Contents
SASIG 2014/15 Meeting Dates
Regional News
Industry News
European News
Parliamentary News
Government News
House of Commons Questions
Reaction to the publication of the CAA’s final decision on airport charges and regulation for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports
Media News
SASIG 2014/15 Meeting Dates
6 March 2014
27 June 2014
24 October 2014
13 March 2015
Meetings are held at Local Government House, Smith Square, SW1P 3HZ, location map.
Regional News
11 Jan 2014 – Liverpool John Lennon Airport has been in talks with its bankers after it revealed annual losses in excess of £7m. The airport’s auditors, KPMG, warned in the annual report of ‘material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern’.
14 Jan 2014 – A legal challenge to the government’s decision to allow the expansion of Lydd Airport in Kent is to be heard at the High Court later this month. The £25m project includes a runway extension of almost 300m (328yds) and a new terminal building.
16 Jan 2014 – Heathrow Airport have announced plans for a six week consultation with local households, asking for their views on the shortlisted third runway plan. The consultation will begin on 3 February. During the consultation process, a direct postal mail out will be sent to 120,000 households and businesses most affected by the proposed plans. Those outside this area will have the opportunity to share their views online. Drop-in events taking place in nine local areas will also give people the chance to ask questions and influence the plans.
15 Jan 2014 – The building contractor Costain has been appointed to build a spine road for the extension to Manchester Airport’s existing cargo centre. The contractor is to provide basic infrastructure including the creation of a 1km single carriageway road with two roundabouts and two junctions onto the A538 road.
15 Jan 2014 – Stockport Council have supported plans for the Manchester Airport relief road. The application has been discussed at extraordinary meetings of two area committees with both Cheadle and Stepping Hill voting in favour of the £290m road. The council’s planning and highways committee will debate the plans on 19 January before the application is referred to the Secretary of State for final approval.
15 Jan 2014 – Residents in parts of west Kent are opposing proposals to change the flight path at Gatwick Airport.
16 Jan 2014 – Norwich International Airport saw an 8 per cent rise in passenger numbers in 2013 with over 460,000 people from the region using the city’s airport. The passenger increase was attributed to a growth in a number of different sectors at the airport.
17 Jan 2014 – The Chief Executive of Jaguar Land Rover has criticised the recommendations of the Airports Commission for failing to properly consider the case for regional airports. At the Runways UK conference in London, Dr Ralf Speth said he was disappointed at continually having to commute to London to catch flights when there was spare capacity outside the capital.
Industry News
17 Jan 2014 – UK air traffic rose slightly in the calendar year 2013 compared to the previous year, in spite of a number of issues, including European strike action and bad weather, with their associated delays and flight cancellations. Figures are still below those from 2007, when air traffic was almost 13 per cent higher than in 2013.
European News
Parliamentary News
13 Jan 2014 – The All Party Parliamentary Group for Integrated Transport Strategy has scheduled the launch of its first report for 29 January. According to the Group’s secretariat: ‘The APPG’s first report will aim to ensure that Howard Davies’s recommendations on Heathrow and Gatwick are not established in isolation from other modes of transport planning, particularly with regard to HS2, and that major decisions on the future of investment in our transport infrastructure are set out in an integrated transport framework.’ The APPG is a cross party group, established in 2013 to provide a long-term, integrated and intermodal approach to transport policy in the UK. This will include air, road, rail, ports and freight and will cover the whole of the UK and examine how better connectivity could make the UK more cohesive.
14 Jan 2014 – The House of Commons Library have published a ‘standard note’ on the recent history of Heathrow Airport. The note looks at how the airport has developed over the past twenty years or so, including the construction of Terminal 5; the aborted plans for a third runway and a sixth terminal; and plans for the airport’s future. The note is available on the link above or on the publications page of the SASIG website.
Government News
10 Jan 2014 – The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has published the open consultations: Economic regulation of Gatwick and Heathrow airports from April 2014. Under the Civil Aviation Act 2012 the CAA has a new set of powers to tailor regulation to suit the specifics of each airport and the needs of their users. The CAA is consulting (CAP 1139) on the proposed licence for the economic regulation of Gatwick and Heathrow Airports from April 2014. The proposed licence includes recommendations of:
- scope and interpretation including the date, area, operator and details of the airport for the proposed licence
- general conditions including payment of fees and licence revocation terms
- commitments conditions
- financial conditions including requirements for the certificate of adequate resources, restrictions on business activities, ultimate holding company undertakings and the banking ring-fencing
The CAA has powers to tailor regulation to suit the specifics of each airport and the needs of their users. Both consultations run from the 10 January until the 24 January 2014. The licence for the economic regulation of both airports will be published in February 2014 to come into force on 1 April 2014. Full details of the Gatwick consultation can be found here, full details of the Heathrow consultation can be found here.
14 Jan 2014 – The Department for Transport (DfT) have published two reports: Traffic at major airports, worldwide: latest year; and 16 Jan 2014 – Passenger traffic on major airlines, worldwide: latest year. Both are Excel spreadsheets, downloadable from the .GOV.UK website.
13 Jan 2014 – Improvements to the VFR charts used by pilots have been announced by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). The changes are intended to increase the clarity of the information depicted on the VFR charts. They follow a consultation with the aviation industry, and will appear in the new editions of the 1:500k and 1:250k series charts published in March 2014. All VFR charts are produced and published by the air traffic control provider, NATS. The main changes include:
- Addition of boundary tint to all airspace boundaries regardless of classification. i.e. all internal boundaries as well as external extremities of controlled airspace.
- Reversal of the colour formatting of airspace classifications boxes i.e. white classification lettering within appropriate classification (blue or magenta) coloured box.
- Re-alignment of all airspace annotations along the leading edges of airspace boundaries, i.e. where adjacent to airspace with higher base level.
- Application of a white halo effect to all aeronautical information annotations that are located over land, and all airspace annotations embedded in airspace boundary tints.
- Removal of duplicate airspace controlling authority names from all airspace annotations, except in the outer extremity of the relative controlling authority’s CAS.
Further information regarding the changes can be found in a NATS newsletter hosted on the NATS AIS website VFR Chart Changes
14 Jan 2014 – Data published by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) shows that during July to September 2013, the overall on-time performance (defined as the proportion of flights arriving or departing early, or up to 15 minutes late) of scheduled flights at the ten UK airports monitored was 80 per cent, the same on-time performance achieved during the third quarter of 2012. The average delay across all scheduled flights monitored was 12 minutes, also the same as in the third quarter of 2013 compared with the previous year. However, charter on-time performance increased by 2 percentage points and average delay fell by 3 minutes.
In the third quarter of this year (2014), there were 372,000 scheduled and 29,000 charter passenger flights at the ten airports monitored for punctuality by the CAA. This represents a 2 per cent increase in scheduled flights and a three per cent increase in charter flights, compared with the same quarter in 2012. The link above also includes more details on: scheduled flights; charter flights and destinations with most flights.
15 Jan 2014 – The Transport Committee will be holding a one-off evidence session with Sir Howard Davies, Chair, Airports Commission, on Monday 20 January 2014. Commenting on the session Transport Committee Chair Louise Ellman MP said ‘we look forward to discussing the thinking behind the Airports Commission’s report with its Chair, Sir Howard Davies’.
16 Jan 2014 – The Airports Commission published their draft Appraisal Framework which sets out in detail how The Commission expects the short-listed scheme designs for additional airport capacity announced in December to be developed, and how the schemes will be appraised. This consultation invites responses on the draft framework which consists of 4 inter-related elements:
- The Commission’s objectives, against which options will be assessed and on which its final recommendations will be based.
- A refreshed scheme design for each short-listed option, to be used as the starting point for appraisal.
- A business case and sustainability assessment for each option, incorporating the information needed to make informed assessments against the Commission’s objectives.
- A set of appraisal modules explaining the methodologies that the Commission proposes to use in assessing options.
Each of these elements is described in more detail in the Appraisal Framework, and the Commission welcomes views on its suggested approach in each case (whilst noting that the requirement to develop business cases and sustainability assessments for each option is prescribed by its terms of reference). The consultation period will run until 28 February 2014. Consultation responses, with a suggested maximum length of 30 pages, should be sent to [email protected]. A list of consultation questions is included within the Appraisal Framework document appendices.
16 Jan 2014 – The Airports Commission have published a consultation on the Commission’s current position on taking forward additional feasibility and impacts work for an inner Thames Estuary airport proposal. It invites comments on the draft terms of reference for the 4 research studies which the Airports Commission will be progressing. The Commission’s current position on the draft terms of reference for the four study areas can be found in the appendix to the report, but are outlined briefly below:
- Environmental impacts – assessment of the impacts on the Natura 2000 sites, coastal system, habitats and species affected and historical and archaeological sites, in constructing and operating a new airport and identifying whether the legal tests could be met.
- Operational feasibility and attitudes about moving to a new airport – assessment of key potential operational issues and potential mitigation, including meteorological and wildlife impacts, the SS Montgomery and relocating energy facilities; assessing airline, airport, business and industry attitudes to the decision to move operations to a new hub airport, and to then moving operations.
- Socio-economic impacts – assessment of the local, sub-national and national economic and social benefits and impacts of building a new hub airport in the inner Thames Estuary, closing down Heathrow and London City airports, and redeveloping the Heathrow site.
- Surface access impacts – assessment of the operational, cost and environmental impacts of any surface transport proposals required to support a new hub airport, as well as impacts on existing and planned local and strategic transport infrastructure.
The Commission is now inviting views and comments on its current position on the proposed terms of reference. Comments are invited by no later than 14 February 2014, to inform the project initiation documents. Please send any comments on the draft terms of reference for the four studies to [email protected].
17 Jan 2014 – The consultation on the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA) new information duties under the Civil Aviation Act 2012 closed on 31 August 2013. Following consideration of formal responses to the consultation, as well as views expressed at stakeholder events and meetings held throughout 2013, the CAA has published their final statement of policy. The full policy statement is available here.
Alongside the statement of policy, they have also published a summary of the responses they received to the consultation, which sets out how they plan to implement the information outputs proposed in the consultation. The CAA has stated that it will continue to ‘engage with stakeholders’ as it progresses work on making this information available. Further details can be found in the summary of stakeholder responses to the CAA’s proposals, available here.
House of Commons Questions
Cunningham – Information collected on air pollution in regions of the UK
16 Jan 2014
Jim Cunningham, (Labour Party, Coventry South): To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what information his Department has collected on air quality in (a) Coventry, (b) the West Midlands and (c) each region of the UK.
Dan Rogerson, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for water, forestry, rural affairs and resource management (Liberal Democrats, North Cornwall): DEFRA operates approximately 300 monitoring sites across the UK. 130 of these are part of the Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) and each collects and reports hourly information on some or all of the following pollutants: ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), particulate matter of up to 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) and particulate matter of up to 10 microns in diameter (PM10). In addition, there are 11 non-automatic networks that collect data for a range of other pollutants including hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metals, black carbon, acid deposition and ammonia.
There are 16 DEFRA-operated monitoring sites in the West Midlands. Nine of these gather information as part of the AURN; four monitor hydrocarbons, two monitor black carbon, two monitor metals, one monitors PAHs, one monitors acid deposition, one monitors acid gas and aerosol and four monitor ammonia. Coventry has one DEFRA monitoring site operated under the AURN. Details and monitoring information for all these sites and pollutants is available on the UK-air website at: http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/ . Data from UK-wide modelling of air quality is also available on this site. In addition to information on air quality collected from the above networks, local authorities in the UK have a responsibility to review and assess local air quality and to prepare reports of local air quality. DEFRA is provided with this information.
Reaction to the publication of the CAA’s final decision on airport charges and regulation for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports
11 Jan 2014 – Simon Buck, Chief Executive of the British Air Transport Association (BATA) said that BATA ‘remain disappointed overall with the final decision on airport charges published by the CAA’. However, BATA welcomed ‘the CAA’s decision that the airport requires continued regulation through an airport licence’.
13 Jan 2014 – Stewart Wingate, Chief Executive of Gatwick Airport has said that he was ‘very disappointed’ with certain elements of the CAA’s final decision. Mr Wingate said that it was positive the CAA accepted Gatwick Airport’s framework as the best way to regulate, but challenged changes including ‘over-optimistic’ long-term passenger forecasts, cost of capital reductions and ‘onerous and intrusive’ monitoring regimes. He also said that he disagreed with the CAA’s conclusion that the airport needed an economic license given its substantial market power.
13 Jan 2014 – Virgin Atlantic is considering an appeal against the decision by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) over airport charges. Craig Kreeger Chief Executive of Virgin Atlantic said that the airline was ‘baffled’ at the CAA’s decision.
Media News
12 Jan 2014 – Parking charges at Heathrow Airport are considered the most expensive of any airport in the world.
13 Jan 2014 – Heathrow Airport has said that it has increased the number of flights to BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
SASIG Regional&IndustryNews Bulletin 11 Jan – 19 Jan
SASIG ParliamentaryNews Bulletin 11 Jan – 19 Jan
The Parliamentary information in this Bulletin is sourced from De Havilland Information Services plc