happen. That now has happened with both an extensive Tube option and a link to the

old Great Western main line. But we need to make sure that road access also works for those who wish to use the airport.

It would be useful if the Minister could give us an update on Gatwick, the second very large airport in the London area. There was a plan to have a much cheaper and faster progress to many more passenger movements, with the idea of having a constant-use second runway. That requires shifting the existing relief runway a little, so there is quite a bill of cost. That was meant to be coming along before the end of this decade, and it would be very interesting to hear an update on whether it is going to happen.

The relevance to this Bill is that, of course, as those airport expansions happen, many more slots will become available. We owe it to those who are thinking of venturing very large sums of money to expand Gatwick and Heathrow to let them know what the rules of the game will be when they come to place those slots, and to look to see how they are going to remunerate the large sum of money in the case of Gatwick and the absolutely colossal sum of money in the case of Heathrow, even in the original budgets. Heathrow has all that additional risk from complexity, which could result in needing to remunerate even more capital than is currently envisaged.

While I welcome the three main aims of the Government and think that this legislation could be improved by telling us in detail how they can do things that will improve all those, we need more on the environmental impact on surrounding communities living close to airports. I speak as someone who used to represent a constituency that was some 35 miles or so out of London to the west, where there were problems with Heathrow noise. There are solutions that could be woven into this legislation or general government policy. A new generation of planes should be considerably less noisy. It is possible to construct flight paths that are less intrusive, and it is certainly possible to increase the angle of ascent and descent, which reduces the magnitude of the area affected by the noise nuisance. The more that can be done to encourage quieter aviation, the better. There are also other environmental issues relating to surface transport; I gently sketched them in relation to Heathrow and the M25, but there are similar issues for other airports.

My final point is that while, if you are interested in UK economic growth, of necessity you clearly concentrate on how you develop Heathrow and Gatwick—the giant two—regional airports well outside London can also be extremely important to economic prosperity and commerce. I would welcome more thoughts on how they can promote themselves with a good network of routes that do not require interchanging in London—or in Schiphol, as happens so often at the moment for people flying from northern and western airports. I urge the Government to look again at why this is all taking so long, why there is no sense of urgency and why there is not a much clearer refrain in this that we can go for growth here. One of the great triumphs of the UK economy over the last decade has been the big, successful surge in the export of services. Above all, services need really good aviation links, in the way I briefly described from past personal anecdote. I urge the Minister to see himself as a growth champion and to say to his colleagues in government that we can do better than this.

As I flipped the pages on the 1500 blockbuster response to the Humble Address I was amazed at how many near blank pages there were. They might have enticing indications of messages and conversations, but there was no material to or from the Prime Minister about the crucial matters of how he chose Lord Mandelson, what he was told about Lord Mandelson when making the appointment, what he asked to  be done to carry out due diligence, or what conversations he had with Lord Mandelson before and after appointment. The conversations with the PM’s Chief of Staff, a key  advocate of Mandelson’s appointment, are also missing.

I have no problem with the suppression of briefing material and commentary about the US and about events and meetings Lord Mandelson held as Ambassador where state secrets were exchanged or where there were mentions of items that would harm the UK if they were revealed. I do have problems if there are cases of witholding any information about the circumstances of the appointment, the risks involved, the mitigations required in the light of the risks. Where are the documents to support the decision to make a political appointment, to check out the candidate, and to handle his declared interests?  Nor should we be spared the conversations between UK Ministers about the state of the government and the impact of the  appointment, however embarrassing. We have seen some of that.

There are also important policy matters that need to be examined. I was pleased to see Lord Mandelson was proposing change of economic policy to get some growth, and was rightly critical of the government’s approach to tax, spend, benefits and business. We have not seen reports of conversations and meetings about EU re set and the interplay between the EU and the US which must have been central to some of his work as Ambassador to the US. During his period as Ambassador President Trump became more critical of the EU and wanted to give them harsher treatment than the UK over trade. What was said about this between Ambassador and Prime Minister? How did EU re set affect the negotiaitons they were holding with the US?

There is nothing wrong with private capital financing infrastructure. In the UK it has worked very well for broadband cables. The Thames tideway tunnel to give London more dirty water handling capacity has been a model project financed by the private sector.

There is much wrong with bogus private finance schemes of the kind Labour  went in for when it was last in government. PFI for NHS hospitals or state schools often turned out to be dear money, locking the state into expensive service contracts and dear borrowing.

The Chancellor thinks she can take pressure off her borrowing by going for PFI. There is a great danger that she allows deals that leave substantial risk with taxpayers. Markets will regard this as more back door state borrowing. Taxpayers will pay more to borrow this way. Public spending will continue out of control.The public sector must not lock itself into more bad contracts through its inability to specify a fair terms contract and stick to it.

State investment has brought us the disasters  of HS 2 and Post Office computerisation. Labour’s last PFI s lumbered too many schools, hospitals and the  taxpayer with too many long term bad contracts just to get the debt off the state’s books at great cost. The debt is still out there, and the taxpayer has to pay.

The last Labour government nationalised Network Rail, putting the state in charge of tracks, signals and stations. Well over half the cancellations and delays experienced by passengers in recent years have come from problems at Network Rail. Damaged track, track repairs, signal failures, prolonged maintenance have all hit service reliability and punctuality.

We also have experience of lines where the state has  been running the trains over the nationalised track. There is no sign of these fully nationalised groups doing better on punctuality and service reliability, with some doing worse than the hybrids.

In recent  years the train operating companies have been put under more and more state control, limiting private sector managements from innovating or managing better. The timetables are state controlled, dictating what services to run, and many fares are controlled.

When we last had a chance to compare a fully nationalised railway with a privatised one during privatisation in the 1990 s the privatised railway did a better job, reversing passenger number decline and improving  service quality. When John Prescott took over as Minister he in 2000 announced a 17 % rise in passengers and 22% rise in freight since 1997 for the privatised railway .

It looks as if the fully nationalised railway if this government will develop more of the bad characteristics of the largely nationalised system they inherited. Expect more losses, more service cuts to try to rein in costs, more delays and cancellations. Two years in and still no revised business plan to tackle extreme delays and financial overruns at fully nationalised HS 2. If they cannot even manage a railway with no passengers and no trains yet, what chance of running an existing railway with staff problems and unhappy passengers?

It is unusual for a governing party under 2 years into government to undertake a public debate about what it believes and what it should be doing.  This is what Tony Blair has asked them to do , writing a powerful and interesting essay with some wise words in  it. He is right that so far they have drifted leftwards from the stance adopted to win the election, and have u turned on many occasions when public opinion and or unhappy  backbenchers tell them something is unpopular and will not work.  He makes the point that there is no purpose served by having a leadership contest before the party has decided what it wants to do and how it is going to do it. He could have added that the Starmer winning Manifesto in the last election was careful not to overpromise or to threaten us with radical change. There is no mandate from the election for a socialist experiment in further largescale wealth and income redistribution. There is no mandate for a more thoroughly nationalised and state controlled economy.

Some in Labour disliking Mr Blair can riposte that a leadership election could force the candidates to  propose different visions and to grapple during the leadership election itself  with what the party thinks it now is and what it wants to do. The problem with that idea is the party should feel bound by the few General election promises it did make that cut through and were part of the decision making process of many voters. Most wanted faster economic growth, and that was the central pledge. Many wanted proper control of borders and liked the sound of Smash the gangs. Most were relieved with the promise not to increase main taxes on people. Many believed they would just make marginal changes to VAT on schools and to income tax on rich foreigners.

Instead Starmer and Reeves embarked on a reckless increase in spending, part financed by aggressive tax rises on enterprise, business, farms, shops, success and jobs. Despite this they are seen by many in Labour as too mean, not expanding the public sector even more quickly and extensively. Any new policy needs to start from the realisation that Starmer and Reeves have pushed the extra spending, taxing and borrowing too far already. The markets are uncomfortable and the voters largely angry and feeling cheated. We have not been living under 40 years of neo liberal market based economics, but under a highly overregulated EU style slow growth economy, nearly bankrupted by Labour’s banking crash and recession 2007-10.

The Labour MPs and Ministers are talking to themselves and a  few Green party voters with ideas to spend and borrow and tax more. Far from bringing faster growth and some relief from tight finances this route will  bring more disaster on the government. The answer to youth unemployment is not more subsidies but more jobs. More jobs require tax cuts for businesses that might create them, and ending the bans that stop them.Debt interest is already through the roof and Rachel Reeves has to pay much more to borrow than Liz Truss. The markets do not see Rachel Reeves as some tight fisted right winger, but as a left inclining spender who has already pushed the limits of what the UK can afford. If there is to be a new Prime Minister who wants a  more left wing Chancellor and approach, he or she will be speeding a  bond crisis that could see interest rates much higher and the UK state forced by markets  into reducing its appetite for loans.

Labour wrongly say they had the worst inheritance economically of any government since 1979 as they tell us this week how bad young person unemployment is. They forget they inherited in June 2024 inflation on target at 2% and growth for the first half of 2024 as the fastest in the G7.

Their beloved OBR set out forecasts in 2024 for 2026 on the basis of continuing with Conservative policies. They said this year inflation would be 1.9%, growth would be 2% and unemployment would be 4.2%. The OBR forecast this year for 2026 given Labour’s policies is for inflation to be up, at 2.3%, unemployment to be substantially up at 5.3% and growth well down, at 1.1%.

The OBR do not foresee a big drop in world GDP to explain the fall in their UK forecast, with world GDP still at 3.1% in their estimates. So they are saying that Labour’s high tax, high spend, high borrowing policies have caused this substantial deterioration in the economic performance they expect.

When it comes to bad economic inheritances it is right Labour  effectively accept that 1979 was a very bad one. Five years of left wing economics had taken us to borrow from the IMF and had left us with high inflation, high unemployment and high borrowing in need of controlling.  They should also recognise that the 2010 inheritance from Labour was also a very bad one, with the banks squeezed to near death, high and rising unemployment and a big recession. In contrast the 2024 inheritance was a good one. It is true 2020-2023 had been poor for growth and inflation thanks to the covid lockdowns and the Ukraine war and energy shock, but things were corrected  by 2024.

Since coming to office most of the policies Labour has adopted have destroyed jobs, driven up prices and put stress on the public finances by spending too much. Labour do not suffer from an inheritance problem but from their own disastrous drift to the big incompetent state, net zero self harm and excessive borrowing.

For almost two years  the government has watched as  the number of young people not in training , education of work has risen worryingly. Yesterday Alan Milburn published a report telling us this has been happening, and expressing justified moral outrage that it is happening. HIs Report did not set out what the government should do about his. The lack of urgency continues, so we have to await a second report to tell us what might change this alarming trend.

The government wants people to believe that this has been a long standing and deep rooted set of problems. It is true the previous Labour government left office with young people unemployment far too high and rising. From 2012 to 2021 the Coalition and Conservative governments got it well down. It has been rising since 2022 when higher energy costs, higher interest rates and post covid recovery issues affected the figures. The rise has got worse under this government. No-one should be surprised, as their National Insurance hike has hit young people’s job opportunities hard. Higher business rates for High Street shops, entertainment and hospitality has hit those jobs for young people. The new Employee Rights Act has put more employers off offering a job to a young person to see how it works out.

The government should as the Opposition proposes, urgently reverse some of these mistakes and get behind business so they can create more jobs and want to recruit again. There is a growing gap between what the market needs and what  jobs are on offer. People would like more choice of services to their home, but the hostile atmosphere hitting the self employed  and small businesses means fewer are prepared to venture to meet those needs. The country is short of builders, digital technicians, medics and other trained people. This government likes to intervene substantially in the labour market, so why can’t its interventions deliver better results for both consumers of services and the young people who would like jobs in those areas?

Ministers are often telling us they do things at pace. Instead they do not even get their reviews to run to a tight timetable. What a pity they did not think these big issues out in Opposition before the election.

The government is going to spend a lot of money developing digital ID. They should mend  the system they already have.

I was a Trustee of a charity. Under recent legislation I was required to register  my ID with Gov.UK and then tell Companies House I had done  this to reaffirm my Trusteeship. I duly registered with Gov.UK and then wasted hours of time trying to get Gov.UK to share with Companies  House in the required way. After several days of failed attempts I asked the Secretary of the charity to help. She also was unable to get it to work. I have since heard of many others encountering the same difficulty. My contacts with Companies House failed to resolve the issue. As I needed to comply by a deadline I resigned from the role instead.

This is causing upset and losing charities and companies helpers. It is difficult to see why we need another more expensive  system of digi government ID, or why the contractor cannot  be required to get Gov.UK to be able to confirm information for other departments. This system puts people off the whole idea of digi ID as it impedes law abiding people but will not catch lawbreakers. It will be like the chronic failure of the National Insurance number system to control illegal working and illegal migrants.

I am not writing about the by elections before the results and will not publish partisan comments on them prior to the poll. There are so many candidates that balanced coverage needs to mention.