I agree with my hon. Friend. There is competition not only for passengers, but to get airlines and aircraft to land. Given that a lot of cargo is carried in an aeroplane’s belly, if Newcastle, Manchester or Leeds Bradford loses a flight to Scotland, it will lose not only the passengers and the benefit they bring but the cargo carried by the plane. The United Kingdom already has experience of that with Belfast airport. The Northern Ireland Assembly managed to get the power to vary APD because it was in competition with Dublin airport, which was taking passengers and aircraft to travel from south of the border. That is well known to people who are interested in transport, but it is less well known that the impact was not only on Belfast, but on English and Welsh airports, as people decided to fly across the Atlantic from Dublin to save the £71.
8.45 pm
I will conclude by talking about the economic impact on England. I have given the figures for the savings that passengers could make, and airlines can of course take advantage of those savings by choosing to split them between passengers and their own profit lines. If, however, for the sake of argument, one Ryanair flight and one easyJet flight were moved from Manchester airport to Glasgow, £2.9 million of revenue would be lost to the United Kingdom Treasury and 450 jobs would be lost in Manchester. That is not insignificant when one is trying to build an economy, and I do not blame Edinburgh or Glasgow for trying to build their economy in the way that Newcastle and Manchester are doing. Those figures represent nearly 250,000 passengers, and the economic impact in relation to long-haul flights is much more significant.