Civil Aviation Bill

I agree with the hon. Lady. What is needed is a greater degree of formality. With the present legislative and regulatory regimes, if a non-designated airport is unwilling to go very far down the road that a local community might like to see it travel, there are no levers to apply to that airport. It may have been subject to a section 106 regime at some point in the past, but without designation, which we are not discussing, there is a fog of uncertainty about its obligations. People sometimes say that independent consultative committees have some powers to influence the way in which airports operate. My constituents are extremely concerned about the way in which the ICC works in our area. I suppose it is not much different from those in other parts of the country. The policies that Nottingham East Midlands airport put to the independent consultative committee are not locally based policies. They are based on Department for Transport policies, without any regard for what people in the local community want. It is difficult to express in words the extreme and long-lasting frustration that my constituents feel about centrally devised policies being rubber-stamped by airport management, with no effective local say or input. The recent White Paper effectively told Nottingham East Midlands airport what its future growth will be and what it must do to ensure that that growth takes place, with a master plan process that simply repeats what is in the White Paper—literally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. We must have real local authority input. Amendment No. 21, the second of the amendments that I tabled, deals with the quota count system. The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton made a fair summary of the weaknesses of that approach. It professes to be a regime that will encourage the uptake of quieter aircraft, but its numerous shortcomings allow far more planes to fly at night while maintaining the same so-called noise climate. Although the planes may indeed be marginally quieter, it is the number of noise events, rather than a few decibels more or less, that causes the misery of sleep deprivation to residents living under flight paths. No matter what regime is designed and developed, it is essential that the cap on numbers of movements which exists in designated airports is retained. The Bill as currently worded merely enables the Secretary of State to set a limit based on noise rather than movements.