Aircraft Near-misses

HC Deb 02 March 2000 vol 345 cc331-3W

Mrs. May

To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions if he will set out

(Mr. Brake), of 21 December 1999, Official Report, column 524W, what comparators he used to calculate the PPP infrastructure companies' estimated efficiency improvement of 20 per cent. [115921

Mr. Hill

The briefing note PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published in December 1999 assumed that under the Public Private Partnership for London Underground the private sector infrastructure companies will bring efficiency improvements of 20 per cent. The PwC note, which has been placed in the House Library, sets out the basis for assuming this level of efficiency savings, which is in line with the experience of other industries where the financing and management of infrastructure programmes has been transferred to the private sector.

Since the PwC briefing note was published, Arthur Andersen and the London School of Economics have completed a report for the Treasury Taskforce called "Value for Money Drivers in the Private Finance Initiative". This shows the PFIs of all types are, on average, delivering efficiency savings of 17 per cent.

Mr. Cohen

To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, pursuant to his answer of 21 December 1999,Official Report, column 521W, covering investment in London Underground, if he will list the specific projects envisaged, indicating the estimated cost of each. [111591]

Mr. Hill

Under the terms of the Public Private Partnership (PPP) for London Underground, infrastructure companies will be required to implement a combination of specific projects and performance enhancements specified in output terms. The PPP will not, therefore, in general specify particular amounts of money to be spent, nor particular works to be carried out. It will be for bidders to decide what they have to do to meet the performance specification for each infrastructure company.

However, when the PPP competition was launched in June 1999 London Underground published a briefing document containing estimates of how much they then believed it would cost over the first 15 years to implement the performance regime under development for the PPP. This was broken down as follows:

the definition of a near miss between aircraft; how many such incidents have taken place at Heathrow in the past three years; and how many of those incidents occurred within three miles of Wargrave in Berkshire. [111259]

Mr. Mullin

The definition of a near miss (or Airprox) applied by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) isa situation in which, in the opinion of a pilot or controller, the distance between aircraft as well as their relative positions and speed have been such that the safety of the aircraft involved was or may have been compromised.

In the last three years (1997–99) there were four reported Airproxes in the London Heathrow (LHR) Zone, an area 24 nautical miles (nm) East-West by 16 nm North-South, centred on Heathrow. Wargrave does not lie in the LHR Zone but in the same period there were two reported Airproxes within a circle radius 3 nm centred on the town.