Finance Bill

I shall be brief as I do not want to repeat what has already been said. Like many hon. Members, I met the Prime Minister of Jamaica when he came here to raise the issue of air passenger duty, so I heard the case that he, his Tourism Minister and the Caribbean Council have made about the effects of the proposed system on the Caribbean. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has gone through the case in detail, so I shall not repeat it all. The key issues for the Caribbean are quite simple. The first is the importance of tourism. As my hon. Friend said, the collapse of the traditional economy in the Caribbean—the Jamaican Prime Minister specifically mentioned the collapse in the bauxite market—has made the islands much more reliant on tourism than ever before. Anything that discourages people from flying to the Caribbean, as opposed to destinations nearby such as Florida, will have an impact on the area. Secondly, people living in the UK, including British citizens, whose families are still living in the Caribbean and who need to visit them—I have been approached by many people in my constituency about this—are also affected. Tourists have a choice about where they go and are able to weigh up the cost of fares, but the people visiting their families have no such choice; they either visit them or they do not. The only choice they might have is to go via a different route. That could mean, as was mentioned earlier, people taking a short-haul flight to, say, Paris and then flying from there across the Atlantic because it is cheaper, which would not particularly help our airline industry or do anything to deal with pollution. We should be aware that people who need to visit their families may not be at all well off. An increase in passenger duty from £160 to £300 in a couple of years is not an insignificant amount of money for a family of four wanting to make those journeys. Let me say a few words about the alternatives. I am not necessarily convinced that the amendment provides the answer; it simply proposes to move to duty per plane. We should be looking at a system more closely connected to distances of flights. I am told that such an approach would cause all sorts of administrative problems, but, frankly, I do not believe it. As was said earlier, we can look up in 10 seconds on Google the distance between any two cities in the world, and all the airlines provide the air miles when we fly—presumably based on the actual distances of the flight.