Amendment 5—it seems that Amendment 6 is very similar—addresses Clause 2, in which the Government are asking us to give them a power to set up a separate trust for linked travel arrangements. It is a very open-ended power which runs counter to the Government’s actions of the week before last. When Monarch failed, the Government decided, very sensibly, to organise repatriation for all customers of Monarch regardless of whether they had bought package holidays or simply a flight. In essence, the Government were setting aside the special status of package holiday customers, for which they had each paid £2.50. The Government’s action might have been sensible, but it rather undermines the Minister’s argument at Second Reading that it might not be appropriate for one group of more cautious customers to have to subsidise, perhaps indirectly, compensation for other customers who chose a more risky option.
The Monarch case has also illustrated the sheer size and impact of such a failure. The current ATOL trust struggled for some years with more calls on its funds than it could cope with, and it had to be subsidised by the Government. It has been in good health recently, but that history is there. Any fund like this succeeds because it agglomerates many small sums of money into one large total. If you start setting up several funds, you are disaggregating the total money available, and that undermines the principle.
The Minister has been absolutely clear by indicating that currently the Government have no intention of setting up a new trust fund but just want the power to do so if they choose to in the future. This is a dangerous principle which is increasingly creeping into government legislation whereby the Government are gathering up “just in case” powers, giving no clear indication of how they intend to use them. I would argue that they have to do better than that in order to justify including this power in the legislation. We need a more detailed justification, a consultation and an impact assessment before this additional wide power can be considered acceptable. We oppose the power in principle as well as being concerned about the practical impact if it is used. I beg to move.
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