Reply To: Chat thread – Thursday 23rd January

[memesweeper]

BSI1978 wrote:

The officials drawing up the document accepted this, writing that plane tickets are not expensive enough: “Ticket prices do not reflect the full social cost of flying and are not sufficiently incentivising the uptake of decarbonisation solutions such as SAF.”

The report was referencing SAF at that point, and the unlikelihood that there would be sufficient land to scale the necessary SAF required. But the reference to plane tickets not costing enough is a tad alarming.

We have to tax something(s). If you tax things, usually, you get less of it (eg Employers national insurance up = fewer jobs). Given airfares are — at least from London — very high to deal with restricted supply (slots and lack of aircraft) and excess demand it is a very sensible thing to tax them heavily. I imagine we could tax airfares to a much greater extent than we already do and the number of flights and passengers most likely wouldn’t fall at all. What would fall is the margins of airlines, in particular BA, but you know what? Tough. Much better that than putting up most other taxes.

APD as designed is not a tax that incentives any good environmental activities nor punishes bad behaviour. A completely different type of tax based on (say) take off and first hour of cruise emissions would be required for that. Any suggestions that APD is a weapon for environmental improvement is greenwashing (eg “parking charges at Heathrow”).