Action Briefing Aug 2003 - Sept 2003
	The Newsletter of Birmingham Friends of the Earth

Flying to the sun is still costing us the Earth

The Government’s Consultation on the Future of Air Transport ended on June 30th after almost a year of stormy public consultation across the UK. The environmental consequences of more airport and air travel growth will be disastrous, but Friends of the Earth believes the Government could avoid these threats and still help the economy.

In July last year, Transport Secretary Alistair Darling launched a UK wide public consultation on airport and air travel expansion, claiming that “doing nothing is not an option” and that the Government’s aim was to provide “a framework for sustainable development for the next thirty years and beyond”. He then announced over 30 options for new or expanded air transport infrastructure across the country.

The consultation was based on highly flawed ‘predict and provide’ forecasts that the annual number of passengers using UK airports will rise from 180 million in 2000 to over 500 million a year by 2030. Catering for this size of expansion would mean the equivalent of building an airport the present size of Heathrow every five years for the next thirty years.

The Government’s approach has been to presume that there are economic benefits of catering to this expansion and that these exceed the environmental effects which it believes can be ‘mitigated’. But allowing the damage to take place and then trying to ‘mitigate’ the effects is hardly a credible form of environmental protection.

Soaring costs
If aviation’s hefty tax favours remain in place and ministers allow large scale airport and air travel growth on the scale set out in the consultation, then the subsidies given from the public purse to aviation would rise from £9.2 billion a year in 2003 to over £16 billion a year in 2030. And of course, it's the individual taxpayer who picks up the bill for the environmental damage caused, including road traffic congestion; the growing effects of man-made climate change; ruined countryside; and local air and noise pollution.

Friends of the Earth’s conservative estimate is that these costs to society are between £2.3 and £6.8 billion a year. By 2030 and depending on how much airport and air travel expansion is allowed, this range could rise to between £5.8 and £18.7 billion. What's more, subsidies allow air travel to compete unfairly with other modes of transport while not paying its fair share towards essential public spending. But because these costs have not been taken into account the public has not received with a thorough and impartial assessment of the claimed economic benefits of aviation expansion.

Modelling transport demand
The Department for Transport's uses a computer model called 'SPASM' to forecast possible future passenger demand. Friends of the Earth and others asked the DfT to re-run SPASM to test different assumptions from those used by DfT officials. The new assumptions included that by the year 2030 aviation fuel will be taxed at the same rate as motor vehicle fuel (45.8p per litre); that air travel will be subject to VAT; and that Air Passenger Duty would be removed. Applying these fair tax measures would cause the number of passengers using UK airports to rise at a slower rate, from 180 million a year in 2000 to 315 million a year in 2030, instead of the official forecast figure of 501 million passengers. On this basis there would be no need to build any new runways: 135 million extra passengers a year could be accommodated within existing capacity. That the results of this re-run were not fed into the consultation, even when it was re-launched in February 2003, is further evidence that the consultation is slanted.

Alistair Darling MP, quoted in the Observer, June 8th 2003, said: “you can’t build yourself out of the problem that we face. We have a choice in the next 25 to 30 years: either we build more and more motorways - astronomically expensive, environmentally damaging, and I doubt if we could actually do it - or we take a radically different look at how we manage the system”. If the Government approves large scale airport expansion, Mr Darling will need to explain why managing demand for road space is necessary, yet managing demand for airports and air travel is not.

Managing demand for air travel should be achieved by:

1. Ending aviation’s unfair tax breaks and subsidies, and introducing a charge directly related to aircraft emissions which cause man made climate change introducing a fair tax regime which treats aviation in the same way as other industries.
   
2. Regulating airports for the pollution they cause. Airports are currently largely unregulated in this respect, unlike other polluting activities like factories, waste incinerators; food processing and energy plants.
   
3. Setting legally binding environmental limits for the amount of pollution and road traffic each airport can generate.
   
4. Extending peoples' transport choice by improving high speed rail alternatives to replace internal domestic flights and short haul trips to Europe, which make up the majority of flights leaving the UK.
   

Doing the sums: aviation's tax subsidies

Tax not paid

• Tax free aviation fuel = £5.7 billion a year
• No VAT on tickets, aircraft meals etc. = £4.0 billion a year
• Duty free = £0.4 billion a year
  

Tax paid

• Air Passenger Duty = £0.9 billion a year

Net tax subsidy = £9.2 billion a year

Aviation’s subsidies are equivalent to a 3p cut in the basic rate of income tax.

The cost to the average UK taxpayer (earning £25,000 a year) = £500 a year in extra tax. For a taxpayer earning £10,000 the cost = £100 a year more tax.

If the Government decided to use the money to fund cash strapped public services instead, Friends of the Earth estimates that it could pay for:

• 180,000 extra policemen, teachers and nurses
• Safe walking and cycling routes for all children in Britain (£2bn) (source: Transport 2000)
• Traffic calming on all appropriate residential roads (£3bn)
• 6,500 “home zones” (safer residential streets as in The Netherlands) (£1.4bn)

Vital rail schemes struggling for funding while aviation receives £9 billion a year from the public purse include:
Thameslink 2000 (£2bn);

• Revised East Coast Main Line upgrade (£1bn);
• Greater Manchester strategic rail study (£1.5bn);
• Southampton to West Midland freight upgrade (£1bn);
• South West Trains upgrade (£1bn);
• Felixstowe-Nuneaton gauge clearance for freight (£0.5bn);
• South Central upgrade (£1bn)

Rail figures from ‘Modern Railways’ magazine, March 2003. The above schemes are either awaiting a decision, have been ‘deferred’ because of funding difficulties, or may still be funded by the SRA within the Government’s 10 Year Plan timescale.

James Botham