We must stop this obsession with domestic flights
It seems that the Conservative party have blindly jumped on the directionless and disingenuous bandwagon which seeks to penalise people who take domestic flights within the UK. Last week, the Independent carried a front-page article about British Airways’ new flights to Newquay, claiming that the airline was being irresponsible by starting a new domestic route — even if this service was merely a reallocation of a previous Glasgow rotation!Of course, the industry needs to cover its environmental costs, but in the rush to go carbon crazy, we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to protecting our own domestic market. As coverage of the British travel trade fair in Birmingham has pointed out, 80% of the UK tourism market is fed by domestic visitors, yet anyone who chooses to fly to internal destinations is now being penalised by two sets of air passenger duty, instead of just one. How can we persuade a family of four from Belfast to take a short break in London, which is already one of the most expensive cities in Europe, when they will have to fork out £80 in air passenger duty? Instead, this family could drive down to Dublin airport, and take a short break to Spain, and pay no air passenger duty at all on the outbound journey, and a mere €5.78 each on the return — despite the fact that the flight to Spain will be almost 3 times as far.At least bed tax proposals seem to have been dropped for now, but if we are going to be serious about asking more people to take their holidays in the UK, then this will inevitably mean we will have to build more accommodation facilities along the South Coast. This will no doubt bring the travel industry back into conflict with an untold number of nimby groups, crewed by the very people who are trying to stop us from flying to more distant destinations.
Whilst any policy measures to encourage the development of more high-speed rail routes should be broadly encouraged, the West Coast Mainline upgrade has already shown us just how massively over budget these projects can run — so much so that the (allegedly unpaid) carbon cost of a flight from Birmingham to Edinburgh is significantly less than the subsidy handed out to the railways for the short train journey from Birmingham New Street to the airport!
Any transport infrastructure needs to balance its social and environmental impacts with its financial costs, but it would be disastrous to give the rail industry blank cheques in the name of combating global warming, especially as domestic flights make up such a tiny proportion of aviation’s contribution to the problem.
March 25th, 2007 at 6:45 am
[…] They chose to target the CO2 emmissions of the industry as a whole, and to say that these flights should not be needed, because the route is a very short one, and people should travel by train instead for domestic journeys. […]