Whitsun Adjournment

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett), who focused on a number of subjects that are important to him and his constituents. He mentioned alcohol-free zones. We should look more pointedly at that issue—even in respect of my own constituency, which is a fantastic area—because that sort of minor antisocial behaviour affects the quality of life of many people. On 7 June, I am accompanying a local councillor, Jim Marsh, to the local police station in Coupe Green to meet local residents who have a problem with youths who drink alcohol in the local park where children often play. That affects the quality of life of people living around the area. Alcohol-free zones may well be the answer. Such tools need to be used more effectively, particularly where trouble takes place outside football grounds, for example, often even when there is no football match going on. The antics that some of these yobs got up to last night were absolutely amazing. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford mentioned the discontent of different groups of people and the effect of the abolition of the 10p tax rate on the poorest sections of society. A friend of mine phoned me up recently, asking me whether I had heard the Chancellor on the ““Today”” programme trying to justify what had gone on with the 10p rate, saying that everything would be okay as £120 would be given out to the poorest people. I said that I had heard that. My friend said that the Chancellor attempted to justify why the cost would be greater than originally stated by the Prime Minister—less than £1 billion, when it is now £2.7 billion. The Chancellor said that it was necessary because of food and fuel inflation, which meant that people needed help straight away. My friend said, ““Do you realise, Nigel, that the only people who are going to miss out on the food and fuel inflation money are the poorer sections of society?”” That was because the £120 simply takes those people back to where they were before the Budget. The people who benefited from the abolition of the 10p rate and the altering of the 22p rate down to 20p will get an additional £120. They benefited from the Budget and will also get £120 to help them with food and fuel. The poorest sections of society will get not a penny to help them with the inflation on food and fuel that we all see when we go to our supermarkets and petrol stations. It is yet another reason why people get extremely frustrated by the Government not listening and not learning. I, too, should like to pay tribute to Tom Burlison. He was a former secretary of the GMB and a former professional football player for Hartlepool United and honorary president of the club. I met Tom on several occasions. If ever someone was asked to describe Lord Burlison, they would say that he was hard-working, dedicated, committed and unassuming. That was another thing about Lord Burlison. When I first met him, I referred to him as Lord Burlison. He stopped me, grabbed me by the arm, and said, ““Call me Tom.”” That was Tom Burlison for you. I know that he will be missed every day by his family, but it will be more poignant when his son, Rob, who recently got engaged, gets married. Everyone who was associated with Tom will miss him too. We will miss him greatly. Early-day motion 1616 asks the Chancellor of the Exchequer to do away with the proposed 2p increase in the fuel price to be introduced in the autumn. We know that, as a result of the huge increase in oil prices recently, he has a windfall of more than £500 million to date. It has been estimated that if the Chancellor were to postpone the 2p increase further, it would cost him roughly £500 million. It is not as if the idea is uncosted. He did not expect to get that money in the first place, and surely we need some protection. Inflation is already dramatically on the rise, and with petrol at such high prices—£1.20 a litre—we cannot say when it is going to stop. Surely the Chancellor should not be adding to the woes of ordinary families in this country by clobbering them with another 2p increase. In business questions, I mentioned the plight of public phone boxes, which are now rapidly disappearing throughout the country. I had the privilege of going to Dunsop Bridge in my constituency several years ago when BT unveiled the 100,000th public telephone box in the country. It was opened by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. BT chose Dunsop Bridge because Ordnance Survey says that that is where the centre of the United Kingdom would be if we squashed it all together. All the local school children were there, and they were excited by the opening of the phone box. I just happened to be in my constituency one Sunday morning when a man turned up asking where certain villages were. We asked him what he was doing. He said, ““I've come to check your telephone box because it's due to be taken away.”” I had a look at the list of public telephone boxes that are going to be removed from Ribble Valley, and there it was: Dunsop Bridge. The 100,000th telephone box is going to be taken away. [Interruption.] There is no sense of history. I said that it was sad when BT removed the red telephone boxes. I ran a bit of a campaign to get them retained. They are as important to the British character as red buses, and we look forward to the bendy ones going and the traditional ones coming back. Thank you, Boris—and Boris gets another name-check. There is an important aspect to telephone boxes. Even though a lot of people have mobile phones, they do not work in many rural areas. The life of the batteries is still relatively short, and if a battery is dead, what are we supposed to do in an emergency? It is important that we get at least a proper network of public telephone boxes even if they do not make money. BT has a good community programme and supports a lot of community projects. I would have thought that that would be a tremendous community project. I would not mind if it put in the boxes a message saying: ““This telephone box does not make any money. It is part of a community project, sponsored by British Telecom.”” I hope that BT will think again, look at the network that currently exists and not take these emergency facilities away from our country. We have a rather thin House today. I suspect that had we held the debate in Crewe and Nantwich, more Members would have been present. However, I want to raise one more issue. We have discussed a good many taxes recently, but I want to talk about aviation duty, with which the Government propose to replace air passenger duty. It will be calculated on the basis of a combination of an aircraft's maximum take-off weight and a distance factor determined by the geographical band to which the aircraft flies. Aircraft weighing more than 5.7 tonnes and freight-only flights will be subject to the duty. It will be the first time that freight-only flights have been taxed. The duty will be applied to the aeroplane regardless of the type or number of passengers. Aeroplanes carry out phantom flights now and again, and that clearly needs to be addressed. Aviation duty will have unintended consequences. This brings us back to the abolition of the 10p rate. The present Prime Minister—the then Chancellor—did not quite realise the consequences of the abolition of the 10p rate and the alterations higher up the band scale. I am sure that he did not sit down with his Cabinet colleagues and ask them ““How can we hit the poorest hardest?””, although had he done so, he would of course have ended up with the system that he introduced. What resulted from it was an unintended consequence, however; let us be generous to him in that regard at least. I believe that aviation duty, as currently planned, with unduly penalise United Kingdom aviation, and will have significant perverse consequences for regional airports in particular. While taxing freight aircraft may seem attractive from an environmental point of view, it seems likely that the economic consequences will be entirely disproportionate. We know why the Government are doing this—it is for environmental reasons—but the unintended consequences will hit the British economy. A balance needs to be struck. The Secretary of State for Transport has stated that changes to air passenger duty should"““reflect the number of flights rather than passengers, strengthening incentives for airlines to use their planes as efficiently as possible.””" I am sure we would all agree with that. However, in the 2003 White Paper ““The Future of Air Transport””, the Government acknowledged that"““Britain's economy increasingly depends on air travel, for exports, tourism and inward investment.””" That is the balance that must be considered in the introduction of any aviation tax: how to make aviation as efficient as possible without damaging the UK's national and regional economy. In its response to the White Paper, South West of England Regional Development Agency said:"““Airports can play an important part in regeneration, especially in areas where it is not appropriate for associated commercial development to take place immediately adjacent to the airport.””" It added:"““Air access to London and other European airports is central to the economic development prospects to many parts of the region””." In that context, Members may be interested to know that airports in the south-west employ about 3,500 people, and generate a further 5,600 jobs in the region. I recently met representatives from Manchester airport, which many of my constituents use to fly either directly to another country or in transit through to London. From that meeting I gained the distinct impression that aviation duty would distort the international level playing field for UK freight. It is a logical conclusion that if freight departing from the UK attracts a tax that does not apply anywhere else in the world, businesses will go elsewhere. Manchester Airports Group estimates that aviation duty would damage UK competitiveness on a third of goods traded. It is one thing for aviation duty to be paid on goods coming into and going out of the country, but many companies will be very intelligent about the countries to which they fly. For instance, if they have to fly to Charles de Gaulle airport in France or Schiphol in Amsterdam, they will do exactly that. The freight will then be taken off, and will travel by road. It has been estimated that would result in thousands more lorries on the roads, transporting goods that would otherwise have gone to a regional airport somewhere or other. At Manchester airport alone, at least 1,144 scheduled cargo flights would become commercially unviable or at risk. That equates to about 220 jobs in the north-west region. I have also been informed that for East Midlands airport, which is the UK's largest pure freight hub, that figure is likely to exceed 850 jobs. It must be considered that aviation duty has the potential to seriously undermine long-haul development from UK airports, because both freight customers and airlines can reduce their tax liability by taking an indirect route via another hub. That is exactly what air passengers would do, too. Whereas now many people would fly directly from a regional airport to, for instance, the United States of America or the middle east, if the duty for long-haul flights becomes prohibitive they will look to go via Schiphol or Charles de Gaulle to connect with Air France or KLM to fly the long-haul sector from there as that would reduce their tax liability. For a family of four, that liability could amount to a lot of money. I am asking the Government to take on board the unintended consequences of this tax. Manchester airport also says that it will be turned into an enormous tax collector for the Government. Current air passenger duty costs are about 9p per £100 collected. Manchester airport estimates that with the new tax it would have to collect about £400 million a year on behalf of the Government and that it would cost it many thousands of pounds to start to collect that money. There could be a huge cost to the regional airports, and that could even damage the prospects of remaining in business for those that are marginally viable. I also want the Minister to take the message back to the Secretary of State for Transport and the Chancellor that another unintended consequence could be that the new tax raises less money than the current air passenger duty as customers—both passengers and freight—will more intelligently work out how to complete their journeys. I understand the environmental reasons why the Government want to introduce this tax, but it is logical if we are to go down this route not to do it alone. Neighbouring countries would benefit from that—as indeed would the rest of the world, because if we start on this course alone the problems will start shifting around the world and people across the globe will act intelligently and start making different choices in air travel. We need to get everyone sitting down to work out how to have a proper aviation fuel tax that everybody throughout the world will implement, so that we can encourage airlines to be more fuel-efficient and do away with all the phantom flights made just to keep slots open. We would also not be penalising the freight industry in this country; doing so would lead to the loss of a number of jobs, as they would simply move to Holland and France. Now is the time to do as I suggest. The consultation has just finished, and the Treasury and the Secretary of State for Transport should sit down and take a look at all the representations. Would it not be far better if they were more intelligent about this and came up with a policy that everybody could endorse and that would not have all these unintended consequences, rather than not listen, not learn, introduce this tax, lose all the jobs, lose a lot of taxation as well—they would not even get that tax revenue—and then afterwards have to change the policy simply to ensure that British industry was not damaged? Now is the time to do this. If the Government really are listening and learning, we will hear a change of policy from them forthwith.