More Tax
 

Nice to see that Boy George sneakily introduced an 8% hike in the Aviation Pax Duty Tax (double the rate of inflation) in the small print...not!

How the :mad: will this help jobs in the aviation industry?:mad:

Ah ! The Budget


Sneaky with the APD, watched the budget live but missed that bit !!

Ahem, cough, I quote from the Budget 2012 PDF.....

So wasn't quite sneaked in, we were told of it back in the Autumn. There was also an APD consultation in December which you missed too. Finally, you also missed the fact he announced way back in 2011 budget that the RPI increase of APD would be deferred until 2012. :cool:

someone has to pay

You can't have European services with US taxation unfortunately.......

I love how the government say "we will need more capacity for aircraft, aviation is growing bigger and bigger". Not with the way you keep increasing your stupid taxes!

Georgey boy completely failed. Next please.

BA publisised that the APD rise would reduce their recruitment demands by 50%, not all that long after lauching a pretty widely received recruitment campaign.

Even Willy, Carolyn McCall, whatsus name fom Virgin and soppy bollox O'Leary got together to denounce the government plans. Walsh has been pretty persistent.

Hardly a surprise really. Aviation gets screwed again.

Aviation...The Government Cash Cow!!!

Get a petition signed by 100k people, a third of pprune members, and then the issue can then be debated in the house of commons. Then maybe, just maybe, will the government see aviation as something more than a piece of !!!! and actually appreciate that without aviation the economy would be !!!!ter (hard to imagine I know!!).

Cheer up.

He could have introduced the same rate of tax on aviation industry fuel that motorists have to pay on the petrol that takes them to work and back. And that would have seriously made your eyes water :{

That would have precipitated the collapse of the travel and business industries in this country, and he knows it!

Wouldn't it be a refreshing change if people in this once-great nation of ours stopped carping and whining and doom-saying (which is 75% of the reason we have this illusory recession just now) and instead looked at the positive side? I'm sick of hearing the endless avalanche of isolated, cherry-picked and often out of context doom that spews from all our media while the positive is studiously ignored.

What about his promise to do something about London Runway capacity then? Doesn't that deserve a cheer in this place? Or the plans to boost investment and manufacturing and technology?

Jesus, if you spout misery and nothing else is it any wonder you all sound so bloody miserable? You've convinced yourselves to be miserable and negative so depression is all but inevitable. Pun intended. There is another way...

It's already been said but the APD will mean people won't fly long haul from UK.

Already know 2 cases personally of people flying to Amsterdam and then going long haul from there, thereby saving at least £150 on the total fare, not to mention the drive to LHR since they flew from their local regional airport.

Ironically in one case the a/c from Amsterdam to Barbados landed at Gatwick on the way - so much for "green" taxes.

Mrs W did just that yesterday. The flight to AMS from EMA was less than the APD. GBP 170 (from April 1st) for a business ticket is ridiculous considering what you get in return - Heathrow terminal 3!

And what's more it was so easy we will be doing it in future! Another example of the UK tax system actually doing harm to the economy.

BA/Iberia advantage.
 

Maybe AIG could use the APD differential between long and short haul flights to run a short haul feeder service from UK regional airports into Madrid/Barcelona and then use BA/Iberia long haul fleet to proceed on to final destinations. Thus using UK tax policy to give itself a trading advantage and also to boost Spanish economy:D

"What about his promise to do something about London Runway capacity then? Doesn't that deserve a cheer in this place? Or the plans to boost investment and manufacturing and technology?"

'We'll have to increase taxes to get by' and ' We have to raise our pay to get by ' are the *only* promises where you can count on politicians to make good on, anything else is they promise is usually jes' plain BS ...

And it's going up again next year!

Budget 2012: Air Passenger Duty rise confirmed - Telegraph

Be sure if someone else farts in the Middle East then fuel will go up again on top of the 3p tax in August.

So, Agaricus, you believe that when a politician says he 'promises to do something about' a problem, this will result in the problem being fixed. As opposed to the 'setting up a committee/digesting the committees conclusion/asking for consultations/digesting the consultations conclusions/kicking it into the long grass now the public have forgotten about it..' a bit like say, 'we will clear the deficit within the life of this parliament' or 'an end to boom and bust'.

Keep wearing your tinfoil hat dear, nursey will be along soon with your lithium...:rolleyes:

Leming .

Here are the current rates of APD Air Passenger Duty (UK only): An excise duty charged on the carriage of passengers flying on an aircraft with an authorized take off weight of more than ten tonnes or more than twenty seats. Due when the aircraft first takes off on the passenger’s flight and is payable by the aircraft operator. plus the increased rates applicable from April 1, 2012, and also from April 1, 2013:

BAND A (0-2,000 miles, includes Europe)

Economy

From April 1 2011: £12

From April 1 2012: £13

From April 1 2013: £13



Non-economy

From April 1 2011: £24

From April 1 2012: £26

From April 1 2013: £26

BAND B (2,001-4,000 miles, includes North America and Middle East)

Economy

From April 1 2011: £60

From April 1 2012: £65

From April 1 2013: £67

Non-economy

From April 1 2011: £120

From April 1 2012: £130

From April 1 2013: £134

BAND C (4,001-6,000 miles, includes South America, China and India)

Economy

From April 1 2011: £75

From April 1 2012: £81

From April 1 2013: £83

Non-economy

From April 1 2011: £150

From April 1 2012: £162

From April 1 2013: £166

BAND D (over 6,000 miles, includes Australasia, Malaysia and Indonesia)

Economy

From April 1 2011: £85

From April 1 2012: £92

From April 1 2013: £94

Non-economy

From April 1 2011: £170

From April 1 2012: £184

From April 1 2013: £188

Source: HM Revenue & Customs

Is this a change? I believe APD was previously payable by the passenger, based on the most distant point on their ticket (which encouraged split ticketing).

This alone could have a lot of ramifications, mostly negative to UK airlines. Do they know what they are doing? (No need to answer that - I know they don't)

Edited to add. This isn't workable ... What charge per passenger would QF/BA pay for a flight destined to Australia via SIN (or BKK)? It would seem that the either the Australia APD would never be paid, or that the airline would be charged the higher amount for all passengers, including those destined to SIN. :ugh:

What! An aviation policy dreamt up by the government which wasn't thought through? Say it ain't so!!

Cheer up. There's no tax increases on high speed trains, they get you there quicker than planes, don't burn umpteen litres of fuel to get up to 27,000 feet just to come down again and, in general, people like 'em. I agree that there should be no or less tax on long-distance flights because the only other way of covering those sorts of distances in by boat (sorry, ship) and you only do that if you're single or on a honeymoon.

Why not load up your 400 at LHR, fly to AMS, do a touch and go and then onto long haul destination. Each pax only pays the £13 short haul / band A tax. The Dutch scrapped the tax ages ago to support their aviation industry. When every long haul flight starts to do this then the public / politicians are going to question WHY. It's the same reason why aviation fuel isn't tax. Operators will find a way around it.

I think you will find that the APD is due to rise by the RPI (Retail Price Index) in 2013 and years after - so around 2.5 per cent me thinks. Just another aspect of rip-off Britain.

You prefer electricity generated by nuclear fission or by burning oil/coal?

Does it really matter as long as it keeps the lights burning and people are kept warm?

There’s a fine line between milking the cash cow and killing the goose that laid the golden egg… somebody call a vet!

This is supposed to be a "green" tax.

If in twenty/thirty years from now the climate change "experts" are proved to be wrong, will the government give us all a refund?

Not sure what point you're making but I'll answer as best as I can. Humankind in the 21st century is energy-hungry and the only practical way to feed that hunger at present is energy produced by coal, oil, gas and nuclear fission. Ideally I would prefer energy to be produced from so-called sustainable sources but we do not yet have the technology to do so. Spain, where I live, produces 30 percent of its energy by this means but still requires 70 percent by conventional means. As a way of reducing energy consumption, savings can be made by, for example, travelling by train from Valencia to Madrid rather than by aircraft.

My point is that you cannot automatically assume that rail is 'greener' than air. If you take all the factors into consideration - how the energy is produced, the footprint of (at least) dual track on concrete sleepers (vs 2km of runway on each end), the cost (money and CO2) of creating the rail, the load factors, the cost (or value) of people's time, etc - in isn't a given that rail is better. In some cases yes, but in others (particularly when the rail journey is over 3 hours) no.

I take your point. The train journey from Valencia to Madrid, city centre to city centre, is ninety minutes. The journey by aircraft, airport to airport, takes 55 minutes, plus 20 minutes at both end from airport to city centre, which, of course, uses more energy. Ninety five minutes. I would also argue that airport infrastructures easily match those of rail. The quoted air fare is 95 Euros - rail 90 Euros but for that price you can take three items of luggage. You pays your money . . . !

If the UK dropped into the sea, there would be no impact whatsoever on the “green” problem... other than a massive loss of tax revenue. Civilization needs to be able to move. The only other option is go back to the stone age.

Pardon me but this is another commonly used, but erroneous, argument of why rail is greener than air. City centre to city centre without the trip to the airport. But how many people are actually going centre to centre? I'd guess that in most cases either at the origin or at the destination but not so often both. For a passenger travelling from near the airport and destined near the airport on rail would be 130mins by rail vs 55 by air. (Or if we split the difference 110mins vs 75) Yes, for some journeys your comment is valid, but not for all.

OK, to go back to:

If he could, maybe he would, but aviation fuel taxes are government by the Chicago Convention of 1944, and for that reason are set at zero.

APD is, in some way, an attempt to "offset" that, but it risks being counter-productive when:

a) Higher rates of tax mean people visit other countries instead of Blighty and

b) People fly longhaul from non-UK airports to escape APD.

However, the government also know that for all the "jobs" the aviation industry supports, it also exports spending to other countries at a faster rate than it brings it in. This is where I think APD is, ironically, counter productive.

The arguments used by airportwatch & co are that aviation exports £, therefore we should discourage it by taxing it more. Except of course that as per (a), it has a far greater impact on inbound tourists, who are much more price sensitive.

I would like to see an unbiased model showing the net impact that APD has on the economy, and would suspect that as with many taxes, it reaches a peak before falling off. I don't think there is the political will to see it scrapped, but it certainly can't be milked for ever.

I say this sitting in NEV, having paid around £220 less for my long haul CDG-SXM sector than the equivalent LGW-SKB. But all told, by the time I've made the short hop across the pond, and the local connection, I have saved very little, just seen more places on the way :)

The departure tax from HKG is HK$120 - just under ten quid. On a Cathay Pacific business flight, comparing Hong Kong's airport what you get at LHR T3 for over 17 times the cost makes you realise what an extreme rip off this is.

Any change to NI's special status in this respect? And what's happened to the whispers in the Welsh Assembly about exempting passengers from APD if departing on the back of dragon?

With respect - those near the airport have to travel less, but those the other side of the city have to travel further. Most airports are outside the city boundaries, so everyone has to travel further than they would to reach the city centre rail station.

People also moved in the Stone Age! Of course people have to move. It's how they do it and how much energy is used in them doing so that is the point.

Don't you just love the govt's spin on all this! Tell me what is the difference between spin and lies?

Here is the rest of the article from BBC news

BBC News - Airlines urge review as UK air passenger duty rises by 8%