Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester. I was absolutely delighted to hear him remind the House that there is no spare planet. Quite honestly, the rate at which we humans are trashing our planet suggests that we actually do think we can go to Mars, or something spectacular like that, and still live a good life. However, I point out that if we destroy this very beautiful planet, or make it increasingly less beautiful and diverse, our lives will be utterly constrained as well.

I like to say something nice about the Government occasionally, if I possibly can. I noted the Minister’s statement at the start that this Bill aims for a greener, cleaner future for aviation. That is a very noble aim, but I am afraid it is impossible unless we radically rethink how we are going to deal with it.

About 25 years ago, when I was on the London Assembly, we assembly members and the mayor, then Ken Livingstone, had a presentation by Heathrow representatives. They promised—this is 25 years ago, remember—that Heathrow could become sustainable within a few years. They claimed it should be given permission to expand because it would soon be polluting less.

It took us a couple of years, but the mayor and the assembly soon realised that Heathrow had lied. It still lies about expansion and pollution. It lies about how important it is to the economy and about how much public subsidy it gets. The truth is that the aviation industry cares about profits, not the environment. You can no more have sustainable aviation than you can have a crocodile with a conscience; it just does not exist.

There is absolutely no techno fix for the pollution that aviation causes. The Royal Society worked out that to reach net zero for aviation fuel—is this what we are snappily calling “jet zero”?—we need at least half the UK’s agricultural land to grow the raw materials. That would be over two-thirds if farmers only grew rapeseed.

That means less wheat, barley and fodder for livestock. That also means higher prices for cereals and food. We already have food inflation due to floods in some areas and droughts in others. Last year, the 2025 UK harvest was the second worst on record. If the Government want farmers to grow jet fuel instead of food, prices in the shops are going to rise in order to keep the planes flying.

As we enter the era of climate crisis impacting on world food production, our country will have less farming land but will want more of it devoted to support the oxymoronic idea of sustainable aviation. In the past 25 years, the UK has lost 771,000 hectares of farmland, contributing to a 12% fall in food self-sufficiency. That decline is about to get worse with the disastrous planning Bill the Government have passed.

I love the effort going into expanding renewable energy and battery storage, but as the Climate Committee has pointed out, that does not stop aviation becoming the number one contributor to emissions in the next few decades.

This Government have lost all claim to be a green Government, with their attack on nature in Britain and their decision to expand aviation. The go-ahead for the expansion of London City Airport, Luton, Gatwick and Stansted means an extra 51 million passengers per annum. If the Government add Heathrow to that total, that is an extra 65 million passengers. If all those extra flights result in either extra emissions or extra farmland taken up growing jet fuel, that means rising fuel prices and more public subsidy.

Of course, the reality is that we will not switch two-thirds of our farming land to jet fuel. The whole Bill is greenwash, designed to provide political cover for aviation expansion and bigger profits. The real solutions are to tax private jets and the ultra-frequent flyers, to stop short-haul flights, and to make train journeys cheaper and more reliable. The solution is less flying, not this fiction of sustainable aviation.

A noble Lord mentioned “flight shaming”; I am not trying to do that. It is understandable that families want to go on holiday once a year, but as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, pointed out, 70% of flights are taken by 15% of the population, which suggests that those people are grabbing their unfair share of the pollution that we can each expect to produce. Therefore, I ask the Minister: does he approve of making train journeys cheaper and more reliable, and putting a tax on private aircraft and frequent flyers?

I said to the owners of Heathrow 20 years ago—much to their annoyance, “If you want to show how environmental you are, then go ahead and fix the major problems of noise and air pollution and stop ruining the climate. Once you’ve done that, then, and only then, can we have a conversation about expansion of airports and of aviation”. I am so disappointed that this Government cannot see that. I recognise that they feel the need to explain that aviation can go on just as it has in the past, but that simply is not true.