Question: What is your take on the recent security alerts at our airports?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: As a committee we have undertaken to begin an inquiry into transport security.

The Department of Transport has its own security group which looks at security and is answerable to the secretary of state, and we will look at security of ports and aviation and railways as part of our existing work.

With closed systems like aviation, it causes enormous problems for passengers but it is possible to close them down as we have seen recently.

A real difficulty with open systems like railways and even ports is that it is very hard to close them completely.

Certainly my committee looked at the role of British Transport Police and I think we need them to move back into a situation where they actually controlled not just aviation and railways but ports as well.

We may need to move back to a professional border police. It seems to me we already have the core existing professional force and it should be expanded. I think that would be a much better solution to this proposal for some kind of new border security force.

Question: Have you any sympathy with the view that UK foreign policy contributes to the terrorist threat?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: There are some people who are so extreme in their views that they think anything western constitutes a hazard.

It is foolish to imagine that when you look back over the series of outrages you can say that if we took a different policy then all would be well.

To start of with there is no obvious equivalent between a democratically government - the Israeli government - and a guerrilla force which is Hizbollah supported by the Iranians.

Dunwoody on global warming

Question: What do you think of the proposals from the Liberal Democrats and others that there should be further aviation taxes to combat greenhouse gases?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: It is not a very informed debate. If you look at the context, most people accept that aviation is responsible for only about three per cent of greenhouse gases.

Of course there is a growth in air transport because people like to travel, people now expect to be able to get on planes and go for a fortnight in the Dominican Republic, and we need to be realistic.

I don't hear people demanding that we should thoroughly insulate every house in this country which would have an immediate effect on CO2 levels.

Big increases in aviation taxes are unrealistic because it would discriminate against those who use the cheap airlines - in other words the less well off.

The other real problem is that aviation is an international and growing industry.

If we taxed UK based consumers and operators then the industry would move elsewhere where they are not taxed to that extent.

Dunwoody on the railways

Question: Are you disappointed on the progress made on an integrated transport policy since 1997?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: People forget that enormous funds have gone into the railways, five times more than when it was British Rail.

If BR had the same access to the degree of capital in its last years that private companies now have there would only be a completely rejuvenated railways system.

We are now getting that in terms of infrastructure but we would have also have had a development plan.

I mean 25 years ago BR were talking about electrifying the lines between Crewe and north Wales but no one talks about that now, no one talks about expanding the railways. We appear to be prepared to, as one of my witnesses said, deal with the railways in aspic, and that wont do.

Question: Is there any merit in the Conservative suggestion of some kind of closer integration between the track and train companies?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: They messed it up in the first place and now they are suggesting something which is even barmier.

At the time they privatised the railways you could have defended what was in effect regionalisation because BR had reorganised and had established a vertically integrated regional organisation.

But that was thrown into total chaos by privatisation and to recreate that would mean that a freight train would pass through five or six different ownerships before it got where it wanted to go and I can see some difficulty with that.

Dunwoody on road pricing

Question: Given difficulties with previous big government IT projects, wouldn't road pricing be doomed to become a bureaucratic failure?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: My committee has done a lot of work on this and the previous committee before 1997 did a report as well.

We went to Norway to see the system which has been working there for 15 years and is very efficient, and Singapore has a system which is very efficient.

IT has now moved on to such an extent that there are five or six different ways to do it without either slowing down the traffic or causing congestion.

The difficulty you face, and this is the debate we should be having, is even if you have an integrated system - which means motorway tolling plus congestion charging in most cities - and even if you've got all of that right, its only a management tool and you still have people buying more cars at the rate of three per cent extra a year. It's a management tool that only gives you a certain amount of leeway.

I think hope lies in the speed with which people replace the combustion engine, because the big changes in transport in the UK have always come from a total modal shift.

When the roads weren't usable people used the canals, when the canals were too slow they invented the steam engine, when the steam engine was not working fast enough they developed planes.

I'm convinced the next modal shift will be towards the use of hybrid fuels which will have a direct effect on the whole question of CO2. But I think equally important is that it could affect the way people operate in cities.

People will get a train to where they want to go and then pick up an electric car drive to where you want to be, leave it there, pick up another electric car somewhere else, and that would transform a lot of our transport into a truly 21st century system.

Dunwoody on the Labour leadership

Question: What is your take on the Labour leadership handover?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: With the present prime minister having announced he will not stand for another term, I think it's a bit daft to just drift towards the next general election. That is not in anyone's interests.

We in Labour always lumber ourselves with the most complicated electoral systems - we are a party which is with more in love with machinery than any party I know.

I think we have to get on with getting a decent leader in place in time for the next general election. I don't think there's any doubt that it will be Gordon.

That doesn't mean that I won't disagree with what he puts forward.

He's well known and trusted as a chancellor, I think people will expect him to spend a certain amount of time working the system the way he wants, throw out some of the more barmy ideas and take a little more time to show people what he can do as prime minister.

I think he's going to be an extraordinarily good prime minister and the sooner he can demonstrate that the better.

He needs longer to shape the new government the way he wants it, because he would want to appoint new people and he would presumably want to emphasise different policies in a different way.

As for the deputy prime minister's post it doesn't really exist. I think it should be consigned to the historical dustbin as the nonsense it is.