17:07 Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)

The first concerns wind farms. Northamptonshire is not known at all for being a windy place. In fact, it is one of the least windy counties in the country. Clearly, we are not given to providing enormous renewable energy resources—yet we have had so many wind farms approved in our county that we have contributed more than what could be seen as our fair share towards any renewable strategy.

“the recently published National Planning Policy Framework… provided an important and up-to-date expression of national renewable energy policy, and this has… been taken into account. Such decisions”

Therein lies the problem. Whereas we, as a Government, are in favour of greater localism and of people’s ability to have their say, the inspectorate—while not rejecting those findings, but accepting and welcoming them—is clearly determined to insist that the national desire for renewable energy outweighs those local concerns.

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17:35 Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)

I declare an interest at the outset as the constituency Member of Parliament for Peterborough, which houses the international headquarters of Thomas Cook, so tourism and leisure issues are important to me. This is also a wider issue relating to business competitiveness, the impact on family budgets and household incomes, and the ongoing debate about sustainability, the environment and climate change.

People will inevitably say that this tax is about maintaining some kind of traction on air travel and aviation in order to reduce the dangers of climate change. However, attempts to justify the tax on environmental grounds have been unpersuasive, and particularly with the application of the EU emissions trading scheme to the aviation sector, I believe that the aviation tax should eventually be phased out.

In his 2011 book “Let them Eat Carbon”, the chief executive of the TaxPayers Alliance, Matthew Sinclair, noted research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that suggests that by 2050 aviation will still be responsible for only 5% of the human contribution to climate change. That figure, although significant, is still pretty marginal. With aviation expected to continue to make up such a small share of global emissions, stopping people flying is not critical to limiting climate change, and we know that aeroplanes are now quieter, cleaner and more efficient than ever. APD is excessive, unfair and inefficient as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and it is duplicated in a number of other policy interventions. I therefore believe that it should eventually be abolished.

In their working paper “The impact of the UK aviation tax on carbon dioxide emissions and visitor numbers”, Mayor and Tol found that the 2007 increase in UK aviation tax had had

“the perverse effect of increasing carbon dioxide emissions, albeit only slightly,”

A 2008 cost assessment by the Department for Transport found that the aviation tax was excessive following the doubling of air passenger duty rates in February 2007. The Government have since—surprise, surprise—stopped carrying out such studies, but results show that even with a high estimate for the social cost of carbon, it is hard to justify the current APD rates on the basis of aviation’s contribution to climate change.

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