Finance Bill

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak to amendment 1 and all the issues that are thrown up as a consequence, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) on the intelligent way in which he set out the arguments. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) on making in such a compelling fashion the case that I, too, wish to make. There are two main arguments that I wish briefly to explore. The first is about the desirability, in the view of my party, of having a system of aviation taxation based on each plane that travels, rather than on each customer who travels. It is worth momentarily setting the context for that policy preference. Aviation in the United Kingdom is an increasingly large contributor to the overall output of carbon dioxide. Six per cent. of the UK's total carbon dioxide emissions now results from aviation, and that figure is rising rapidly—far faster than, for example, the contributions made by other forms of transport or by buildings to overall CO2 emissions. There is therefore an important issue to address. How can we try to ensure that the projection of rapidly increasing CO2 emissions is limited, rather than rising inexorably in the years and decades ahead? Most people accept that CO2 emissions resulting from aviation are likely to grow as a proportion of CO2 emissions overall. The key is to try to ensure that they grow more slowly and make up a lower percentage of overall emissions than they would otherwise. For that reason, our desire as a party is to try to find a system that allows people to fly—we realise that in many circumstances, although not all, people need to fly for work or leisure—but that ensures it is done as efficiently as possible. I thought that the analogy drawn by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) was a good one—perhaps it is sometimes easy to think of such matters in quite straightforward terms. A car with four people in it is obviously a much more efficient way of transporting four people from A to B than four cars each with one person in. It is for that reason—a reason that is, I admit, partly to do with congestion, but partly to do with helping the environment—that some councils have explored the possibility of reserving lanes for cars with two or more passengers, because we need to be more efficient and intelligent in using CO2-emitting fuels. On the same principle, it would clearly be desirable to have planes filled to capacity, or at least to give airlines the incentive to fill them to capacity where possible. The issue is therefore about incentivising those companies, partly to make their planes fuller but partly not to continue with this strange system whereby planes are flown around empty in order to get them to different destinations—that may sometimes be necessary, but it is reasonable to try to incentivise airlines to do it as little as possible—and partly also to introduce more fuel-efficient planes. I recognise that the Government's policy will create those incentives. However, having a per plane duty rather than a per passenger duty will create even greater incentives than the Government's system. The hon. Gentleman also made the point that we should try to ensure that we do not create perverse incentives for customers to avoid the system that the Government are putting in place by taking a short-haul flight and then a long-haul flight, or vice versa. One always needs to consider when looking at such systems whether people will find ways around them that may be economically advantageous to them, but which will undermine the basic environmental policy that the Government are seeking to promote. That is the background to the issue. The second part of my speech relates to the issue that has been so eloquently discussed by the hon. Members for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington and for Hammersmith and Fulham—namely, the division of the world into four bands for the purpose of assessing levels of air passenger duty. The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington said that the system was arbitrary, but it is not entirely so. There is a method to it. The lines that have been drawn are straight lines, not jagged or wobbly ones. What is strange about the system is that its consequences do not appear to have been fully thought through. There are a number of anomalies in the system, and the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham has been particularly imaginative in thinking of potential pitfalls in the system being proposed by the Government. The overwhelmingly obvious anomaly is the one that has been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather), the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington and others—namely, the fact that the Caribbean is in a different band from the United States. In an era in which anyone with a computer can put in the names of two cities and find out precisely, to the nearest metre, the distance between them, it seems strange that we need to base the system on capital cities. It would be perfectly feasible to base it on the actual distance of each flight. We could have a tax system that charged a number of pence per mile, for example. Or, if that were too complicated to administer, we could have a banding system in which the bands applied to each individual flight, rather than to the country that was being visited and to the location of the capital city in that country. The situation becomes particularly anomalous when the country in question is very large, because the capital city might be located in an area that is unfavourable to travellers—or, indeed, in one that is more favourable than the rest of the country. I wonder why the capital city has been chosen as a measure. We were talking about the United States of America earlier. Los Angeles, which is eight time zones away from London, is a much bigger city than Washington DC, so why is Washington DC regarded as the most suitable point for judging the tax level of journeys from the United Kingdom to the United States? New York would be just as good an example, or Chicago. There are any number of cities in the United States that are bigger than Washington DC, which is not a tourist destination for many people. Far more British people go to Florida, for example, which is further from here than Washington is. It is slightly strange that the Government have chosen to use capital cities as a measure, and it is reasonable to ask them to look again at whether this is the best system to use. I would like to suggest an alternative system. I understand that paying more tax to travel further is a reasonable proposition. I do not doubt that there are people on low incomes who wish to travel to distant parts of the world, but most of us accept the need to reflect the environmental damage done by long-haul flights. It is the anomalies in the system that people are uncomfortable with. I do not know whether the Minister, in the short time that she has been in her job, has had the opportunity to consult her officials and other Ministers and to consider an alternative system. If she is attached to the idea of four bands, we could keep them, but each individual flight could be assessed within those bands. There is only a limited number of destinations that one can fly to directly from the United Kingdom, and it would take very little time to assess any new routes that came into effect. In that way, the Government could retain the simplicity of a banding system—they could introduce more than four bands if they wished to do so—but each individual flight could be assessed within one of the bands. Such a system would avoid two places that were close together being banded separately. It would also avoid the even more anomalous situation—the example of the Caribbean and the United States has been mentioned—in which places that are much further from the United Kingdom are placed in a lower band than places that are more proximate to us. I hope that the Minister will consider that proposal, for reasons of fairness as well as for environmental reasons.