The Times : 18 February, 2003
By Libby Purves
Air travel is growing globally at about 5 per cent a year, but faster in Britain. The cheap carriers claim that they just sop up passengers from other airlines, but I doubt it: in June easyJet numbers were up 50 per cent on last June, Ryanair and Go by 34 and 72 per cent. Don’t tell me these were all serious travellers moving across from BA and Lufthansa: they were people like me, going “ooh, Prague, 30 quid!” Three quarters of all airline passengers are holidaymakers: that is, people who don’t actually need to fly but want to. Moreover, the short-break culture — fuelled by an increasing number of contract workers and small entrepreneurs who daren’t be away for long — means that instead of one big holiday people are lured by low fares to take multiple short breaks.
It can’t last, and it mustn’t; for the evidence of damage to the environment is overwhelming. The historic anomaly of airlines not paying fuel tax, brought in to shelter a fragile new industry after the war, will inevitably be ended. Green groups point to the absurdity of government giving a hidden subsidy of £9 billion a year to airlines by not charging them tax on fuel or VAT on fares, while down here on the ground they torment motorists and underfund the railways. Every passenger, even on a full plane, pollutes far more than a passenger on a half-empty train. Your share of a return flight to Florida pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than your whole year’s driving, not to mention nitrogen and sulphur oxides in those pretty vapour trails.
The impact of airports on the land is another thing which will push this small island in the direction of taxing air travel. Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, opposes it, but he is probably just a bubble himself. The tide of history runs against him. The calculation outlined in The Times yesterday is that if fuel were taxed at 46p a litre and VAT phased in, passenger numbers would rise so much more slowly that existing runways could cope till 2030 and beyond. Much countryside would be saved, and enough tax raised to sort out the other transport problems which bedevil our daily, necessary journeys. Efficiency gains could keep normal air fares at or near 2000 levels, but bargain budget fares would vanish. Goodbye, bubble.
I think it will happen. The United States probably won’t do it, which is hard luck on the ozone layer, but the US has a different relationship with planes: they are the cords which bind a nation sprawling across half a continent. Britain won’t do it unilaterally, because it would wreck our airline industry and let continental rivals scoop up our long-haul passengers at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. But I think that the whole EU will do it — the fuel tax, if not the VAT — sooner rather than later.
I cannot be sorry. It was fun while it lasted; but our airspace grows ever more crowded and dangerous, our airports threaten to sprawl and pollute and deafen us more every year, and cheap fares are not worth the environmental cost. In the summer, I had a moment of revelation on the ground at Brest, flying buzz back to the UK. Some paperwork problem delayed take-off, and then we lost our air traffic slot: we sat on the ground for more than an hour, and the engines were kept running all that time. So there was another delay while the fuel bowser came and filled us up again. If they had been paying tax on that fuel, I doubt this would have happened; the palpable heat, visible haze and heavy petrochemical smell around our static aeroplane all that evening bore witness to the fact that fuel’s too damn cheap, so they don’t much care.
The bubble has to burst. We, the three quarters of airline passengers who do it purely for fun, must save up a little longer for our flights, spread them out more, and consider using the excellent European rail systems which take you right to the heart of cities and do not involve prolonged check-ins, the confiscation of nail-scissors, the breathing of foul recycled air and the need to blank your mind temporarily to the existence of al-Qaeda. We’ll still fly long-haul, still fly on special holidays and on business. But I think — no, I am sure — that another short-lived phenomenon has now swelled almost to the point where it must vanish. It will be goodbye to the odd, amusing, but strictly temporary phenomenon of frivolous flying.
