Planning Bill

moved Amendment No. 57: 57: Clause 23, page 13, line 39, after ““year”” insert— ““( ) air passenger transport services for at least 50,000 air transport movements of passenger aircraft per year,”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving this amendment, I will also speak to Amendments Nos. 58 and 59. The amendments take us to the definition of airport development for the purposes of nationally significant infrastructure projects—in other words, what will come within the IPC regime. They would add the criterion of aircraft movements to that of the numbers of passengers in the threshold. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said that the Government did not want the definition to be in effect about the construction of a new runway and that airport-related development, "““could also include work to terminals which would not necessarily have an impact on the number of aeroplanes using a runway””.—[Official Report, 14/10/08; col. 710.]" The words ““not necessarily”” are important there. It would be naive to think that there is never an issue around aircraft movements and the experience is that more and more passengers are squeezed through terminals—pace terminal 5. We acknowledge the impact from the numbers of passengers. My particular purpose in tabling the amendments is to ask the Government in turn to acknowledge the impact from the number of flights and the number of aircraft movements. I include in those the empty and half-empty flights maintained, as my noble friend Lady Tonge said in Committee, by airlines in order to preserve their slots. Surely both the runway capacity and terminal capacity determine overall capacity. I found this a difficult issue because I start from the principle of not wanting to support the Infrastructure Planning Commission and not wanting to push more decisions its way. However, it is important to be clear. How do the Government regard aircraft movements? Do they dismiss them as irrelevant? If the Government take a particular view of them as relevant or irrelevant, how is the IPC to respond? In particular, will the local impact statement be able to take account of the impact of numbers of aircraft movements? Can it validly comment on the movements and their impact in such a way that under Clause 102 the IPC must have regard to the impact of aircraft movements? It is important to establish the impact of aircraft movements as well as of numbers of passengers. I do not need to repeat arguments about the impact on the ground of both noise and movements of other sorts of traffic; I will not take the time of the House to do that. However, it is essential that it is understood locally that aircraft movements have an important impact on the quality of life of those who have to suffer them while not being on the flights. I beg to move.