Air passenger duty
Another badly designed tax in need of reform
UK Air Passenger Duty is a terribly designed tax.
Travelling in Europe (very broadly defined) is £13, roughly halved if you travel within the UK, but not halved if you go to the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands. Those flights are taxed the same as a flight to the Canaries, or Moscow, or Algeria. Which makes no sense.
If you travel any further, the tax jumps from £13 to £90. Want some winter sun? The tax to Tunisia is £13 but Egypt costs £90. That makes no sense either.
Unless you fly from Northern Ireland. The tax is still £13 to Tunisia, but it is £0 if you choose Egypt. This really is absurd - and is the Northern Ireland Executive’s fault. They wanted direct flights to the US, so cut a deal with HM Treasury to abolish long haul flight taxes from Belfast. They have paid over £10m to the UK government since 2018 for that tax break - during which time no airline has flown from Belfast to the US. They are literally paying the UK government to cut a tax that no-one pays. Real madness!
The tax is the same amount if you fly to Egypt or to Brazil, China and other real long haul destinations. That doesn’t make much sense either.
But if you fly to Argentina or a handful of very long-haul destinations, you need to pay a £4 supplement. As far as I can work out, this is simply to make the system more complex. If that is aim, it has succeeded. If there is any other aim, it has failed.
If you fly in the posh bit of the plane the tax is more than doubled. That is true within Europe - where you don’t get much extra space, and on long haul flights, where BA gives first class passengers seven times as much space as economy passengers get. Equally bizarrely, the tax is the same in premium economy as in business and first class.
This creates environmentally perverse outcomes. A full Norse Airlines 787-9 (lots of economy seats) pays 20% more tax than an equivalent BA 787-9 (lots of business suites) - even though the BA plane uses 50% more fuel per person. Yup, that is right, we have created a tax that charges the higher polluter less.
The same is true for short haul planes - easyJet pay 20% more than BA for an A321 (neo251NX), even though the easyJet configuration emits less CO2 than the BA plane.
It would not be hard to do better, but my policy proposals are simple, and MUCH better…
