TAX CUTS THAT COULD SLASH COST OF DOMESTIC FLIGHTS
BORIS JOHNSON wants to cut air passenger duty on domestic flights to bolster travel connections across the country.
Passengers currently pay a levy of £13 for each trip on a domestic flight but only a single fee on international journeys.
‘It seems wrong someone flying from Belfast to London and back pays more tax than someone flying from Dublin to London and back,’ the prime minister wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
The tax cut plan is part of his vow to ‘build back better’ after the pandemic in a way that brings ‘every corner of the UK closer together’.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps said a £20million review being launched soon – which would also consider ways to upgrade rail, road, sea and air links – would seek to make the travel taxes ‘more fair’.
The plan was welcomed by the aviation industry, which says the levy puts an unfair burden on passengers and led to the collapse of regional airline Flybe last year. Tim Alderslade, of Airlines UK, hailed ‘a welcome measure of relief to domestic carriers facing an existential threat from the impacts of Covid’. And Karen Dee, of the Airport Operators Association, said the plan offered the industry ‘a glimmer of hope’.
But Paul Tuohy, of Campaign for Better Transport, said it would undermine the government’s green agenda. And Andy Bagnall, of the Rail Delivery Group, urged the PM to deliver ‘a level tax playing field across cars, planes and trains, with each paying according to the environmental impact they have’. Greenpeace UK said: ‘The government needs to face up to the reality that the aviation industry has to be smaller than it was prepandemic, and make the process as painless as possible for the workers, with the lowest possible impact on the climate.’