You already have to check that your carry-on bag isn’t a couple of centimetres above the permitted size, that your boarding pass is saved to your phone, and that you don’t have any liquids that will be taken off you at security. Getting on a plane involves running a gauntlet of minor rules and regulations. But very soon there may be something else to worry about as well. If you have exceeded your “quota” of trips for the year, someone will stop you at the gate to demand you pay a ‘frequent flyer’s levy’ as well.
The rest of the world may be starting to move on from the Net Zero zealotry of the last decade. But unfortunately, the UK’s Climate Change Committee hasn’t got the memo. The unelected group of green commissars has today (Wednesday) issued its latest set of recommendations. Among the headline policies, it is calling for a “frequent flyer” tax. Of course, the UK already has a tax on every flight you take, with an increase in the last budget, and an extra levy now planned for business class tickets as well. But the Committee wants to go further. “This is a tax that increases with the number of flights an individual takes…[and] it would need to be sufficiently high to manage demand”.
Seriously? There are so many problems with a frequent flyers tax that it is hard to know where to start. It is very hard to understand, for example, how it is going to be effectively policed. Presumably there will have to be a common database accessed by every airline in the world so that they can check that people are not exceeding their permitted number of flights. We will just have to cross our fingers and hope that it works better than the constantly crashing British Airways IT system.
Likewise, there will have to be some way of stopping people from simply getting the train to Paris and flying from there. It will turn into a bureaucratic and data nightmare. Even worse, it will hit businesses very hard. Many of our exporting companies have to send people on constant flights for sales pitches, but presumably they will have to be taxed as well. Otherwise people will simply claim they are flying to Malaga for work to avoid the levy. It is a mess.
But perhaps most importantly, it reveals the chaos at the heart of government policy-making. One day the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is telling us that airports, led by a third runway at Heathrow, have to be expanded to boost economic growth. On the next day, we have the Climate Change Committee telling us that flying has to be taxed at a high enough rate to limit demand. Which is it?
In reality, the Committee has over-reached itself, demanding policy changes that threaten to sabotage one of the very few policies this government has which actually have some chance of helping the economy to expand. The Committee will either have to be ignored, in which case there is no point in spending any money on it, or else it should be abolished before it does any more damage to the British economy. A frequent flyers tax is a crazy, unworkable mess of a policy – and the Committee has damaged its little remaining credibility by even suggesting it.
You already have to check that your carry-on bag isn’t a couple of centimetres above the permitted size, that your boarding pass is saved to your phone, and that you don’t have any liquids that will be taken off you at security. Getting on a plane involves running a gauntlet of minor rules and regulations. But very soon there may be something else to worry about as well. If you have exceeded your “quota” of trips for the year, someone will stop you at the gate to demand you pay a ‘frequent flyer’s levy’ as well.
The rest of the world may be starting to move on from the Net Zero zealotry of the last decade. But unfortunately, the UK’s Climate Change Committee hasn’t got the memo. The unelected group of green commissars has today (Wednesday) issued its latest set of recommendations. Among the headline policies, it is calling for a “frequent flyer” tax. Of course, the UK already has a tax on every flight you take, with an increase in the last budget, and an extra levy now planned for business class tickets as well. But the Committee wants to go further. “This is a tax that increases with the number of flights an individual takes…[and] it would need to be sufficiently high to manage demand”.
Seriously? There are so many problems with a frequent flyers tax that it is hard to know where to start. It is very hard to understand, for example, how it is going to be effectively policed. Presumably there will have to be a common database accessed by every airline in the world so that they can check that people are not exceeding their permitted number of flights. We will just have to cross our fingers and hope that it works better than the constantly crashing British Airways IT system.
Likewise, there will have to be some way of stopping people from simply getting the train to Paris and flying from there. It will turn into a bureaucratic and data nightmare. Even worse, it will hit businesses very hard. Many of our exporting companies have to send people on constant flights for sales pitches, but presumably they will have to be taxed as well. Otherwise people will simply claim they are flying to Malaga for work to avoid the levy. It is a mess.
But perhaps most importantly, it reveals the chaos at the heart of government policy-making. One day the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is telling us that airports, led by a third runway at Heathrow, have to be expanded to boost economic growth. On the next day, we have the Climate Change Committee telling us that flying has to be taxed at a high enough rate to limit demand. Which is it?
In reality, the Committee has over-reached itself, demanding policy changes that threaten to sabotage one of the very few policies this government has which actually have some chance of helping the economy to expand. The Committee will either have to be ignored, in which case there is no point in spending any money on it, or else it should be abolished before it does any more damage to the British economy. A frequent flyers tax is a crazy, unworkable mess of a policy – and the Committee has damaged its little remaining credibility by even suggesting it.