Finance Bill

I would like to be able to support the content of the Liberal amendment, because the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has been disingenuous in the way in which he has tried to defend the tax that we are discussing. The two arguments that he has used are flawed and damaging to the environment. His first argument was that air passenger duty is an environmental tax—not a very good or effective one, and not one that he would have chosen if there were anything else around, but the only thing that he could scrabble together at the time. That, roughly speaking, is his view of the tax. The Minister went on to say that it was not a bad tax in retrospective terms, and that he would fight very hard in the courts to make sure that nobody won a case against him. The problem for me is simple. We will need regulation and a shift—not an increase, but a shift—in taxation from taxes on the family and taxes on business to taxes on pollution. However, if the country believes that that is not for the purpose of the environment, but is merely another sleight of hand, another stealth tax in order to gather money for the Treasury, that undermines our ability to take the nation with us in the tough measures that we will have to adopt. I was disappointed by the Minister’s reply to the last debate, because although it was ruled out of order to talk about the environment, he did so. He mentioned that the tax was environmentally healthy. He also suggested that some minuscule amount of emissions might or might not be saved on some technical arrangement that the Treasury had gone into. Everybody knows that this is a tax to raise money. I have a slight disagreement with the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), which I know he will not mind. When my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) introduced the landfill tax, he made it clear that that was an environmental tax. Even though my right hon. and noble Friend the then Prime Minister allowed me to raise the rules for the defence of the sea because climate change was a real issue—and that was in the early 1980s—back in 1994, the emissions from aircraft were significant only to a very few. There were not many aircraft, the amount of emissions was not very great, and it paled into insignificance when compared with other things. The kind of nonsense that Ryanair peddles now was true then. What has happened since 1994 is that Ryanair and others have entered the market, there has been a huge increase in emissions, and those emissions are particularly great in the United Kingdom. If they continue at the present rate, they will use up all the reductions that we can make in the immediate future in other areas of carbon emission. Of course we must be very tough about emissions from aircraft. We know that that is not easy, because many of the people who have taken advantage of cheap flights have found that that hugely improves their quality of life. Any of us trying to deal with the issue knows how difficult it is. That is why the Minister has done the environmental movement a great disservice by pretending that this ineffective, money-raising tax has anything to do with the environment at all, and why he knows in his heart—that is why he is looking down—that it would have been credible only if he had introduced at the same time a measure resembling the amendment, and said clearly that he needed the money. Honesty is the best policy. Whereas my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe was honest, I have to say, within the rules of the House, that I do not quite catch that in the present Administration.