§ Mr. PrescottTo ask the Secretary of State for Transport (1) whether international passenger airline operators using United Kingdom airports are required to prevent unaccompanied baggage being carried unless indentified and subject to security control before it is carried; what are the International Civil Aviation Organisation requirements on this matter; whether they are enforced in the United Kingdom; and if he will make a statement;
(2) what interpretation has been given to the British Government by the Joint International Air Transport Association—Air Transport Association baggage security group on ICAO standard 5.1.4.; and if he will make a statement;
238W(3) what directives or regulations were in force to ensure that no unaccompanied baggage was carried on international flights at the time of the Lockerbie bombing; and what new requirements have been enforced since in regard to unaccompanied baggage;
(4) what steps have been taken since the Lockerbie bombing to ensure that there is a positive reconciliation of passenger with baggage; and how he ensures that the airlines carry out his policy.
§ Mr. McLoughlinThe ICAO standard, both as it stood at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and as revised subsequently, requires that baggage belonging to passengers who are booked to joint a flight but fail to do so should be identified, and the baggage should not be carried unless it is first subject to security controls. The United Kingdom was one of the first countries to make this a mandatory requirement. It did so in 1985, by means of a direction to aircraft operators under the Aviation Security Act 1982.
Both the ICAO standard and the United Kingdom requirement apply only to bags belonging to "no show" passengers. At present it is not possible to identify other unaccompanied bags, such as ones which have been misrouted, mishandled or misconnected and which are being returned to their owners, except by what are essentially manual methods. These are slow and cumbersome, and all leading aviation countries accept that it is not practicable to require their use at major airports because it would seriously reduce the capacity of the international air transport system.
It is recognised internationally that this problem can he overcome only by the development of sophisticated systems capable of identifying unaccompanied bags automatically. With this in mind, and building on proposal put forward by the joint IATA/ATA baggage security group, the European civil aviation conference has drawn up and published guidelines setting out the criteria that such systems will need to meet.
Several manufacturers are currently developing systems designed to meet these criteria. The results of initial trials are encouraging, although at present there are still a number of problems which need to be overcome. We in the United Kingdom have brought the manufacturers of the systems and the airlines together in an attempt to ensure that the problems are resolved as quickly as possible; and we have made it clear that, once they are resolved, we shall announce a date by which airlines will be required to identify all unaccompanied baggage loaded or transferred at our airports. No other country has yet made such a firm declaration of intent.