AIR NAVIGATION (NOISE CERTIFICATION) (AMENDMENT) ORDER 1972 (Hansard, 9 March 1972)

§ LORD DRUMALBYN
My Lords, I beg to move that the Draft Air Navigation (Noise Certification) (Amendment) Order 1972, laid before the House on February 17, be approved. I shall speak very briefly to the terms of this Amendment Order. It is the intention, subject to approval, that the Order should come into effect on April 1, 1972, the date on which the Civil Aviation Authority assume their major functions. The Order is purely a procedural one; it does not involve any transfer of responsibility for policy on noise certification of aircraft; 272 that remains with the Secretary of State. It provides, by amendment of the Air Navigation (Noise Certification) Order 1970, for the transfer from the Department to the Civil Aviation Authority of the executive function of certifying aircraft for noise purposes and of ensuring that the conditions relating to certification are complied with. The Authority will, of course, by virtue of their former Air Registration Board component, possess all the expertise necessary for this task. This Order tidies up the original Order by substituting the words "Secretary of State" for the words "Board of Trade" in those provisions which relate to the making of regulations, and it increases the penalties for failure to comply with the provisions of the Order, to bring them into line with the penalties for breaches of Airworthiness Regulations. I beg to move.

§ LORD BESWICK
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, in switching from the one subject to the other. I cannot quite follow the reason why he adopted such a different tempo. Is he suggesting that this is less important than the previous business? If so, I am not at all sure that he is right. However, I do accept that in the main this is consequential legislation to the legislation which established the Civil Aviation Authority. The opportunity has been taken to increase the penalties for this form of pollution. What the noble Lord has not done is to satisfy the doubts that were expressed in another place and and have been expressed elsewhere as to whether the increases in the penalties are adequate in the circumstances now prevailing. I can well understand that there ought to be some correlation between the penalties for breach of the noise certification regulations and those for breach of other airworthiness regulations; but since that correlation was originally established there has been a significant change in the public attitude to noise and to pollution generally. Against the background of that change I am, myself, not convinced that the present penalties are adequate, and I should like the noble Lord to explain why it 273 was not possible to meet the very reasonable criticisms that were made and do something, or at least undertake to do something in the future, about the increase of penalties.

§ LORD DRUMALBYN
My Lords, the noble Lord will recollect that the really major penalty involved in this case is the power to prevent the aeroplane from taking off at all, which is in paragraph 10 of the Air Navigation (Noise Certification) Order. That is the major penalty, and for that reason it was not thought that it was necessary to do more than we have done in the present Order. It is always a question of judgment as to what the right penalty should be, but these penalties are really in line with the penalties that are imposed in the various legislation that is at present extant, and there does not seem to be any real reason to increase the penalties on this score.

§ LORD BESWICK
My Lords, the noble Lord said "in line with other penalties provided for by other legislation". Will he give me an example of the sort of other legislation he has in mind? Is he referring to legislation connected with airworthiness, or is he referring to regulations connected with pollution? May I ask him a particular question? There will be a new Bill, I understand, in the next week or two relating to pollution, and there will be penalties in that Bill. Can he really say that the amounts provided for in this Order are in line with the other anti-pollution legislation?

§ LORD DRUMALBYN
My Lords, the penalties are increased quite substantially in this Article.

§ LORD BESWICK
My Lords, that is not the question I asked.

§ LORD DRUMALBYN
My Lords, they go up from £10 to £50, and from £20 to £100, as related to penalties in the original Order, and this is the kind of increase that we have seen recently in legislation. I cannot give it chapter and 274 verse, but I am sure that the noble Lord's own recollection will bear out that this is the kind of increase in penalties that we have made—with the one exception, of course, of oil pollution, which is a totally different matter. The noble Lord perhaps wishes to interrupt me again, because of course he cannot make another speech.

§ LORD BESWICK
My Lords, I am not asking even for chapter and verse; I am asking for the book. In which Act connected with anti-pollution are the penalties in line with these? They are really out of line with current thinking.

§ LORD DRUMALBYN
My Lords, what I said—and I hope I conveyed this—was that it was in line with the current level. We have been operating penalties at about this kind of level. That is what I am saying. An increase as provided here from £10 to £50 and £20 to £100 is at the sort of level that we have seen in legislation that we have been passing in the last year or two. It seems to me that this is perfectly reasonable. I know that some noble Lords have in mind the kind of special penalty that arose in connection with oil pollution, but that is really a quite different subject altogether. Oil pollution can cause a very great deal of damage. We are here dealing with two things: first of all, with the failure to have a certificate, and, secondly, with a contravention of that certificate. If you are not able to produce the certificate, it is not in any way in the same class of offence as oil pollution. As to the contravention, the main penalty, as I said before, is the restriction on the aircraft from taking off if it is not complying with the terms that are laid down in respect of that particular aircraft in the Air Navigation (Noise Certification) Order. I think that really the noble Lord is reasonably satisfied with this.

§ LORD BESWICK
My Lords, let me just say I should have been had it not been for the last sentence.