The Bishop of Chester gave his maiden speech at the second reading of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill on 20th November 2025, emphasising the importance of sustainability and responsible stewardship of the earth, and the vital importance of air travel to communities:
The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their warm welcome, although I confess that sustainable aviation fuel was not a subject that I imagined I would be addressing when various noble Lords have given me advice about maiden speeches. I am grateful for their wisdom, warmth and welcome, and especially that of the doorkeepers and staff of this House. It seems that I should have taken them rather more literally when they said I would be working with high-flyers, and rather less literally when they pointed out that not everything was rocket science.
I speak as one born almost two and a half thousand miles from where we sit. Indeed, the first serious journey of my life was by air, back here to the UK. I am also a father and, like the rest of this noble House, entrusted with passing on entire to the next generation this good earth. Sustainability matters: the good Lord provided us with many things, but a spare planet was not among them, at least in this age. It is this balance of pragmatisms which means that I speak largely in support of the Bill. We need to be real about air travel being vital to modern life. It builds community, enables encounter and crosses divides.
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The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, I echo the excellent opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, by saying that I view anti-Semitism as perhaps the greatest tragedy and disgrace in the history of the Christian Church.
The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, it is a privilege and a challenge to follow such a brilliant speech from someone who knows his way around the subject. If you want to find good things to tax, I always say that you should start with sin: find a new sin and tax it. I rather agree that HS2 is a sin, not for adding capacity, which I am all in favour of, but in doing so in such an unnecessarily expensive way. For me, trains go quite fast enough already and it could have been done far more cheaply without factoring in the speeds in a small country. As I follow the noble Lord’s speech, I think of St Paul, who once began by saying, “I speak as a fool”. I do so too, a little, after that wonderful description of the financial landscape.
The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, is it not the 28 days that people have to make arrangements, when they change from being asylum seekers to being refugees, that is the difficulty? It takes me more than 28 days to open a bank account if I am on good form, and there are lots of other things that they have to think about. Could the period not be extended beyond 28 days? Universal credit often does not kick in for at least 35 days. The 28-day period is just too tight for people in these circumstances.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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