ELFAA condemns UK Government’s further smash and grab on air passengers
30-Oct-2009 On the eve of the entry into force of the UK’s greatly increased Air Passenger Duty (APD), the European Low Fares Airline Association (ELFAA) urges the UK Government to withdraw the swingeing increases to APD, which take effect from 1 November 2009.
“It is widely recognised that aviation has a critical role to play in getting the European economies up and running once again”, said ELFAA Secretary-General John Hanlon. “Increasing this already unfair tax on one of the UK’s key industries is akin to biting the hand that feeds it. The reneging on the undertaking in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report to reform this unashamed tax take on individual citizens and base it instead on actual emissions per flight compounds the injustice.”
ELFAA believes that the APD is an additional unnecessary cost which inevitably falls back on the consumer and hampers the competitiveness of the UK's aviation sector. "Once again, the UK is showing itself to be helplessly out of step with international trends which have seen other European countries withdrawing their equivalent of APD," Mr Hanlon added. Finally, ELFAA believes that aviation's entry into the EU's emissions trading scheme from 2012 should sound the death knell for APD. "The UK government's own report has confirmed what we knew already - namely that aviation, before being included in EU ETS, is already more than covering its environmental costs," argued Mr Hanlon. "Government policy should recognise this and not seek to increase tax take, under the guise of environmental measures."